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Chapter 1: Elijah Pierson
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Kingdom of Matthias, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Patriarchy, Family, and Society
Religion, Perfectionism, and Insanity
Race, Prejudice, and Resilience
Rural Life and Urban Culture
Desire, Relationships, and Sexual Freedom
Summary
Analysis
Like Elijah Pierson, Robert Matthews goes to New York from the countryside as a young man in search of work, and he finds himself turning increasingly to faith to cope with the transition. Unlike Elijah, Robert is not successful in business. Instead, he erratically pursues various denominations of Christianity. During this time, he starts physically abusing his wife and children. Soon after, everybody in his life abandons him. Robert wanders around the city in search of work, and he eventually winds up in Elijah’s home on Fourth Street.
The book began by introducing a character named “Matthias.” Now, the authors revisit Matthias’s life story. Matthias’s real name is Robert Matthews. Like Elijah, Robert Matthews grows up in a rural environment, struggles to adapt to urban life, fails to find a home in mainstream religion, and ends up driving people away from him. This suggests that, like Elijah’s, Matthews’s extreme religious devotion has a disastrous effect on his and his family’s lives.
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Robert Matthews is born in 1788. He grows up on a country farm in a village called Coila, in New York State. His Scottish immigrant family practices a strict form of Calvinism. They harshly oppose pro-reform sects of Scottish Calvinism, and they reject most recreational activities beyond fasting, prayer, and reading the Bible. When he’s around 12 years old, Robert attends his community’s most important gathering: an annual event called the Lord’s Supper. During the event, the ministers publicly shame each person in the community who has failed to comply with the congregation’s religious standards.
Similar to Elijah Pierson’s childhood, Matthews grows up in a close-knit Calvinist community. Scottish Presbyterians placed great importance on the sacrament called the Lord’s Supper, or communion. If a person was believed to be practicing immorality with no intention of repenting, that person would be barred from the Lord’s Supper observance. The authors hint that these practices fueled Matthews’s later extremism.
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Ministers reprimand people for activities like public swearing, wearing dirty clothes, and attending sermons given by people who aren’t in their community. It’s difficult for anybody to sway too far from the community’s strict religious rules without being punished. Although the community’s religious leader, Reverend Mr. Beveridge, creates a stressful, punishing atmosphere in his community, he favors Robert as a boy and even blesses him.
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In contrast to Elijah Pierson’s childhood church (where rich townsfolk pay more to sit at the front), Robert Matthews’s church seats rich and poor people together. However, similar to Elijah Pierson’s community, Matthews’s community emphasizes fatherly authority. Each household’s father runs the family, leads prayers, and must be obeyed. Men run all religious and social events, while women and children stay largely silent. Sometimes, the townsfolk claim to have visions and direct interactions with God, though ministers tend to under-record cases involving women and children. Despite this, Robert believes he has several visions throughout his childhood. He grows up believing that he’ll experience many hardships but will ultimately become the master of his own household.
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Matthews’s parents die when he’s about seven, and he grows up working for a neighbor as a farm laborer. As a teenager, he grows ill and anxious. An elderly member of Robert’s church takes Robert in and teaches him carpentry for a couple years. In 1808, Matthews abruptly leaves town and heads for New York City. He settles into a tenement in the impoverished Lower East Side neighborhood with the Wright family (also from Coila), and he begins diligently attending church. Robert keeps getting fired from carpentry jobs because he has a habit of angrily chastising his colleagues for “sinful” behavior such as drinking.
In 1811, Matthews has an outburst and beats his sister-in-law, and the Wrights send him back home to Coila. Robert’s community set him up with a home, a store, and some land, and Robert becomes a shopkeeper. He occasionally travels to New York to pick up wholesale supplies for his store. During these trips, he courts one of the Wright family’s daughters, Margaret Wright. They marry in 1813 and have a son a year later in Coila. Since Matthews is an orphan and has no father figure of his own to obey, he become the head of his own household (and a respected member of his community) at the young age of 26.
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Matthews’s business fares well at first, until an overambitious plan to expand his store sends him (and several others in his community who invested in his business) into bankruptcy. Having lost his good reputation, Matthews moves his family back to Manhattan and pursues work as a carpenter. After a few years, Matthews starts his own carpentry business, but his family is plagued by illness while living in cramped, unsanitary quarters. His two young sons die, and then he falls ill himself. He has to move his family to a cheaper, more cramped tenement. Matthews begins having headaches and violent outbursts. He also begins having confused episodes, lashing out, and beating Margaret and their children.
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Around this time, Matthews stumbles across an African Methodist church. His Calvinist faith is strongly anti-racist, and he’s used to participating in multiracial congregations, so he joins. At this church, people have dramatic experiences where they feel directly touched and saved by the Holy Spirit. Calvinists usually reject such behavior, but Matthews is deeply moved by it, and he thinks he’s witnessing pure faith. Matthews begins believing that he’s a Hebrew prophet. Matthews is inspired by a newspaper editor and politician named Mordecai Manuel Noah, who claims to be the Jewish messiah. Margaret thinks that Matthews is going insane.
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Matthews moves his family back to upstate New York, where they float around different towns, largely relying on charity from relatives. Margaret wants to leave Matthews, but her community convinces her not to. Around the same time, Noah starts dressing in a king costume, and he tries to build a vessel (which he calls Noah’s Ark) that he wants to sail to Manhattan, filled with “creepy” things. The project fails, and Noah returns to a career in politics, but Matthews keeps talking about it. Margaret dutifully (but miserably) follows Matthews to Albany as he searches for work. Albany is evolving into a thriving commercial and political city, filled with a mix of working-class people and affluent merchants.
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Matthews joins Albany’s North Dutch church, which is less harsh and fiery than the Calvinist church of his upbringing. The Reverend is Charles Finney, and his sermons focus on being loving and helping the poor. Moved by these ideas, Matthews strives to be more loving, and his violent outbursts decrease for a while. But when the whole family contracts smallpox and their youngest son dies, Matthews reacts by repeatedly beating Margaret with a whip. Matthews believes that Margaret is possessed by an evil spirit that made the family sick, and that he needs to whip the spirit out of her.
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Around this time, a minister named Edward Norris Kirk is ejected from his Presbyterian church by politicians who think his sermons are too intense. He moves to Albany, becomes an avid Finneyite, and begins preaching from North Dutch Church, until he founds Albany’s Fourth Presbyterian Church. Matthews is drawn to Kirk’s sermons. Kirk delivers lengthy evangelical sermons (sometimes lasting all day long and well into the night). He preaches that the Calvinist focus on obeying the patriarchal social order restricts people’s freedom. Kirk, instead, sees women as the family’s spiritual core. Many women are drawn to his sermons.
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Matthews begins attending Kirk’s sermons, and he starts believing that he must make people accept religion in their hearts (and not out of obedience or fear). He begins hounding other carpenters about their drinking and swearing, and he loses most of his work. The family begins to starve, but Margaret is too afraid to complain in case Matthews beats her again. Although Matthews thinks that he’s being a good evangelical, he’s actually doing the opposite: he glorifies himself, he can’t find steady work to empower his family, and he beats his wife and children. Kirk’s followers notice this, and they reject Matthews’s efforts to become more involved with their church.
This rejection humiliates Matthews, who thinks he’s being mistreated because he’s poor. He stops shaving and starts believing that he has visions from God about starting his own religion. Margaret grows increasingly worried about how to feed their children. One day, Matthews runs into the town hall, yelling at everyone that they’re sinners. Then he tries to lock Margaret in their home and forcibly baptize her. She resists, telling Matthews that her Finneyite church would not condone such behavior.
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The next day, Matthews goes to Finney’s church. He wants to teach the congregation about the “true” path. The congregation mostly just ignores him. Matthews refuses to leave, and he starts preaching to the congregation. They silently filter out while he’s talking, and the last person just turns off the lights, leaving Matthews in the dark. Matthews believes that this is a sign from God that a great flood is coming. He runs home and tries to get his family to flee, but Margaret refuses. Then, Matthews runs away with three of their sons. Margaret’s church community spread word of an insane man who’s kidnapped his children, and two days later, they find Matthews. The community rescues the children, confines Matthews inside a poor-house for insane people, and collects money to help Margaret.
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Two weeks later, Matthews is released and returns home. A forgiving Margaret welcomes him back. She hopes that Matthews has changed, but he soon lapses back into abusive behavior. Margaret consults a lawyer and learns that she has no legal grounds to divorce Matthews. She does learn, however, that Matthews can be imprisoned for two months for beating her. After Matthews and Margaret have a bad fight, the police arrest Matthews, but they don’t charge him, citing lack of evidence. Margaret has to start begging in order to feed her family.
Matthews begins thinking that rich people and preachy women are sinful. He believes that ministers like Kirk are evil because they encourage women to stop obeying men. He also starts believing that he resembles a biblical figure named “Matthias,” who’s supposed to cleanse the church of people who betray Christ. In 1831, Matthews abandons his family and travels to Rochester—the center of the Finneyite evangelical movement—to announce himself as “Matthias, Prophet of the God of the Jews.”
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Two of Matthews’s brothers also settled in Rochester in the early 1800s. One brother, called John (or J. L. D. Mathies) is a painter who abandoned Calvinism and also dislikes evangelicals. He paints portraits of mystics and Native American warriors. He ends up becoming a landlord in Rochester to support his art. The other brother, James, was a poet and heavy drinker who died some years ago. James disliked overly religious people as well. Matthews arrives in Rochester and briefly reunites with John, but they have an argument, and Matthews leaves Rochester within two weeks of arriving.
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Matthews wanders around New York for several months, before returning to Albany, boasting about having converted thousands of people to his new religion. Upon arriving, he seeks out Margaret, but she refuses to take him back unless he finds work, so he leaves for good. Matthews continues wandering and eventually winds up in New York in 1832, as an unkempt man with a wild beard and a bad temper. He seeks out Margaret’s family, but they reject him for abandoning Margaret. Matthews angrily leaves their house, calling them all sinners. He ends up roaming the streets and preaching by day, and sleeping in a boarding house near the Battery at night.
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Another lodger in the boarding house, named William Leete Stone, recalls Matthias saying that he’s been chosen as a vessel for God’s word, and that his wild, crazy beard is very important to his mission. Stone believes that Matthias is a fraud who’s started to believe his own lies. Matthias even tells another boarder that he’s over 1,800 years old. Matthews decides he wants to publish his ideas, so he seeks out an anti-evangelical newspaper man named Gilbert Vale. Vale refuses, believing that Matthews is a lunatic. Eventually, Matthews hears about strange religious activities going on at Bowery Hill, so he makes his way there and knocks on Elijah Pierson’s door on May 5, 1832.
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