In contrast to the Finneyite inventors of Yankee middle-class culture, the two prophets at Kirtland may look like marginal men—cranky nay-sayers to the economic, domestic, and social progress of the nineteenth century. Against the Finneyites’ feminized spirituality of restraint, Smith and Matthias (each in his own way) resurrected an ethos of fixed social relations and paternal power. Yet as they saw things, they were defenders of ancient truth against the perverse claims of arrogant, affluent, and self-satisfied enemies of God.
But Americans also sensed that the Matthias cult spoke with strange eloquence to the social and emotional upheavals in which they lived their own lives—particularly their struggles to redefine what it meant to be a woman or a man in the new world of the nineteenth century.
Young Elijah learned early in life that God had placed men and women into families and social ranks, then governed their destinies according to His inscrutable Providence. Elijah was not to question this visible, worldly order. He had only to apprehend his station within it and then follow the rules of that station. As a child this meant fearing God, denying his own sinful will, and obeying his father and mother. (Later, it would mean being a father and family governor himself.) Elijah […] knew that if he misbehaved or if the local fathers allowed others to misbehave, God would do terrible things to Morristown.
Elijah Pierson and other pious, upwardly mobile migrants struggled to stake out social and emotional ground between the thoughtless rich and the vicious poor.
Absent, ignorant, and cruel fathers had degraded poor women and children and left a moral void. City missions would fill that void, mainly (in the case of the Female Missionary Society) through the ministrations of middle-class women.
Frances Folger and her friends were perfectionists […] to them, all time was holy, and women and men were being judged every day.
Elijah and Sarah prayed with the Holy Club for three years, and in 1828 Elijah began talking with the Holy Ghost. He had always been a man of prayer, and had always asked God for help when he had to make some decision. But it was only in 1828 that God began answering him in English.
The doctors now told him there was nothing they could do. Their diagnosis was consumption brought on by exhaustion and malnutrition: Sarah had literally worked and fasted herself to the edge of death.
In 1835, an enterprising Manhattan journalist disclosed that, as a boy, Robert Matthews had his own conversations with supernatural spirits and impressed his friends with feats of clairvoyance. […] It is even more likely that when the adult Matthews began having visions years later, he would have instinctively trusted that they came from God.
When their taunts failed to stifle Matthews’s sermons, the men had their boss fire him.
Despite all of his protestations of faith, [Matthews] was violating the most basic precepts of evangelical manhood, with his unsteady work habits, his self-glorification, and his domestic tyranny.
Margaret […] stopped by the mayor’s office to find out what she could do—and learned that, in the eyes of the law, she could do very little.
Boys would work with their fathers, then join their sisters at night to learn Truth at the father’s feet. Wives would cheerfully assist the patriarchs, bearing their children, preparing their food, keeping their houses spotlessly clean, and obeying husbands who were their only source of knowledge and material support.
But with Ann’s ascendance in Matthias’s affections, [Isabella Van Wagenen] coupled her faith with her own notions of what was going on, notions that had to do less with divine patriarchy than with devilish lust.
The bulk of the Kingdom’s household drudge work now fell on Isabella Van Wagenen, who was especially peeved that Mother and Father rose late in the day, which threw her back in her chores.
As life in the cult (or, as the cult members call it, the “Kingdom”) falls into a rhythm, it becomes clear that Isabella Van Wagenen—a Black woman who functions as the cult’s household servant—bears the brunt of the domestic labor. Other cult members, like Matthias (who informally refers to himself as “Father”) and Ann (who starts going by “Mother” after she begins a relationship with Matthias) barely do any work at all. They sleep all day and keep shifting more work onto Isabella’s shoulders. The cult is a patriarchal environment, and Isabella’s plight exposes how such environments tend to marginalize and oppress people who are undervalued. The cult’s most powerful white man (Matthias) and white woman (Ann) effectively exploit the only Black woman (Isabella Van Wagenen). Matthias organizes the cult to recreate the “traditional” way of life he experienced as a child in a rural community run exclusively by father-figures (patriarchs). Many situations that unfold in the cult thus symbolize dysfunctional aspects of patriarchal societies. Here, Isabella’s frustrations show that such environments tend to disenfranchise, marginalize, and exploit women of color the most. Isabella’s plight thus serves as a subtle commentary on the racism and sexism in “traditional” American society.
There is too much changing of wives here […] l have a nice little woman, and I should not much like to lose her.
On July 28, Matthias, Elijah Pierson, Ann Folger, and Catherine Galloway sat down to supper. At the end of the meal the Prophet spooned out plates of blackberries that he and Pierson had picked that day. Ann Folger ate only two berries. Catherine finished her plate, and Elijah wolfed his down and had another. Matthias had none at all. […] About four o’clock the next afternoon, Elijah […] suddenly collapsed. […] Matthias forbade any doctors or medicine to aid Elijah, and Elijah agreed: prayer and prayer alone could relieve his affliction. […] In the morning, Ann Folger told the waking disciples that Pierson was dead.
What a devilish shame it is […] that a woman wants two or three men.
Finally, Ann came downstairs for breakfast one morning and quietly addressed Benjamin as “husband.” […] Folger leaped at the situation and offered to pay any sum of money to make Matthias leave.
Privately, [Benjamin Folger] instigated a rumor that Isabella [Van Wagenen] had tried to poison him and his family on the morning when she served up the undrinkable coffee. […] On Western’s advice, she initiated proceedings against Folger for slander, and gathered up signed testimonials attesting to her trustworthiness from several of her former masters and employers.
In effect, the court sustained [Charles] Laisdell: every man should have his rights, and the rights of a husband over the body of his wife superseded those of her father. On that basis, the jury found Matthias guilty.
I have got the truth and I know it, and I will crush them with the truth.
Isabella confirmed all of [Vale’s] hunches about the Kingdom’s sexual arrangements, and much more besides. […] He was well aware that the black servant Isabella’s word, on its own, would not stand up against the Folgers’, given public prejudices. And so whenever possible, he supplemented her narrative with “white evidence” from his interviews and from the public record.
[F]or all their seeming eccentricity, these extremist prophets have a long and remarkably continuous history in the United States; they speak not to some quirk of the moment or some disguised criminal intention, but to persistent American hurts and rages wrapped in longings for a supposedly bygone holy patriarchy.
And so the world would come to know her as the ex-slave Sojourner Truth.
