Apocalyptic and messianic movements tend to rise during periods of heightened anxiety and division, particularly when ongoing and prospective crises seem existential. In the 1830s and 1840s, tens of thousands of Americans and Canadians responded to seismic societal shifts and controversies by aligning themselves with millennial religious movements defined by the belief that the world would soon be destroyed, that the faithful would be delivered from their earthly troubles, and that the Messiah would return. Millerism was one of the most influential millennial movements to sweep across the United States and Canada during this period: it attracted as many as 100,000 followers from multiple Christian denominations — causing serious consternation among established churches.
Millerism held that Christ’s return was imminent, and with it, the downfall of the Antichrist, Earth’s fiery destruction, and the salvation of the saved. The doctrine was slowly developed in the 1820s by William Miller, an upstate New York farmer and former deist, who, after the trauma of serving in the War of 1812, returned to Christianity. To interpret the Bible, Miller developed a complex and convoluted form of scriptural typology that he drew from the apocalyptic Old Testament text the Book of Daniel, particularly the 2,300 day prophecy Daniel is alleged to have overheard from two angels. Miller, believing that each “day” constituted a year, calculated that Christ would return 2,300 years after the 457 BC decree to rebuild Jerusalem by Artaxerxes of Persia. Miller concluded that Christians must begin preparing for Christ's imminent 1843 return.
Miller was initially hesitant to share his ideas beyond close personal circles, but his confidence grew through the 1830s as he turned to preaching and writing. In the early 1840s, Millerism grew from a regional phenomenon to a bona fide national movement, spurred in part by Miller’s meeting Joshua Vaughan Himes, a Boston pastor with a knack for marketing. Himes began publishing the biweekly newspaper Signs of the Times and evangelizing on the road. Millerism was spread through lay preachers who travelled from town to town, holding camp-style revival meetings, sometimes preaching on steamboats and railcars.
Newspapers and circulated literature were, according to historian Benjamin Baker, “the glue that held the Millerites together.” At least six newspapers were established in Canada, including The Expectant and Bridegroom’s Herald in Toronto, Hope of the Church in St. Thomas, Behold, He Cometh in Hamilton, and the Voice of Elijah, initially in Montreal, then Toronto.
Millerism was a product of the Second Great Awakening. The early 19th-century multi-denominational Protestant revival was shaped by borderland camp revivals, intense spiritual experiences, public conversions, salvation through acts, and advocacy for societal reform. It was a period of religious experimentation that both produced and developed new movements like the Irvingites and the Children of the Peace, many of which were distinctly apocalyptic and held that the end was near. Methodist and Baptist churches also grew significantly, drawing adherents from more established denominations.
The Second Great Awakening in Canada took place against a turbulent backdrop. Agricultural and commercial downturns, disintegrating class distinctions, political and ethno-religious violence, the Clergy Reserve issue, the 1837 and 1838 rebellions, Daniel O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic emancipation and Irish repeal, and lingering anxieties from the French revolution and Napoleonic wars drove belief in the alluring hope that all troubles would be resolved soon.
The movement's conversion campaign gained enough traction by 1842 that congregations could be found in Toronto, Kingston, Port Hope, Cobourg, Port Credit, and Hamilton, including Black Millerite groups in Toronto and Hamilton. In December 1843, Millerite followers, finding themselves barred from all congregations in Toronto, built their own meeting space, which they called Bethbridge’s Hall. According to Millerite Luther Caldwell, the hall was “soon so crowded that the building gave way, and [they] were left without a house in which to hold [their] meetings.”
The devotees then built a second meeting house with a capacity of 600 to 900 on land donated by a follower, claiming that “the excitement through the city is immense.” In Niagara, a Millerite reported that, having been driven out of all available churches, the movement was holding meetings in barns and waggon-houses. William Miller himself visited Toronto in August 1844, just a few months before the predicted end; there, he was met by enthusiastic supporters who, according to historian William Westfall, “responded to his message by rioting in the streets.” In September 1844, a Millerite publication described Toronto as “an important place in Canada West” and announced that a shipment of literature had been sent to help local evangelizing efforts.
Millerism was particularly successful in Canada East’s Eastern Townships, where a prominent community of immigrant Americans supported Miller’s conversion crusade through camp meetings that drew “waves on waves of people.” However, Millerite sources reported finding less success in Montreal: they chalked that up to the Catholic Church’s local power. Millerism was deeply anti-Catholic, holding that the Pope was the antichrist. While speaking at a conference in Toronto in August 1844, Miller declared that, since “Popery was on the ascendant,” Christ’s return was near.
Meetings were often raucous affairs that were attended by the converted, the curious, and those looking to gawk. Both hostile and Millerite sources describe preachers and congregants performing “the struggles,” which entailed rolling on the ground, limbs flailing, and speaking in tongues. A British Whig and General Advertiser reporter who attended a camp meeting outside Kingston wrote of seeing preachers go “through the crowd, exhorting and shouting, and threatening their unfortunate dupes with horrors that made even my blood run cold.”
The Millerite press reported several alleged miracles and sightings, which they interpreted as proof of their divine rectitude. In fall 1843, several camp meetings were held in Toronto. A Millerite witness described seeing sinners “crying for mercy — and Christians rejoicing in the blessed anticipation of being soon delivered from a world of sorrow and affliction.”
“Believers in these parts,” he wrote, “are firm and are determined to look for the Saviour until the parting skies shall reveal him.”
About 10 or 15 “respectable citizens of Niagara” claimed to have seen the apparition of a kneeling man “in the sun” that October, while in February 1844, a preacher in Dunwich said he’d seen “a window of light with a magnificent blaze of light in the sky.” Another Dunwich resident reported having have seen in the sky “the distinct appearance of a horse and rider — the rider being armed with a bow, and having on his head a crown.” A Southwold resident claimed to have seen “the precise appearance in the heavens of a beautiful flame-coloured form, presenting to the eye the precise appearance of a person — though seeming no larger than a child 7 or 8 years old.” In Sketches of Upper Canada, Thomas Corrant describes attempting to convince an Oshawa Millerite that what they were looking at was actually a sun-dog.
Anxieties around Millerism’s growth induced a minor moral panic linking fervent apocalypticism with mental illness. Between 1841 and 1848, roughly 12 per cent of all committals to the Toronto Provincial Lunatic Asylum involved a form of eschatological excitement, although only three individuals were admitted with symptoms explicitly linked to Millerism. In October 1844, a Millerite preacher in Toronto complained of being labelled a “Millenarian Maniac” by local critics.
Historians have challenged the oft-repeated assertion that American Millerites en masse wore white robes and neglected their earthly duties in the leadup to the predicted rapture(s), and many of the primary sources commenting on Millerism were openly hostile, making it difficult to parse which actions Millerites actually took and which have been mockingly attributed to them. Rumours flew in Canada about individuals fasting for 40 days, giving away all their property, claiming high-value land for their own use post-apocalypse, and cleansing themselves in frozen bodies of water. In Oshawa, a local clairvoyant and seance-holder named Sarah Terwilligar allegedly strapped a pair of homemade silk wings to her back and jumped from her father’s second-storey porch on February 14, 1843, in the hopes of ascending to Heaven. Instead, she plummeted 15 feet and broke a leg. Some of these incidents might well have happened, but they should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. Still, as historian Jack Little acknowledges, the apocalyptic message of the Millerites was “highly conducive to public hysteria,” and their practices left a deep impression on contemporary observers.
(Upper Canada Sketches, 1898)
Miller would ultimately make three inaccurate predictions about the date of Christ’s return. His first was March 21, 1843; his second was March 21, 1844. Although there were individuals who left the movement after these days passed without incident, a remarkable number soldiered on. The British Whig and General Advertiser highlighted the role of cognitive dissonance, writing in July 1844 that “instead of renouncing such humbug, the people seem to embrace it the more readily.”
October 22, 1844, came and went, soon becoming known as the “Great Disappointment.” In Toronto, an angry mob surrounded the Millerite meeting hall ; law enforcement prevented them from tar and feathering the inhabitants. After the crowd threatened to return the following night to tar and feather the preacher, throw him in the lake, and tear down his meeting hall, the preacher fled with his family to Buffalo. A letter to The Christian Guardian gloated that the “fruits of fanaticism and delusive error have appeared in the alarm and confusion created” and declared Millerism thoroughly debunked.
Upper Canada saw serious agitation around established institutions in the leadup to the 1837 rebellions, and new religious movements were seen as an American import. Little has argued that Millerism presented the strongest American challenges to 19th-century British hegemony in English Canada and that the movement’s failure played a significant role in Canada’s rejection of American-style evangelical fundamentalism.
According to Little, the Great Disappointment “marked the end of the Millerite movement as such, but also the start of its institutionalization.” Most disappointed Millerites simply walked away from the movement, but there were those who continued to hold out hope that Christ’s return was imminent. In 1845, the Albany Conference was held in New York to address the movement’s future. Some Millerites became known as Adventists or Second Adventists, but theological disagreements led to the emergence of new sects. Groups of former Millerites known as Seventh-Day Adventists continued to proselytize around Lake Ontario under Joseph Bates and Hiram Edson. Others established Adventist churches, which remained marginal through the 19th century. The 1852 census of Upper Canada found 131 Second Adventists in what would become Ontario, while the 1861 census found 1,050. Former American Millerite Ellen G. White would co-found the Seventh Day Adventist Church with Bates and two others in the 1860s and found followers north of the border.
Traces of Millerism remained in subsequent religious premillennial movements. John Nelson Darby travelled through Ontario in the mid-19th century with his own reading of the Bible. These visits led to a series of international prophetic Bible conferences, several of which took place at Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Plymouth Brethren “renewed and extended” the millennial crusade in the 1860s. By the late 19th century, premillennialism had found a more established and “respectable” class of evangelicals. In the 20th century, eventual Alberta premier and radio evangelist William Aberhart would help keep the tradition alive through his Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute. Following the war, groups like the Canadian Council of Evangelical Protestant Churches emphasized premillennial beliefs, which continue to inform the theology and practice of groups across the country today.
Westfall writes that “prophecy visions, and personal encounters with God were an integral part of the religious life of Protestant Ontario.” Millerism, like the other millennial thought prevalent at the time, was driven by a curious mix of optimism and pessimism: believers anticipated the inevitable destruction of all they knew but also held that such destruction would put an end to all suffering. Through appeals to emotion and experience, the Millerites were able to harness the anxieties of their era and grow into a significant challenge to the status quo.
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