The staccato exchange of dots and dashes represented a revolution in human communication. Moments later, the exact sequence was returned from Baltimore. Once he was ready, he tapped a long handle, sending a series of long and short electric pulses racing along a wire. Morse hunched over a compact device of his own design. A 53-year-old painter and professor named Samuel F.B. On May 24, 1844, five months before the Great Disappointment, an excited group of men crowded into the chambers of the United States Supreme Court. This was one side of the young republic: pious, restive, utopian, apocalyptic. New movements abounded: Mormonism, Shakerism, Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, Universalism, Spiritualism. Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ evangelized aggressively, and quickly outstripped the more established Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Revivals rocked the country, with millions converted in heady mass gatherings that could last as long as a week. The early 19th century witnessed the Second Great Awakening, an explosion of religious activity that shattered the irenic deism of the American Founding. Needless to say, daybreak came, and the entire episode quickly became known as the "Great Disappointment." (Disciples of Miller nevertheless reconstituted into what we know today as the Seventh-day Adventist Church.) Though the devotion of Miller's followers was admittedly extreme, it was not terribly unusual.
From these vantage points, the thinking went, their ascent to heaven would be unimpeded. As dusk fell on that fateful Tuesday evening, Millerites across the nation were said to have donned white robes and climbed to the tops of roofs, hills, and haystacks. As the weeks and hours wound down, his followers frantically prepared to meet their Maker, reconciling their differences, returning ill-gotten money, vacating lawsuits, and leaving crops to rot in the fields. October 22, 1844: that, Miller determined, would be the Last Day. The followers of William Miller were estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, and they shared with their leader an overpowering sense that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand. The world was going to end that day, of that they were quite sure. A review of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe
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