Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America

Abstract

For nearly a decade, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar entitled “Apocalypse.” Among other things, the course considered how Christian and Jewish ideas about the end of human history have affected and even directed the behavior of believers. Jonathan Todd Hancock’s Convulsed States would have made an excellent supplemental textbook for that course.This work is framed around the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812, the epicenters of which were located near the town of New Madrid, Missouri, not far from the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The quakes, at least one of which was probably a 7.0 on the Richter scale, were felt from Philadelphia to what is now western Nebraska, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a truly startling span of territory.Those who are attuned to end times speculation have long been inclined to see natural disasters as harbingers of the apocalypse. Hancock helpfully locates the earthquakes among a series of events, each of which alone would have jolted millenarians into a state of excited anticipation: the Great Comet of 1811; wars with Native Americans for control of the Northwest Territory; the outbreak of the War of 1812; and a massive fire that killed seventy-one people in Richmond, Virginia, including the state’s governor (17). Had these been insufficient to raise the anxiety of the faithful, “two charismatic religious figures laid out visions of destruction” that alarmed both white society and Native Americans.First was the 1807 prediction of Shawnee spiritual leader Tenskwatawa (also known as The Prophet) that earthquakes and other natural disasters would herald a “day of judgment” caused by the “white people [who] had taken possession of so much of the Indian country, and had lately killed so many Indians on the Wabash” (83). This book is remarkable in its thorough explication of the belief and governance systems of the indigenous people of the region, particularly the Shawnee, Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw, and how Tenskwatawa’s visions, supported by his brother Tecumseh’s aggressive militarism led to—among other things—the decline of intertribal cooperation. Second was the publication of Nimrod Hughes’s 1810 pamphlet, A Solemn Warning to All the Dwellers upon the Earth, an apocalyptic date-setting exercise based on Hughes’s interpretation of the Book of Daniel, combined with his understandings of numerology and kabbalism, in which he announced the coming apocalypse (59).Hancock aptly situates this confabulation in the context of the Second Great Awakening, which of course looms large in the history of American Methodism. “Methodist and Baptist conversions were common spiritual responses” to the earthquakes, he writes, identifying 1812 as a “watershed year for the growth of evangelicalism in the trans-Appalachian West” and crediting fears about the earthquakes for Methodism’s dramatic growth that year, with nearly 19,000 new members (61). He points out that more than 15,000 of those were in the Western Conference, where the quakes had significant impact and argues that conversions that year dramatically changed the organization of Methodism, leading to the creation of two new annual conferences. He also argues that John Wesley’s Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Earthquake in Lisbon (1756) and other writings articulate his understanding that in the face of unfathomable catastrophe, humans should seek comfort from a loving God who receives the repentant with open arms.Hancock offers a thoughtful analysis of the dramatic end-times preaching of Lorenzo Dow, whose “sprawling theological treatise” published in 1812 identified ten signs of the coming “day of vengeance,” which included the power of the papacy, wars, famines, plagues, and, of course, earthquakes (75). My only criticism of this book is that the author does not connect Dow with Methodism. The eccentric evangelist’s tortuous relationship with the Methodists was somewhat tangential to Hancock’s argument. Still, since both Methodism and Dow are significant characters in the book, a brief acknowledgment of their connection might have been useful.