The "Angel Delusion" of 1806-1811: Frustration and Fantasy in Northern New England

Abstract

In the spring of 1805, William Smythe Babcock-an itinerant preacher of morbid temperament and hypochondriacal tendencies-was a troubled man. For four years he had been struggling to build up the Freewill Baptist connection the hill towns of Vermont and New Hampshire, traveling many 1,500 miles and preaching some 300 sermons each year. Babcock had a sound New England pedigree, including a degree from Yale College, but by 1801 he had forsaken the bustling seaport of New Haven for the remote reaches of Vermont after experiencing a profound spiritual transformation (inspired, he later said, by the mysterious sound of dripping water on a dry night). Like so many eager men, he found the northern frontier a more hospitable environment for his deepening faith than the staid Congregationalism of old New England. But, also like so many other New England migrants, he found that his personal demons followed him to the frontier. Poverty, prolonged dependence on his father, and sheer loneliness conspired to create Babcock a state of arrested sexual and emotional development that would serve the backdrop to one of the more bizarre episodes the history of northern evangelicalism: the Delusion of 1806-11, which an entire community of Freewill Baptists-led by Babcock's wife-conversed regularly with an Angel of God and did his bidding.1 When William Babcock first encountered the woman who would become his wife and chief spiritual adviser, he was forty years old. In the fourteen years since his removal from New Haven to the rugged Vermont hill country, he had failed to establish himself either a minister or a man. Babcock's authority within Vermont's Freewill Baptist community-- a sect notorious for its internal squabbling-was never secure, parishioners repeatedly questioned his moral fitness and pastoral abilities.2 In May 1802, rumors of sexual impropriety dogged Babcock on his itinerant travels, the story spread that he had in the very midst of engagedness while preaching stopped and walked to the opposite side of the room & kissed a woman. Despite his excuses (I told them the woman desired it & I felt it duty to gratify her), listeners stayed away. In February 1804, he was still complaining that there were few or no ears-Some stood & heard a while & then went out, & had a hearty laugh, others were indifferent others hard a Mill-stone... all I said served to offend and harden. By the summer of 1804, William was thoroughly alienated and prayed to be delivered from his burden: hatred & Unbelief & Drunkenness & every evil reigning the house I dedicated to God ... deliver me & house from evil.3 Even more discouraging was his failure to find a wife. Still unmarried and unsettled at an age when most men were beginning to build families and reputations, he confided his sexual insecurity and spiritual doubts to the diary that he had begun keeping soon after his removal to Springfield, Vermont. Sounding very much like a frustrated schoolboy rather than a mature preacher of the Word, he recorded his unfulfilled ambition (I dreamt this Morning I was a Gen Officer, the Service of the Late Catherine of Russia), unsatisfied lust (I lay awake the greatest part of last night... vexed with the flesh, and indulging evil thoughts & suggestions), and childish fears (stories of hobgoblines, impressed upon mind when very young recurred often enough as almost to unman me). Obsessively cataloguing the many aches and pains that afflicted him over the years, Babcock is a study of a man deep emotional and physical distress. Every few moments Mind would be filled with hateful obscene Ideas-Beastly, dirty & mean, he confided to his diary the dark days of July 1801, when what he called my lonely Situation Life.... Without Mother, Brother, Sister, Wife, Children, House, Land, or any proper home became almost too much to bear. …