"To Despair at the Tedious Delay of the Final Conflagration": Hawthorne's Use of the Figure of William Miller

Of the figures who emerged from the Second Great Awakening, William Miller arguably produced the greatest immediate sensation. In 1831, convinced that the Second Coming was imminent, he began a strenuous preaching and writing career, reaching as many as five hundred thousand people and creating an interdenominational movement. The end of the world, Miller predicted, would occur sometime between 21 October 1843 and 21 March 1844; the final date was later amended to 22 October 1844, at which point tens of thousands of Millerites gathered on hilltops, waiting for the heavens to open and Judgment Day to begin. Nathaniel Hawthorne was, of course, far from being tempted toward millennial expectations of this kind. In a humorous letter to Horatio Bridge, he used the Millerite apocalypse as an image of the sort of disaster that should be visited on the nation as punishment for its negligent business practices, writing that “the system of slack payments in this country is most abominable, and ought of itself to bring upon us the destruction foretold by Father Miller.” For him it became part of the jeremiadic tradition of affliction for transgression—that is to say, as calamity, not as spiritual fulfillment. Hawthorne, however,