The Millerites and the Great Disappointment

William Miller was born in 1782 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and grew up on a farm at Low Hampton in upstate New York, near the Vermont border. As a young man he read widely and adopted Deism, the belief in a distant creator who does not intervene in the world. He served as an officer in the War of 1812, and the experience of battle, together with the deaths of relatives, unsettled his convictions. In 1816 he returned to the Baptist faith of his family.

Determined to answer the doubts of his Deist friends, Miller set out to study the Bible verse by verse, using only a concordance. He became convinced that its prophecies could be understood literally and their timetables calculated. The key text was Daniel 8:14: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Following an old Protestant rule that a prophetic day stands for a year, and starting from 457 BCE, the date he assigned to a Persian decree to rebuild Jerusalem, he arrived at about 1843. The cleansing of the sanctuary, he concluded, meant the return of Christ and the purifying of the earth by fire.

Miller reached this conclusion around 1818 but kept it largely to himself for more than a decade. Only in 1831 did he give his first public lecture, at Dresden, New York, and he soon found himself in demand among Baptist, Methodist and other congregations. Scholars often prefer the neutral term “new religious movement” for groups that form around a new prophetic message, since “cult” is a contested label. The Millerites, for their part, saw themselves as ordinary Protestants who had understood the Bible’s timetable.

Miller’s message spread in a region already alive with religious revival. Western New York was known as the “burned-over district” for the waves of enthusiasm that swept it, and New England had a long tradition of reading the times through the Bible. The turning point came in 1839, when Miller met Joshua V. Himes, a Boston minister with a gift for organisation. Himes launched the newspaper Signs of the Times in 1840 and The Midnight Cry in New York in 1842, printed tracts by the hundreds of thousands, and organised general conferences.

In 1842 the movement began holding camp meetings, and that summer it acquired a great tent said to hold several thousand people. Preachers such as Charles Fitch lectured from a large painted chart that set out the visions of Daniel and Revelation, with the calculations leading to 1843. Believers sang from their own hymnal, The Millennial Harp, and met in homes and halls to study the prophecies. Most were ordinary members of established churches, farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers, who did not at first think of themselves as a separate body.

As the expected time approached, tensions with the churches grew. Many congregations rejected the message and expelled its supporters. In 1843 Charles Fitch urged believers to “come out” of churches that refused it, which he identified with the Babylon of Revelation. Miller himself had always spoken of “about 1843” and was reluctant to fix a day. He eventually suggested a period running from March 1843 to March 1844, by the Jewish calendar as he understood it. When that passed, he admitted his disappointment but urged followers to keep watching.

How many people belonged to the movement is hard to say, because there was no formal membership. Historians commonly estimate that some 50,000 to 100,000 people became committed believers, while perhaps hundreds of thousands attended a lecture or read a Millerite paper. Contemporaries also noted that Millerism reached beyond the United States into Canada and, through its publications, into Britain. Its strength lay in New England and New York, among rural and small-town Protestants, but it also drew crowds in cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

In August 1844, at a camp meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, a preacher named Samuel S. Snow presented a new calculation. Drawing on the Day of Atonement in the Hebrew Bible, he argued that Christ would come on the tenth day of the seventh month, which by the reckoning of the Karaite Jews fell that year on 22 October. This “seventh-month message” spread rapidly, and by early October Himes and Miller had accepted it.

The final weeks were a time of intense preparation. Some believers closed their businesses, gave away possessions, paid their debts or left crops unharvested. On 22 October many gathered in homes and meeting places to wait. When the day passed, they were devastated. One later wrote that they “wept, and wept, till the day dawn”. Hostile crowds jeered, and newspapers mocked them.

The movement soon split. A conference at Albany, New York, in 1845 brought together a group who kept expecting Christ’s near return without fixing dates; they gave rise to the Advent Christian Church and related bodies. Others abandoned the hope altogether. Miller acknowledged that he had been wrong about the date, though not about the nearness of the Second Coming, and he died at Low Hampton in 1849.

One small group reinterpreted the disappointment rather than giving it up. On 23 October 1844, according to his later account, a farmer named Hiram Edson came to believe that the sanctuary of Daniel was in heaven, and that in 1844 Christ had begun a new phase of his work there, rather than returning to earth. Former Millerites including Joseph Bates, James White and Ellen G. White combined this idea with keeping Saturday as the Sabbath and with Ellen White’s visions. Their movement was formally organised as the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1863, at Battle Creek, Michigan.

Today the Seventh-day Adventist Church is a mainstream Protestant denomination with millions of members around the world, known for its schools, hospitals and emphasis on health. It does not set dates for the end of the world. Other churches with Millerite roots, such as the Advent Christian Church, also continue.

For historians, the Millerites are a classic case of how a community responds when a precise prophecy fails. Some members left, some reinterpreted, and some built something new. The Great Disappointment has become a byword, but the movement also shows how literate, ordinary believers in nineteenth-century America read their Bibles with great seriousness and organised with remarkable energy.