No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
“… the weakest of the weak…”
Ellen G. White, nee Harmon (1827-1915), is among the least known of the prophet-founders of major American religious movements. The Seventh-day Adventist prophet has received neither the celebrity nor the notoriety of Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Shakerism’s Ann Lee, or Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy. Yet she deserves at least the recognition of these other sect founders. Ill, introverted, and undereducated, White ultimately asserted the most forceful influence on Seventh-day Adventism and ensured it a place among the major American sects. Her long and resourceful career as the Adventist visionary inspired the transformation of a single-minded, other-worldly, Millerite off-shoot into a complex and established denomination with wide-ranging interests in sabbatarianism, eschatology, health reform, temperance, medicine, child nurture, education, and religious liberty. Her legacy includes an impressive global network of sanitariums and hospitals and a vast educational system unparalleled in contemporary Protestantism. Her writings number eighty printed volumes, circulated among an Adventist world membership of over five million.
* Born Ellen Gould Harmon, she married James White in 1846 and thereafter generally used the name Ellen G. White. This study confines itself to her life prior to marriage and generally refers to her in early childhood as Ellen and in adolescence as Harmon.
A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers made possible the research for this paper.
1. Although Seventh-day Adventist historian John Loughborough did not coin this reference to Ellen White, he gave it currency among his Adventist readers in The Great Second Advent Movement: Its Rise and Progress (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1909), 182.
2. No full-fledged, scholarly biography of her has yet appeared. Still the best source on White, which examines her as a health reformer, is Numbers, Ronald L., Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York: Harper&Row, 1976)Google Scholar. Arthur L. White, her grandson, has produced an offlcial biography which, although severely limited by its apologetic stance, contains a wealth of 24 Religion and American Culture fresh information on her in Ellen G. White, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1981-86). For important insights into her domestic life and her role as a denominational leader, see Ronald D. Graybill, “The Power of Prophecy: Ellen G. White and the Women Religious Founders of the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1983). Reliable biographical Sketches on her appear in Numbers, Ronald L., “Ellen Gould White” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Eliade, Mircea (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 15:377-79;Google Scholar Goen, C.C., “Ellen Gould Harmon White,” Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. James, Edward T. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:585-88;Google Scholar “Ellen Gould (Harmon) White,” Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, ed. Don F. Neufeld (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1976), 1584-92. The extensive collection of her un-published manuscripts and letters is housed at The Ellen G. White Estate, Washington, D.C., and is replicated in large part at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, and in the Heritage Room of Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California. Her voluminous published works have been indexed in Comprehensive Index to the Writings of Ellen G. White, 3 vols. (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1962-1963).
3. While there is not yet a Standard history of Seventh-day Adventism, general histories of the movement include Schwarz, Richard W., Light Bearers to the Remnant (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1979);Google Scholar Land, Gary, ed., Adventism in America: A History (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986);Google Scholar Bull, Malcolm and Lockhart, Keith, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (New York: Harper&Row, 1989);Google Scholar for a brief historical summary of the movement, see Numbers, Ronald L. and Butler, Jonathan M., “Seventh-day Adventism,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 13:179-83.Google Scholar
4. For an important anthropological perspective on prophets, see Burridge, Kenelm, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), esp. 153-64.Google Scholar I.M. Lewis provides a social anthropologisf s view of ecstasy and its preponderance among ill women in Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971). On the American shift around mid-century from Calvinism to Victorianism, see Higham, John, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848-1860 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: William L. Clements Library, 1969).Google Scholar A characterization of Victorianism which informs this study is Howe, Daniel Walker, “Victorian Culture in America,” in Victorian America, ed. Howe, Daniel Walker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 3–28.Google Scholar
5. Max Weber's emphasis on the individual qualities of the charismatic personality is found in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947), 358-59. For a critique of this approach which points to millenarian prophecy as a social response, see Worsley, Peter, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, 2d ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), ix–xii.Google Scholar Burridge discusses old rules—no rules—new rules in New Heaven, New Earth, 165-69; drawing upon the Burridge formula, I trace Adventist history within the antebellum American context in “The Making of a New Prophecy, Gender, and Culture 25 Order: Millerism and the Origins of Seventh-day Adventism,” in The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 189-208.
6. The first few chapters of the various versions of White's autobiography provide detailed information on her early life beginning with Ellen G. White (hereafter EGW), Spiritual Gifts: My Christian Experience, Views and Labors (Battle Creek, Mich.: James White, 1860). She revised her account in Life Sketches, Ancestry, Early Life, Christian Experience, and Extensive Labors of Eider James White and His Wife, Mrs. Ellen G. White (Battle Creek, Mich.: Steam Press, 1880) and the later Life Sketches of Ellen G. White (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1915) (hereafter Life Sketches refers to this 1915 work). See also “A Biographical Sketch of Ellen G. White” in her Testimonies for the Church, vol. 1 (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1948), 9-112. For historical discussions of her first nineteen years, see Numbers, Prophetess of Health, 1-14; Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 1: The Early Years, 1827-1862, 15-109; see also Ronald Graybill, “Ellen G. White: The Hidden Years” (Typescript, White Estate, 1977); Bernadine L. Irwin provides little new information on her in “A Psychohistory of the Young Ellen White: A Founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church/’ (Ph.D. diss., United States International University, 1984).
7. The Portland Directory (Portland: Arthur Shirley, 1834), passim.
8. For Ellen Harmon's Methodist background, consult Ronald Graybill, “Adventist Roots in Methodist History,” (Typescript, White Estate, 1974). Her comment on her father appears in EGW, “They Sleep in Jesus,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald 31 (Aprü 21, 1868): 29. Hudson, Winthrop describes Methodist enthusiasm in “Shouting Methodists,” Encounter 29 (Winter 1968): 73–84.Google Scholar
9. She describes her injury in EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 7-12.
10. On the comparison in appearance to her sister, Elizabeth Bangs, observe the photo of the two together in Numbers, Prophetess of Health, 3. While only fraternal twins, Ellen and Elizabeth looked alike facially in middle-age, although Ellen was heavier-set. Her reference to the providential value of her affliction may be found in Testimonies for the Church, 1:19,31.
11. EGW, Life Sketches, 19,26.
12. For an introduction to William Miller, see Rowe, David L., Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800-1850 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), 1–16.Google Scholar White describes Miller's impact on Portland, Maine, in Testimonies for the Church, 1:14.
13. White, Ellen G., “Communications,” Youth's Instructor 1 (December 1852): 20–22;Google Scholar see also Life Sketches, 30. Barbara Welter unveiled similar sentiments in the diaries of contemporary adolescent girls in Dimity Convictions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 13.
14. For contemporary Adventist reactions to White, see Witness of the Pioneers Concerning the Spirit of Prophecy (Washington, D.C.: Ellen G. White Estate, 1961). Numerous illustrations of sickly spiritualist mediums who were invigorated by their trances are noted in Moore, R. Laurence, In Search of White 26 Religion and American Culture Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 102-29, esp. 124.Google Scholar
15. Recently the Millerites have finally received the attention they deserve from contemporary scholars of millenarianism. In addition to the regional study by Rowe, Thunder and Trumpeis, the movement has been broadly analyzed in Barkun, Michael, Crudble ofthe Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840's (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986);Google Scholar Numbers and Butler, eds., The Disappointed; and Doan, Ruth Alden, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
16. For a characterization of the seventh-month movement, see the writings of Arthur, David T., “Millerism,” in The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, ed. Gaustad, Edwin S. (New York: Harper&Row, 1974), 154-72;Google Scholar “After the Great Disappointment: To Albany and Beyond,” Adventist Heritage 1 (January, 1974): 5-10,58; and “Come Out of Babylon: A Study of Millerite Separatism,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1970); see also Schwarz, Light Bearers to the Remnant, 49-51. The same intense Community spirit enjoyed by these Adventists emanated from abolitionist “intimacy drdes” described in Friedman, Lawrence J., Gregarious Saints: Seif and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar For the view that the “linguistic nonsense” of glossolalia communicates important emotions, see Samarin, William J., Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York: Macmillan, 1972).Google Scholar
17. The journalistic reflections of Matthew F. Whittier, a brother of Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, appeared in the Portland Transcript, November 1, 1845, 228-29, generously cited in Hoyt, Frederick, “We Lifted Up Our Vbices Like a Trumpet: Millerites in Portland, Maine/” Spectrum 17 (August, 1987): 18–20.Google Scholar Hoyt and Ronald Graybill name the visionaries that they have located in Maine newspapers, in addition to Ellen Harmon, as Baker, Dorinda, Clemons, Emily, Harnlin, Mary, and Knapp, Phoebe, in Butler, Jonathan and others, “Scandal or Rite of Passage? Historians on the Dammon Trial,” Spectrum 17 (August, 1987): 38–39.Google Scholar The Hirnes comments surfaced in letters from J.V. Hirnes to William Miller, March 12 and March 29, 1845 (Joshua V. Hirnes Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society), quoted in Numbers, Prophetess of Health, 17. White's dismissal of Dorinda Baker was noted in a later letter to the prophet, M.C. Stowell Crawford to EGW, October 9, 1908 (DF 739, White Estate).
18. Rowe comments on the Millerite women in Thunder and Trumpets, 136; see also, Carole Ann Rayburn, “Women in Millerism, 1820-1870,” (Typescript, Andrews University Seminary, 1979). William Fo/s relationship to Harmon is discussed in Tim Poirier, ‘'Black Forerunner to Ellen White: William E. Foy/' Spectrum 17 (August, 1987): 23-28. On Hazen Foss, see EGW to Mary Harmon Foss, December 22,1890 (DF 37, White Estate).
19. The Miller reference is found in Bliss, Sylvester, Memoirs of William Miller (Boston: Joshua V. Hirnes, 1853), 278.Google Scholar
20. For their influential study on failed prophecy, see Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Prophecy, Gender, and Culture 27 Psychobgical Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; reprint ed., New York: Harper&Row, 1964). An alternative approach appears in Lawrence Foster, “Had Prophecy Failed? Contrasting Perspectives of the Millerites and Shakers,” in The Disappointed, ed. Numbers and Butler, 173-88.
21. EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 30. A.F.C. Wallace correlates physical infirmity and prophecy in, “Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 271-72.
22. EGW, Life Sketches, 64.
23. Harmon's first vision was printed in A Word to the “Little Flock”, ed. James White (Brunswick, Maine: Privately printed, 1847), 14-18. A photographic reproduction of this account of the vision is included in Arthur L. White, “Ellen G. White and the Shut Door Question,” (Typescript, Ellen G. White Estate, 1971), 45-48.
24. EGW, Life Sketches, 68. Robert R. Wilson touches on the relation of ecstasy to prophetic activity among Hebrew prophets in Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 5-8; see also, Lindblom, Johannes, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), 47–65, 122-37, 216-19.Google Scholar
25. EGW, Testimoniesfor the Church, 1:62-63; EGW, Life Sketches, 69-72.
26. Ibid. James White estimated the number of her supporters in A Word to the “Little Flock”, 22.
27. I. M. Lewis provides a comparative account of this experience among the spirit possessed in Ecstatic Religion, 66, 187-90.
28. American mesmerism is studied in Füller, Robert C., Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Its relevance to Ellen White is mentioned by Numbers, Ronald L. and Schoepflin, Rennie B. in “Ministries of Healing: Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen G. White, and the Religion of Health,” in Women and Health in America: Historical Readings, ed. Leavitt, Judith Walzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 376-89, esp., 376-77.Google Scholar White's resistance to the call is reported in her Early Writings of Ellen G. White (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1882), 22-23.
29. Lewis addresses this point in his discussion of possession and psychiatry, Ecstatic Religion, 178-205; see also Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth, 162.
30. James White, ed., A Word to the “Little Flock”, 21; Otis Nichols to William Miller, April 20, 1846 (DF 105, White Estate); quoted at length in White, Arthur L., Ellen G. White, 1:74-6.Google Scholar
31. Among William Sargent's many writings on the physiology of such behaviors, see especially, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957).
32. White, James, Life Incidents, in connection with the Great Advent Movement as Mustrated by the Three Angels ofRevelation XIV (Battle Creek, Mich.: Steam Press of the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1868), 273.Google Scholar
33. Emmett, Dorothy describes prophecy in vocational terms in “Prophets and Their Societies,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 86 (1956): 13–23, esp. 16-18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34. Harmon's exchange with the gentleman is mentioned in Interview with E.G. White, Re Early Experiences, August 13,1906. White, Arthur L. refers to the aliases of the “angel messenger” in Ellen G. White: Messenger to the Remnant (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1969), 7.Google Scholar
35. EGW, Early Writings, 21-22.
36. EGW, Life Sketches, 72.
37. EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 60.
38. See, once again, Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth, 165-69.
39. Ibid., 168.
40. On the spiritualizers, see Interview with E.G. White, Re Early Experiences, August 13, 1906; M.C. Stowell Crawford to EGW, October 9, 1908; Graybill, Ronald, “Foot Washing and Fanatics,” Insight, 4 (2 January 1973): 9–13;Google Scholar Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets, 146A7; Schwarz, Light Bearers to the Remnant, 56; White, Arthur, Ellen G. White, 1:82–83.Google Scholar
41. The derogatory references to foot washing and the holy kiss appeared in Morning Watch 1 (May 1, 1845): 141, and Advent Herald 10 (November 19, 1845): 119, cited in Graybill, “Foot Washing and Fanatics,” 12. Lawrence Foster traces the spiritual pilgrimage of Enoch Jacobs from Millerism to Shakerism in “Had Prophecy Failed? Contrasting Perspectives of the Millerites and Shakers,” in The Disappointed, ed. Numbers and Butler, 173-88. Hirnes characterizes spiritualizer meetings in Hirnes to Miller, March 27, 1845, cited in Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets, 147.
42. Wellcome, Isaac C., History of the Second Advent Message and Mission, Doctrineand People (Yarmouth, Maine: I.C. Wellcome, 1874), 402;Google Scholar Nichols to Miller, April 20,1846; EGW, Life Sketches, 74-76.
43. Her position on “promiscuous” foot washing and her early Opposition to marriage, as well as her approval of James White, appear in two 1906 interviews, Interview with Mrs. E.G. White, Re Early Experiences, August 13, 1906 (DF 733c, White Estate), and Interview of E.G. White, December 12, 1906 (DF 733c, Loma Linda University Heritage Room). For her view that women may wash men's feet, see EGW, Early Writings, 117. The libel regarding an illegitimate child dogged her until at least 1870, when church leaders attempted to lay it, along with other “shameful slanders,” to rest in Defense of Eid. James White and Wife: Vindication of Their Moral and Christian Character (Battle Creek, Mich.: Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1870), 103. The warrants for her arrest are mentioned in Nichols to Miller, April 20, 1846.
44. Harmon's memory of the Atkinson, Maine, enthusiasm may be found in EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 40-42. In sharp contrast to her account, however, is the recorded testimony which appears in “Trial of Eider I. Dammon,” Piscataquis Farmer (March 7,1845), and has been reproduced in Frederick Hoyt, ed., “Trial of Eider I. Dammon Reported for the Piscataquis Farmer,” Spectrum 17 (August, 1987): 29-36; the first-hand descriptions of the Atkinson episode in the next several paragraphs of my text are taken from this transcript. For interpretive comment on the trial, see Butler and others, “Scandal or Rite of Passage,” ibid., 37-50.
45. EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 40.
46. Harmon implicates enthusiasm with mental illness in Selected Messages From the Writings of Ellen G. VJhite, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1958), 2,34. The parallel between Harmon's mental problems and the “unbalanced” minds of her enthusiastic Community is noted in Ronald L. Numbers and Janet S. Numbers, “Millerism and Madness: A Study of ‘Religious Insanit/ in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Disappointed, ed. Numbers and Butler, 109-110.
47. An example of her early emphasis on the commonality of the pentecostal experience can be seen in EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 26-30. The quotation of Eider Stockman's appears in EGW, Life Sketches, 36.
48. EGW, Spiritual Gifts, 26; Nichols to Müler, April 20, 1846; EGW to John Loughborough (Letter 2,1874, White Estate).