Fair copy manuscript with the caption title, “Notice.”
Landaff [Grafton County, New Hampshire], Oct. 1, 1844. Ink autograph manuscript on one page (7.5 x 7.88 inches), faint stationery embossed device, notice signed Geo. W. Clement, Landoff, Oct. 1, 1844. Some light soiling and wear; old folds; in very good condition. Item #22646
Legal (great) disappointments, according to forms: “The subscriber having obtained satisfactory evidence from the word of God that the Savior will come this fall ‘with all the holy angels, taking vengeance on all who know not God and obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and will establish his everlasting Kingdom in the new earth,’ hereby gives notice to all whom it may concern, and especially to his Creditors, that he has in his possession real estate (free from all legal incumberances) [sic] and personal property sufficient to pay his debts; and in view of the great event at hand, I have no disposition to injure the feelings or interests of such as may look upon the subject of our Lord’s coming immediately as visionary, therefore, I would say in short, that my property is at the disposal of my Creditors for their pay or security.” Whether posted in earnest as a public notice (there are tack holes to the upper corners) or intended as a contemporary lampoon, an evocative document produced in the geographical heart of a fervent strain of Millerite excitement during the run up to the end of the world, predicted by contemporaries as coming on October 22, 1844. Prominent Millerite Samuel S. Snow had as early as February of that year produced an article in the Midnight Cry that the great time of prophecy (Dan. 8:13-14) would not end until the autumn of 1844—and as he continued to delve into the subject, “he had not been studying it long before he finally set October 22, 1844 as the date for the termination of the prophetic period” (Nichol 226). The localized excitement in northern New Hampshire had been provoked in part by a dramatic camp meeting in Exeter in August, where Snow arrived on a lathered horse and broke in upon Joseph Bates to deliver his prophetic calculations, when as Nichols notes, “There had been set in motion here in New Hampshire a movement within a movement—for the Millerite leaders were very slow to accept the argument for a definite time—a movement which was soon to give a new tempo to the thinking and the activity of the advent believers all over the country, and to bring Millerism to a dramatic and speedy climax” (Nichol 229). Nichol further remarks that “some of the believers in northern New Hampshire, even before summer began, failed to plow their fields because the Lord would surely come ‘before another winter’” (Nichol 226). The fervor of the New Hampshire Millerites was fairly well remarked-upon; a squib in the Portland Press Herald of October 23, 1844 reprints a notice from the N. H. Patriot reporting that Justices of the Peace in Melvin Village and in Wakefield had returned their commissions to the New Hampshire Secretary of State because of the expected return of Christ, since (as one was quoted as writing), “I believe the Lord will come on this seventh month of this sacred Jewish year; therefore I do not wish to remain Justice of the Peace any longer.” George W. Clement himself shows up in the public records of the court rosters of New Hampshire as having been appointed a Justice of the Peace for Landaff on May 20, 1844—but, suggestively enough, is then documented as resigning his position on September 23, 1844. The village of Landaff itself appears in post-Great Disappointment news reports, such as the Litchfield [Conn.] Enquirer of November 14, 1844, which condenses a report that the “New Hampshire Patriot says Moses Clank [sic, for Clark], of Landaff, a man of good sense and well informed, a representative to the State Legislature, fell into the Miller delusion and committed suicide a few days since.” (Clark’s supposed death is reported elsewhere as suicide by drowning, among other examples of disappointed Millerites unseated from reason; reports of this disappointment may have been exaggerated, since a suitable Moses Clark of Landaff seems to have lived well beyond 1844 to a respectable age.) Clement himself seems to have been a substantial man in Grafton County, and the 1850 census has Clement still living in Landaff with his wife and four children; the 1927 genealogy, Ancestors and Descendants of Robert Clements of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, England notes “Squire Clement” as having been a leader in the community and a substantial property owner. This biographical account is silent on his religious practice, perhaps calculatedly so. Had Clement indeed fallen under the sway of the calculated prophecies and thus, as a pillar of the community and officer of the courts, feel it was only proper to create this suitable legal notice? Or was this a satire to point of the absurdity of the everyday complications that would have no doubt ensued were Snow proven right? No truly American latter-day religion seems ever to have been delivered up without having been tugged at birth between absurdity and earnestness, risibility and legalistic self-seriousness. So as the crackling of thorns, etc. This document suits either circumstance—attendant as it was at one of the key moments in the birth of an American religion. See Nichol, Francis D. The Midnight Cry. Takoma Park, 1944.
Price: $4,500.00