The history of apocalypse panic/Armageddon obsession/Doomsday hysteria/End Time terror and Second Coming silliness through the Victorian Age
alma-geddon.com
Anywhere between March 21, 1843 - March 21, 1844 CE …
an earnest, if deeply delusional ex-farmboy, ex-sheriff, ex-Justice-of-the-Peace, ex-army captain named William Miller.
[…] converted to intellect-asphyxiating Evangelical Christianity […] buried himself hairline-deep in Scripture. He finally became convinced, through his own form of creative mathematics, that the End was nigh-ish and that Jesus would be calling the faithful home somewhere between the dates of March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 "according to the Jewish mode of computation of time".
[…]
As the dates drew near, Miller's followers grew frighteningly in both number and fervor until he had some 50,000 doomfounded sheep wagging their tails behind him. […]. The Millerites, as they now called themselves, spent the majority of their time either steeped in prayer, informing all their non-Millerite acquaintances that they were going to burn in hell or else, working themselves into convulsive, tongues-speaking, limb-flailing ecstatic trances. It was all kind of like an incredibly long Republican Primary Convention.
[…]
When dawn on the (October 1844) 23rd arrived without a single airborne believer to be found, the results were not pretty. The ensuing mass nervous breakdown came to be demurely referred to as, "The Great Disappointment". And one can hardly blame them. I mean, it must be an awful letdown; to spend years thinking you had prime balcony seats for the damnation of all your infidel friends and neighbors, only to find out at the last minute that the show's been canceled on account of reality. Now, that's gotta hurt. While it didn't spell doom for the planet, it most assuredly printed it out in big, block letters for Miller and his "ism". Both of which faded into tearful obscurity and died... Or, at least,
Miller did.
1845 CE - After the "Great Disappointment" most of the Millerites wandered off to go their separate ways. Some just went back to their old mainstream churches, some to new ones, some were disillusioned enough to give up on religion entirely. But a surprising number found that breaking up is hard to do and made a beeline from cult to cult without a pause. Most of them called themselves Second Adventists and they no sooner pitched their Chautauqua tents, then they were giving in to their obsessive compulsion for Doomsday date-setting. The nightmare embarrassment of 1844 had barely slipped by when they were already hopping up and down, tilting at 1845. In a pre-Thorazine America, this proved to be an intractable problem.