The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America.

In 1831, Nathaniel Hawthorne published a short story, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," about a country youth named Robin who arrives in a seaport town (presumably Boston) in search of a cousin who has "manifested much interest" in him, and thrown out hints respecting [his] future establishment ... in life." A walking symbol of callowness, Robin dresses in yam and leather clothes that have been spun and stitched by his "mother or a sister," and wears his father's three-cornered hat--an emblem of his nostalgic attachment to the paternal world he has left behind. As a younger son, he has been excluded from inheriting his father's farm, and is looking to his kinsman for rescue.

In the city, Robin misreads every sign and solicitation. He mistakes a prostitute for a maiden, and contemptuous strangers for friends. By the end of the story, Hawthorne leaves him poised on the verge of retreating to the safety of the country from which he came. But the tale ends uncertainly, with an implicit question: will he remain and adapt, or will he turn and flee?

Set in the years when Hawthorne was writing about the psychic costs of the passing of the old rural order, The Kingdom of Matthias can be read as a sequel to "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"--a version of what might have happened to Robin if he had stayed in town. It tells the story of a bizarre religious cult founded by "poor men who were rooted socially and emotionally in the yeoman republic of the eighteenth century" who find themselves in New York City in the 1820s (forced there, like many of their contemporaries, by economic necessity), trying to adapt to a culture committed to "fisk-taking, individual ambition, and the accumulation of money."

The dislocated figure upon whom Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz focus is the cult-leader, Robert Matthews, an emigrant from upstate who had been raised in the last decade of the eighteenth century in an orthodox Scots Presbyterian church, where he learned "to live in an anxious world, where humankind was innately corrupt and where the thunderclaps of the Hudson Valley sprang from the mouth of the Lord." Apprenticed to a carpenter in rural Washington County, he turned up in Manhattan at the age of twenty, where he began to compile a criminal record as a woman-beater. After returning north, he married, and took up a sedate life as keeper of a drygoods store--interrupted by occasional trips, to the New York wholesalers, and by "seizures of intense peevishness."

Matthews profited by the economic boom that followed the War of 1812, but then, overextended, fell victim to the contraction of credit that succeeded the good times. He "had no choice," Johnson and Wilentz explain, "but to take his family back to Manhattan and to start all over again as a carpenter," but in the city his troubles mounted: family illness, long spells of unemployment as construction jobs dried up in the recurrent financial panics. Chronicling the explosive moods that now possessed him, Johnson and Wilentz tell the story of Matthews's descent into madness. It took the particular form of religious fanaticism characterized by a compulsion to emulate the Old Testament Jews, complete with dietary laws and patriarchal costume: "black cap of japanned leather shaped like an inverted cone; a military frock coat ... decorated with gold braid, frogs, and fancy buttons," as well as a sword and iron rod "with which he would rule the world."

In Matthews's prophecies, Johnson and Wilentz discern a wishful vision of a world in which "there would be no market, no money, no buying or selling, no wage system with its insidious domination of one father over another, no economic oppression of any kind." It was a purified world of plain living, from which puddings and pies and other womanish contrivances were banished. And though women themselves would not be expelled, "Every thing that has the smell of women," as Matthews put it, "will be destroyed," and only "real men will be saved; all mock men will be damned."

By the 1830s, Matthews had attracted a flock of followers--some of them obviously demented--and, having renamed himself Matthias, he roamed with them between New York and Albany and the village of Sing Sing on the Hudson. He seems to have had a particular attraction for other psychologically wounded men, and for needy women; one married woman, whom he elevated to a sort of queenship, declared that in her experience it was he alone who could "enter the most Holy of Holies," and "penetrate to the Sanctum Sanctorum." After presiding at the dinner table like Alan Bates in the asylum in King of Hearts, Matthias was evidently given to inviting some new woman to find out if she might be his true "match spirit."

The whole sordid story began to wind down as sexual competition within Matthias's kingdom" turned alliances into rivalries. After the death of one of his chief disciples (whom some contemporaries suspected Matthias of having poisoned), the cult broke up into bitter factions. One group brought charges against the prophet for embezzlement, while another pressed for a murder indictment. By the time Matthias came to trial, he faced an assortment of accusations. The trial itself seems to have been something of a circus, and, due to the efforts of his competent lawyer, Matthias was acquitted of the main charges. Convicted on one assault charge (despite the fact that his victim, his own daughter, had withdrawn the complaint), he served four months in jail--three for the assault and one for contempt of court.

After his imprisonment, Matthias headed west and into obscurity. He showed up briefly at a Mormon settlement in Ohio, where he held forth on theological matters to Joseph Smith himself, who judged that the strange visitor's "mind was evidently filled with darkness." His public career was over.

Like all well-told accounts of human disintegration, this story has a certain pathos. But it also has a degree of absurdity that elicits from the authors an occasional unsuppressed snicker. Johnson and Wilentz seem drawn to it not so much for its exposure of their man's vulnerability, as for his value in making an historical point. In their view, Matthews was insane, but nevertheless somehow representative--a man who had found a way to "reassert a swaggering, authoritarian, and resolutely antibourgeois way of being a man," who had "revived the rural ways he had known in his youth and endowed them with new prophetic meanings."

Referring to Jim Jones and David Koresh (obligatory names these days in any book about religious crackpots from the American past), Johnson and Wilentz contend that "repeatedly, Americans caught in bewildefing times have made sense of things primarily with reference to alterations in sexual and family norms, and a perceived widespread sexual disorder." This is a fair argument--about our time as well as about the antebellum years--but the lunatic Robert Matthews seems a pretty thin foundation upon which to base it. When a small story is used to make a big point, there is risk of disproportion.

The Kingdom of Matthias insists on the significance of the obscure materials it has uncovered, speculating at one point that Herman Melville's father (also a failed retail merchant who moved between New York and Albany) might have known the Matthias story, or even some of its principals; and that Matthias might have had something to do with Whitman's interest in "metropolitan crime." And though "the story of Matthias went largely ignored by later generations, the penny-press journalism it helped to inspire had an impact on American life and literature that, according to one aficionado, Edgar Allan Poe, was probably beyond all calculation."' There is some slippage in that sentence--in which the relations among the penny press, Matthias, and Poe get lost in the syntax.

But the larger problem with The Kingdom of Matthias is that its grand theme that misogyny and reactionary nostalgia are built into the psychological structure of modernity as male responses to the emasculating experiences of domesticity and wage labor--tends to obscure the mundane fact that to his contemporaries, Matthias was a contemptible grotesque. Americans may have "sensed that the Matthias cult spoke with strange eloquence to the social and emotional upheavals in which they lived their own lives," but they did not express that sense, at least not in ways that can be recovered. Johnson and Wilentz work hard to articulate it retrospectively on their behalf, because they believe that the story of Matthias speaks "not to some quirk of the moment or some disguised criminal intention," which is what contemporary commentators seemed to think, "but to persistent American hurts and rages wrapped in longings for a supposedly bygone holy patriarchy." The Kingdom of Matthias is a good story well told; but as an attempt at historical allegory in which large psychic pain is writ small, it is a stretch.