If you wanted to start a new Christian sect in America, the early years of the 19th century were a good time to try. The country was in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, a time when many people believed Christ would soon return to Earth.
What to make of Isaac Bullard? He had a knack for attracting people, but an even stronger ability to repel them. Perhaps that is just the way it is when you set yourself up as a prophet.
Historians attribute the religious fervor to fears triggered by rapid change. America was moving away from self-sufficiency and toward a market economy; people were embracing rationalism, science and individual beliefs over traditional religious doctrine; and economic factors and western expansion were increasing social and geographic mobility.
Daily life felt like it was speeding up and moving away from long-held beliefs. Many people thought America was in moral decline.
The year Bullard chose to start his sect, 1817, was particularly propitious. People at the time could be forgiven if they believed they were living in the “end times.” Just the year before, the region had experienced such freakish weather that it became known as “the year without a summer” and “eighteen-hundred and froze to death.” (The main cause of the cold weather was a volcanic eruption in Indonesia that released cubic miles of debris into the atmosphere.)
After recovering from a long illness, Isaac Bullard claimed to have become a visionary who could perceive divine revelation, and some people were inclined to believe him. Others, like Vermont historian and naturalist Zadock Thompson, saw something more cynical at work. Thompson, in his 1842 “History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical,” suggested that Bullard had used the time of his convalescence to “mature his plans for imposing upon the credulity of the ignorant and weak minded.”
Bullard, who sported a long red beard, led a tiny religious community located about 35 miles north of the Vermont border in British-controlled Lower Canada. The community — Bullard, his wife, their infant son, who they supposedly referred to as Christ or the Second Christ, and a half-dozen followers — moved to Vermont during the spring of 1817.
The timing wasn’t entirely of their own choosing. Members of the group had been charged in the death of another infant. Sect members said that “by command of the Lord” they had fed the child a “decoction from a poisonous bark.” Canadian courts found insufficient evidence for conviction, but the incident turned the general public against the community and an exodus from Canada became “the last resort of this new sect.”
Group members traveled through Vermont until they reached the village of South Woodstock, where they found a receptive audience for their message. As Thompson put it, Bullard “found materials suited to his purpose, and proceeded to make proselytes of two simple but well disposed and honest families by the name of Ball.”
The Rev. Joseph Ball had been a member an anti-Calvinist sect that stressed individual freedom of conscience and beliefs. As a reverend, his recruitment might have lent respectability to Bullard’s group.
The enlistment of Ball’s brother, Peter, was also significant. Peter Ball brought important resources to the community. He owned a farm, which provided community members a place to live and food to sustain themselves. An added benefit was that Peter had a large family, many of whom joined the sect.
Bullard began traveling around Woodstock and surrounding towns in search of converts. Soon the sect’s numbers grew from six to nearly 40, including several “respectable” citizens. According to the local postmaster, Alexander Hutchinson, Bullard used coercion to convert people, making them believe he had the power to make their lives wretched.
Within the sect, Bullard claimed the power to create and dissolve marriages. Salacious rumors started that followers practiced “free love” outside the bounds of marriage.
The Vermont Pilgrims, as they became known, were equally appalled by the outside world, which they saw as debased and unrepentant. So naturally, they kept mostly to themselves. This only strengthened the bonds within the Pilgrim community.
Townspeople found that when they encountered Pilgrims, they couldn’t debate doctrine, because no one seemed to know exactly what Bullard and his followers believed. Bullard never wrote down his doctrine.
What we know of his beliefs comes to us piecemeal in descriptions of the group by outsiders. Bullard apparently thought that most, perhaps all, people were sinners and as such must work fervently for their own salvation through arduous acts of self-denial. Converts were given such grueling challenges as remaining standing or fasting for several days.
Not even the young were spared from harsh tests of faith. When one infant, who was forced to go without food and drink, began to bawl, the child’s mother begged Bullard to end the fast. Bullard’s thunderous reply was, “If it cannot fast, let it die.”
Not that mealtimes brought much sustenance. Bullard typically allowed his followers only a thin gruel of cornmeal and milk or a broth of flour and water. He deemed forks and knives unnecessary affectations of modern, corrupt society, so the Vermont Pilgrims used straws fashioned from feathers or stalks to suck their food from a communal bowl. Even chairs were too civilized for Bullard, who made his followers stand while they ate.
Though most people in Woodstock wouldn’t have witnessed the Pilgrims at mealtime, they were still treated to some of the sect’s more unusual practices. The most shocking to observers was their attitude toward hygiene. Bullard reasoned that, since he could find no admonition in the Bible ordering Christians to wash, he banned his followers from bathing. He also prohibited them from cutting or combing their hair, though he did call upon the men to shave their upper lips.
For clothes, Bullard favored the most primitive of attire. He was said to wear bearskin around his loins, what one commentator referred to as a “leathern girdle.” Others adopted the bearskin attire or wore other clothing they let grow tattered. To Bullard and his Pilgrims, filthiness was next to godliness. To demonstrate their faith, the devout would roll in the dirt roads and lie on them, face down, in supplication.
As a newspaper reported, “They are made to believe their filthy and ragged dress, their frugal, dirty and badly cooked food are meritorious; and to crown the whole, their eating it amidst & mingled, with the most naucious (sic) stench.” Leading by example, Bullard bragged that he had worn the same skins for seven years.
By late August, Bullard decided it was time for the Vermont Pilgrims to leave. Perhaps he believed they needed to keep moving to find fresh converts. They traveled west through Rutland and then south through Bennington County, adding a few more Vermonters to their number.
Though they soon left the state, news of their progress reached Vermont in newspaper accounts of their ramblings. Wherever they went, they had a way of getting noticed. Newspapers described the Pilgrims as appearing thin and exhausted — some were fasting while they trekked — as well as being filthy and infested with lice.
By the following March, the Pilgrims had reached Ohio. By then, however, some members were carrying something worse than lice — smallpox.
Alarmed about the approach of this diseased flock, civic leaders in Cincinnati rode out to meet the Pilgrims, hoping to persuade them to bypass the town. Undeterred, the Pilgrims passed through Cincinnati, where people lined the roads to watch the bedraggled procession pass.
The Pilgrims’ numbers dwindled as members died from disease or deserted. In Cincinnati, they sold their wagons and purchased a flatboat to float down the Ohio. Where they were headed was unclear. Bullard seemed to be searching for some Promised Land.
In early 1820, Thomas Nuttall, a naturalist who was surveying the Arkansas Territory, encountered the remnants of the Pilgrims living by the Mississippi River. The group now numbered only five or six people. Nuttall learned that a passing boat crew had recently taken offense to Bullard, seizing the would-be prophet and forcibly washing, shaving and dressing him in clean clothes.
The final sighting of the Pilgrims came in 1824, when an Ohio man happened upon two women who said they were the last members of the sect. They refused the man’s offer to help them return to their native New England. The account makes no mention of whatever happened to Isaac Bullard.
