Summary

Joseph Bates was a mariner, social reformer, pamphleteer, and evangelist who co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church. From his adventurous youth as a sailor who survived sharks, icebergs, shipwrecks, and imprisonment in Dartmoor Prison, to his radical activism for temperance and abolition, to his pioneering role as the champion of the seventh-day Sabbath in the Advent movement, Bates lived a life of extraordinary courage and conviction. He was the first among the movement’s founders to propose the new convictions concerning the sanctuary and the seventh-day Sabbath that unified a scattered group of disappointed believers and gave them a distinct identity, ultimately leading to the formation of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Early Life and Family

Joseph Bates was the fourth of seven children born to Joseph Bates, Sr. (1750–1828) and Deborah Nye Bates (1865–1828). Though the younger Joseph is sometimes identified as “Joseph Bates, Jr.” in public records of his early life, he rarely included the designation “Jr.” in his published writings. In 1793 the family moved from the village of Rochester, Massachusetts, to the port town of New Bedford, located seven miles away. Well on its way to becoming “the whaling metropolis of the world,” New Bedford’s population grew from 3,000 to 22,000 during the 65 years Bates lived in the vicinity, before moving to Michigan in 1858. The Bates family lived on the east side of the Acushnet River, in the town incorporated as Fairhaven in 1812.

Joseph Bates, Sr. enjoyed at least moderate prosperity and social prominence. He was an army captain during the American Revolutionary War who fought under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette. After independence he went into “commercial business” and became a deacon of the Congregationalist Church. He was one of 16 citizens who founded New Bedford Academy (later Fairhaven Academy) in 1797.

Given his surroundings it is unsurprising that thoughts of becoming a sailor and going on “a voyage of discovery round the world” enamored young Joseph. After failing to dissuade him, his father arranged for 15-year-old Joseph to be a cabin boy on a voyage to Europe in 1807.

Mariner (1807–1827)

Bates’ Autobiography, the main source of information about the first 55 years of his life, was serialized in 51 installments in the Youth’s Instructor, a Seventh-day Adventist monthly. He had a flair for telling stories, reconstructing scenes and dialogue with remarkable detail. During his first two voyages the youthful Bates narrowly escaped peril from a shark, icebergs, shipwreck, and capture by Danish privateers.

While in Liverpool, England, in 1810, hoping to secure passage home after the ill-fated second voyage, Bates and several companions were seized by a “pressgang” and forced into service in the British Royal Navy. When the news that war had been declared between the United States and Great Britain in 1812 reached them, Bates along with six other Americans on the British warship declared their refusal to fight against their own nation and formally requested to be treated as prisoners of war.

Eventually, Bates was among 700 Americans held in Dartmoor Prison, a massive and dreary maximum-security fortress near Plymouth, England. After the Treaty of Ghent ended the war, Bates finally arrived back in Fairhaven five months later on April 27, 1815, following five years of incarceration and more than six years away from home.

At age 23, Bates was a survivor — still intact after eight years of high adventure interspersed with hardship and deprivation, but with little else to show for it. Yet rather than quit the sea, he determined to make a financial success as a mariner. During what biographer Godfrey T. Anderson calls the “acquisitive years” (1815–1827), Bates rose in rank to second mate, then chief mate, and then to ship’s captain in 1821.

At age 25, Joseph married Prudence M. Nye (1793–1870), daughter of Captain Obed Nye, Jr. (1750–1796) and Mary Marshall Nye (1767–1852), in Fairhaven on February 15, 1818. Despite his extended absences at sea and later as an itinerant evangelist, “Prudy,” as he called her, would remain his “beloved companion” for 52 years. Their first son, Anson Augustus (1819–1821), lived only 20 months. Their eldest daughter, Helen (1823–1902), was 16 months old when Bates saw her for the first time after a lengthy marine expedition. After another daughter, Eliza Parker (1824–1914), Joseph and Prudy had a son, Joseph (1830–1865), and their youngest child was Mary Nye (1832–1915).

Temperance and Moral Reform

As a young mariner, Bates had witnessed firsthand the “debasement” caused by liquor. He gave up “spirituous liquors” in 1821, followed by wine in 1822, then “ale, porter, beer, cider” and “any liquor that would intoxicate” in 1824, and the “filthy weed, tobacco” along the way. “From the ruinous habits of a common sailor, by the help of the Lord, I walked out into the ranks of sober, industrious, discerning men,” he later wrote. He continued on that path to becoming “joint owner, in the vessel and cargo which I commanded, with unrestricted commission to go where I thought best.”

In preparation for a voyage to South America on the Empress in August 1827, Captain Bates set forth a set of rules that imposed a strict teetotal regime on the crew. Other rules included no swearing and no washing of clothes or shore leaves on Sunday. The Sailors’ Magazine and Naval Journal reported that 40 ships sailed from New Bedford in 1830 without distilled liquor (except for medicinal use) and another 75 did so in 1831, suggesting that Bates’ “temperance ship” innovation had significant influence.

After arriving back in New Bedford in June 1828, Bates retired from the sea, 21 years after his first voyage to Europe. At age 36, Joseph had achieved the financial goal he had set for himself, amassing a “competency” of $12,000, equivalent to 20 years of annual salary.

On the day of his baptism in 1827, wanting others to gain the freedom from “corrupt custom” that he had found, Bates asked the minister who baptized him for help in organizing a temperance society. He organized the Fairhaven Temperance Society (FTS) along with a dozen charter members, most of them sea captains. The FTS took things a step further than the American Temperance Society, requiring abstinence not only from “ardent spirits” (hard liquor) but from “all intoxicating drinks,” as Bates had done personally in 1824. This became known as the “teetotal” pledge, something the national society did not adopt until 1836 — early evidence of Bates as a man at the radical, cutting edge of reform causes.

A Stand with the Oppressed

Things changed for Bates, and for the nation, after William Lloyd Garrison of Boston in 1831 launched the Liberator, “a militant abolitionist newspaper that was the country’s first publication to demand an immediate end to slavery.” As he followed the unfolding events, Bates became disgusted with the American Colonization Society and with the American Tract Society for its spinelessness in refusing to throw its considerable influence against the slave system. All of this left Bates with a decision:

“I then began to feel the importance of taking a decided stand on the side of the oppressed. My labor in the cause of temperance had caused a pretty thorough sifting of my friends, and I felt that I had no more that I wished to part with; but duty was clear that I could not be a consistent Christian if I stood on the side of the oppressor, for God was not there. Neither could I claim his promises if I stood on neutral ground. Hence, my only alternative was to plead for the slave, and thus I decided.”

Once again going for radical rather than moderate reform, Bates was one of approximately 40 individuals who, on April 23, 1835, formed the Fairhaven Anti-Slavery Society (FASS) as an auxiliary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, pledged both to the “total and immediate abolition” of slavery and to equal rights for “people of color.” Bates also supported other radical commitments, including women’s rights and nonresistance.

Second Advent Advocate (1839–1844)

In the fall of 1839, Bates agreed to attend a lecture in New Bedford on the second coming of Christ by a Christian Connection minister. At first deeply skeptical that anything about the timing of Christ’s return could be shown from the Bible, Bates left the meeting with an emerging conviction that he had been wrong. Reading a compilation of lectures by Baptist revivalist William Miller convinced Bates that time periods in the prophecies of Daniel indeed constituted, as stated by the book’s title, Evidence From Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, About the Year 1843. Bates was all-in for the most “ultra” reform imaginable — the complete eradication of injustice, oppression, and evil, replaced by a new world of peace, righteousness, and joy under the direct, personal reign of Christ Himself.

With William Miller, Joshua Himes, Josiah Litch, and others, Joseph Bates was one of 16 signatories to a call published in Signs of the Times summoning those “looking for the advent near” to a general conference in Boston to begin October 14, 1840. He and his wife Prudy attended the conference together. Bates was kept busy as a member of the committee on arrangements and the business committee. Bates noted that the conference concluded with a communion service in which “the Lord’s supper was administered to about two hundred communicants of different denominations,” emblematic of a unity that transcended the differences in belief and practice that had long divided Protestants.

Bates found Miller’s preaching to be “deeply interesting, and very far in advance of his written lectures.” At a Sunday meeting at the Taunton, Massachusetts camp meeting in September 1842, its attendance estimated at 10,000, “animated singing of the new Second-advent hymns, accompanied by the Spirit of the living God, sent such thrills through the camp, that many were shouting aloud for joy.” At Salem, Massachusetts, the following month, the Millerite “big tent,” its capacity estimated as high as 7,000, could not accommodate the crowds. To serve the overflow, the Fitch-Hale “’43-chart” was fastened to trees around the encampment, with ministers designated to explain the prophecies to the groups that gathered around.

Expectation now centered on March 21, 1844, the date that, Miller contended, marked the close of 1843 on the Jewish calendar. Bates, having already devoted his entire savings to the Second Advent cause, now did the same with his remaining assets in early 1844. He sold his home for $4,500 along with other real estate holdings, paid all his debts, and gave the rest to support efforts, including his own, to spread the message in the time that remained.

Freedom Mission to Maryland

Having given up all his wealth, Bates put his life on the line by selecting, for his preaching mission, what in all likelihood was the most dangerous option available to him. In early 1844, with only about two months remaining until the anticipated end, Bates ventured to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accompanied by Heman S. Gurney, a blacksmith and skillful singer. At their first stop, Kent Island, they faced resistance driven by concern about “the danger of preaching the doctrine of Christ’s second coming among the slaves.” When threatened with a ride out of town on a rail, Bates won the crowd over by responding, “If you will put a saddle on it, we would rather ride than walk.”

At Centerville, where they held meetings for three days, Judge Hopper, a leading citizen who enslaved a large number of persons, said to Bates, “[Y]ou are an abolitionist and have come here to get away our slaves.” Bates replied: “Yes, judge, I am an abolitionist, and have come to get your slaves, and you too! As to getting your slaves from you, we have no such intention; . . . We teach that Christ is coming, and we want you all saved.”

The Midnight Cry and the Great Disappointment

“New light” broke into a camp meeting held in Exeter, New Hampshire, in August 1844, where Bates, while lecturing, was interrupted from the audience by Mrs. John Couch, who believed the encampment needed to hear a fresh word from her brother-in-law, Samuel S. Snow of Connecticut. Snow indeed electrified the encampment by declaring that Christ would return in two months on October 22, 1844. Snow’s “seventh-month” message, also called “the midnight cry,” swept the land “with the velocity of a tornado,” according to the Advent Herald.

Bates was unreserved in his conviction about the seventh-month message and exhilarated by the outpouring of spiritual blessing that attended the movement that proclaimed it. Yet, along with the joyful anticipation of October 22, he and Prudy must have been deeply pained on October 21 when their only surviving son, Joseph, Jr., went to sea as a crew member on a whaler, the Marcus. Joseph was 14 years old, a year younger than his father had been when he did the same thing in 1807.

“Hope sank and courage died,” wrote Bates in describing the shattering emotional blow that he and like-minded believers suffered when their expectations for Christ’s return on October 22, 1844, proved untrue. Previously a respected, moderately wealthy citizen and community leader, Bates found himself impoverished and discredited, ridiculed by boys in the street, and unable to understand how his beliefs had gone wrong.

Prophetic Pamphleteer and Sabbath Champion (1845–1849)

Hope began to rise once again for Joseph Bates in 1845, with new conviction that resurrected his courage. The October 1844 disappointment did not destroy his faith nor that of thousands of others in the Second Advent movement. During the years 1846 to 1849, the group that would cohere around Bates and two much younger leaders, James White (1821–1881) and Ellen Harmon White (1827–1915), emerged. Among these, Bates was the first to propose new convictions concerning the “cleansing of the sanctuary” and the seventh-day Sabbath that unified this group and gave it a distinct identity amidst the various factions of Second Adventism.

In March 1845, a tract written by Thomas M. Preble, a Millerite who was pastor of a Freewill Baptist church in Nashua, New Hampshire, convinced Bates that he had been observing the Sabbath on the wrong day. Preble had come out in favor of the seventh day through the influence of a fellow Millerite minister, Frederick Wheeler, located some 35 miles to the north in Washington, New Hampshire. Wheeler and members of his congregation, in turn, had been persuaded in 1844 under the witness of a Seventh Day Baptist, Rachel Oaks.

Bates’ conviction deepened as a result of a brief trip to New Hampshire in April or May 1845, for consultation with Wheeler and other members of the first Second Advent congregation to also observe the seventh-day Sabbath. His radical zeal now fully engaged, Bates, as he walked across the bridge that linked New Bedford and Fairhaven on his return, was greeted by his friend James Madison Monroe Hall who asked, “What’s the news Captain Bates?” Bates replied that “the news is that the seventh day is the Sabbath and we ought to keep it.”

As “an uncompromising advocate for present truth,” Bates felt compelled by duty to get the Sabbath news out in the form of a 48-page booklet published in August 1846, well-summarized by its full title: The Seventh Day Sabbath, A Perpetual Sign, From the Beginning to the Entering Into the Gates of the Holy City, According to the Commandment. In it, Bates interpreted the Sabbath in a new dimension, that of an apocalyptic theology of history. The Seventh Day Sabbath: A Perpetual Sign “anchored the Sabbatarian movement,” according to historian Merlin Burt. Indeed, it exerted a formative influence on Seventh-day Adventism that has endured into the twenty-first century.

Bates’ fourth book, A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath, published in January 1848, was, at 116 pages, his longest yet. He undertook the task at a time when his cash in hand was down to a “York shilling.” Bates had long since expended his fortune in support of the Advent movement and other reforms, but apparently he had never revealed to his wife the full reality of their precarious financial status until now, when he used the shilling to acquire only a meager portion of the new supply of baking flour and other essentials she requested. When Prudy asked what he was going to do so they would have something to live on, Joseph replied that he was going to write a book on the Sabbath, and assured her, “The Lord is going to open a way.” Prudy, herself not yet a believer in Joseph’s seventh-month message, left the room in tears. Soon afterwards, Bates went to the post office where an unexpected donation of $10 awaited him, $4 of which he used to have a barrel of flour, along with potatoes, sugar, and more sent to his home.

Joseph, James, and Ellen

Reading The Seventh Day Sabbath: A Perpetual Sign convinced Ellen Harmon White and James White to begin observing the seventh day Sabbath in the autumn of 1846, not long after their marriage in August. For his part, Joseph was ambivalent about Ellen’s visions, having observed her experience them on a number of occasions. He did not find anything contrary to the Word of God in what she claimed had been revealed to her, but Bates was for a time unconvinced that the prostration and trance-like state she entered “was anything more than what was produced by a protracted debilitated state of her body.”

Bates acknowledged that initially he had been a “doubting Thomas” with regard to Ellen’s visions. The rational basis that he sought for their authenticity did not come until November 1846 at a meeting in Topsham, Maine, where he listened to her narrate what she was seeing in vision. Though incidental to the message of the vision, she described the features of planets and their moons with a detailed accuracy that amazed him, and he found entirely credible her assurance that she had never studied these matters.

In April 1847 he affirmed that the visions were indeed from God: “I can now speak confidently for myself. I believe the work is of God, and is given to comfort and strengthen his ‘scattered,’ ‘torn,’ and ‘peeled people,’ since the closing up of our work for the world in October, 1844.”

By early 1847, then, Joseph Bates, James White, and Ellen White shared the following convictions: 1) the perpetuity of the seventh-day Sabbath; 2) the three angels’ messages of Revelation 14 as prophetic illumination of the Second Advent movement, pointing to the Sabbath commandment as a final test of loyalty to Christ; 3) October 22, 1844, as the beginning of the Day of Atonement phase of Christ’s high priestly ministry in the heavenly sanctuary; 4) Ellen’s visions as an authentic manifestation of the gift of prophecy; and 5) their calling to make known the final warning message. These shared convictions led to a collaboration from which Seventh-day Adventism would emerge.

Later Ministry and Legacy

Bates moved to Michigan in 1858. Between 1857 and 1872, John Byington followed the life of the circuit-riding preacher, and Bates occasionally joined him, along with J. N. Loughborough or Moses Hull. “No one knows Michigan like John Byington” became a byword among believers.

Bates’ wife Prudence passed away on August 27, 1870, after 52 years of marriage. When Bates died in 1872 at the age of 80, he became the oldest Adventist minister in the denomination.

Joseph Bates’ legacy is profound and multifaceted. As the pioneer of the seventh-day Sabbath truth in the Advent movement, he was instrumental in restoring this foundational biblical practice to God’s people and placing it within an apocalyptic theology of history that gave the scattered believers a distinct identity and a world-shaking mission. As a health reformer decades ahead of his time, he demonstrated through his own life that temperance and clean living were both practical and honoring to God. As a radical abolitionist who risked his life to preach in slaveholding territory, he showed that commitment to Christ demanded a commitment to justice. His courage, his uncompromising commitment to truth, and his willingness to sacrifice everything — his fortune, his comfort, his reputation — for the cause of the Advent message made him one of the most significant founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Key Quotes

“I then began to feel the importance of taking a decided stand on the side of the oppressed. . . . Duty was clear that I could not be a consistent Christian if I stood on the side of the oppressor, for God was not there. Neither could I claim his promises if I stood on neutral ground. Hence, my only alternative was to plead for the slave, and thus I decided.” — Joseph Bates, Autobiography

“The news is that the seventh day is the Sabbath and we ought to keep it.” — Joseph Bates, to his friend James Madison Monroe Hall, upon returning from New Hampshire

“The Lord is going to open a way.” — Joseph Bates, to his wife Prudence, when she asked how they would survive while he wrote A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath

“Yes, judge, I am an abolitionist, and have come to get your slaves, and you too! As to getting your slaves from you, we have no such intention; . . . We teach that Christ is coming, and we want you all saved.” — Joseph Bates, to Judge Hopper in Centerville, Maryland

“If you will put a saddle on it, we would rather ride than walk.” — Joseph Bates, responding to threats of being ridden out of town on a rail in Maryland