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In the spring of 1805, William Smythe Babcock-an itinerant preacher of morbid temperament and hypochondriacal tendencies-was a troubled man. For four years he had been struggling to build up the Freewill Baptist connection in the hill towns of Vermont and New Hampshire, traveling as many as 1,500 miles and preaching some 300 sermons each year. Babcock had a sound New England pedigree, including a degree from Yale College, but by 1801 he had forsaken the bustling seaport of New Haven for the remote reaches of Vermont after experiencing a profound spiritual transformation (inspired, he later said, by the mysterious sound of dripping water on a dry night). Like so many eager young men, he found the northern frontier a more hospitable environment for his deepening faith than the staid Congregationalism of old New England. But, also like so many other New England migrants, he found that his personal demons followed him to the frontier. Poverty, prolonged dependence on his father, and sheer loneliness conspired to create in Babcock a state of arrested sexual and emotional development that would serve as the backdrop to one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of northern evangelicalism: the "Angel Delusion" of 1806-11, in which an entire community of Freewill Baptists-led by Babcock's young wife-conversed regularly with an Angel of God and did his bidding.1
When William Babcock first encountered the young woman who would become his wife and chief spiritual adviser, he was forty years old. In the fourteen years since his removal from New Haven to the rugged Vermont hill country, he had failed to establish himself either as a minister or as a man. Babcock's authority within Vermont's Freewill Baptist community-- a sect notorious for its internal squabbling-was never secure, as parishioners repeatedly questioned his moral fitness and pastoral abilities.2 In May 1802, rumors of sexual impropriety dogged Babcock on his itinerant travels, as the story spread that he had "in the very midst of my engagedness" while preaching "stopped and walked to the opposite side of the room & kissed a woman." Despite his excuses ("I told them the woman desired it & I felt it duty to gratify her"), listeners stayed away. In February 1804, he was still complaining that "there were few...