The Kingdom Of Matthias Summary

Words: 1350
Pages: 6

The Book The Kingdom of Matthias written by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz is a non-fiction text that gives an in-depth description of how the kingdom of Matthias came to be. Along with that, it also describes what life was like in the kingdom and how it fell apart. The main characters are Robert Matthews, also known as Matthias, Elijah Pierson, Benjamin and Ann Folger, and Isabella Van Wagenen. In the book, we learn about the lives and deaths of each of these characters and everything in between. This book is organized in a format that has a prologue, four chapters, and then an epilogue.
In the prologue, the authors talk about the end of the story. It starts in November of 1835 with the Prophet Matthias in court and it is determined that he is innocent of murder. After this, he loses all his followers. I personally thought that it was not a good decision to start the book with the end. I was confused when I was reading the prologue because I did not know who the characters were or how they knew each other. This caused me to not understand what was going on and develop a bad feeling towards the book where I then, did not want to continue reading it.
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In this chapter, we learn about Elijah Pierson who was a religious reformer in New York in the 1820s. He was one of the first men to join Matthias’s cult. He married his wife, Sarah Stanford in May of 1822 and they had one child. He also has a servant named Isabella Van Wagenen. She is a past slave and has also been the housekeeper for James Latourette. I thought that this chapter was very informative, but may actually have had too much information. It seemed to me that it had too much information that it caused the chapter to be less interesting as a whole. It may have been because it was only talking about Elijah, his family, and their background