Our previous installment focused on Bates’ involvement in the causes of temperance and the abolition of slavery – the two foremost social movements in American society during the 1830s.

Biographer George Knight calls Joseph Bates (1792-1872) “the real founder of Seventh-day Adventism.” A sailor, P.O.W. during the War of 1812, and eventually captain of a merchant vessel, Bates left the seafaring life behind in 1827. He became absorbed in the religious revivalism and social reform movements influential in American society in the decades prior to the Civil War.