ABSTRACT
Matthias or Robert Matthews, whose Kingdom briefly flourished on Benjamin Folger's Hudson Valley estate, was a perhaps mentally disordered example of the charismatic patriarch of a small sect of the sort sometimes emerging or securing followers from the maelstrom of revivalistic intensity of the early 1830s. His unhesitating assumption of authority, claims to divine inspiration and legitimation through the following of people of wealth and respectability were the ingredients of his brief moment of notoriety.
