Even the most famous marriage in Adventism went through seasons that were hard to live through.
James and Ellen White never divorced and never formally separated. But in the spring of 1876 they did spend weeks apart by choice, and her letters from that spring are painfully honest.
Some background helps. On 16 August 1865, James collapsed with a stroke while walking with Ellen. More strokes followed in later years. He kept leading the church, but the editors of her letters note that he “at times became depressed, irritable, and hypercritical.”
In the spring of 1876 he went east to Battle Creek while she stayed in Oakland, California, writing on the life of Christ. Letters flew back and forth. To her friend Lucinda Hall she wrote: “I can but dread the liability of James’ changeable moods, his strong feelings, his censures.” About a week later came the line that sums up the pain: “It is better for us both to be separated. I have not lost my love for my husband, but I cannot explain things.”
On 16 May she wrote to James himself: “It grieves me that I have said or written anything to grieve you. Forgive me.” Within about ten days she was at his side at the Kansas camp meeting. They worked fourteen camp meetings together that summer.
The strain did not vanish. In 1877 she told their son Willie that James “feels that he has wronged me very much.” Arthur White, her grandson and biographer, still concluded it would be “unfair and contrary to the facts” to assume the marriage was endangered.
James died in August 1881, still her husband and still her coworker.
Their story will feel familiar to anyone who has loved someone through illness. Love and distance were both part of it, and so was coming back.
Photo: James and Ellen White, c. 1868, photographer unknown (source: Ellen G. White Estate), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_and_Ellen_White.jpg (toned, text added)
Head over to Adventist Today for current events, analysis, and opinion on all things Adventist.
