THE SHAKERS

American Zion

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

—WILLIAM BLAKE

Cottonopolis

Ann Lee was born four decades before the Dark Day, on Leap Day 1736. She was the second of eight children born to a Manchester blacksmith named John Lees and a woman whose name is lost to history. They lived in a small apartment on Toad Lane, a narrow street of smithies and alehouses.

In the mid-1700s, Manchester was ground zero for the nascent Industrial Revolution. When Lee was little, the blocks of the city were interspersed with small farm plots. Shiploads of cheap, slave-picked American cotton and a handful of technical innovations transformed the city. By the time Lee was a young woman, Manchester had begun to fill with unskilled workers from the countryside looking for work in the new mills. The invention of the spinning jenny, a machine that allowed one person to operate many yarn spindles at once, revolutionized the production of thread. Spinning, which had formerly been done by independent artisans or in the evenings by farmers’ wives, became a profitable full-time trade. The jennies spun a surplus of thread, accelerating advances in weaving technology. Groups of wealthy landowners built large mills where water- and steam-driven looms churned out inexpensive cloth. Artisan weavers and spinners could not compete. Many sold their small plots of ancestral land and joined the exodus into the city. Peasants who had previously fed themselves from their own meager acreage and often didn’t eat much at all began to live off factory wages.

Little is known of Lee’s early life. She never went to school. When she was eight, she began to work on a loom. The hagiography written by her followers after her death offers a portrait of their prophet as a severe young woman. The plump little girl relished hard work, the official record reports, and was “never addicted to play as other children.” From an early age she “was impressed with a sense of the great depravity of human nature, and of the odiousness of sin.” In the cramped apartment that Lee shared with her seven siblings, her parents’ sex life was probably on full display. It was certainly within earshot. Repulsed by the “indecent nature of sexual coition,” Lee chastised her mother for submitting to her father’s lust. This insolence earned her regular whippings. After Ann left the textile workshop, she worked as a velvet cutter. For a time she prepared fur for hats. Later she served as an assistant in a lunatic asylum.

Religion was one of the few things that was not in short supply on Toad Lane. By the time Lee was twenty-three, she and other members of her family had joined a prayer group led by Jane and James Wardley, a pair of Quaker tailors who lived in Bolton, a few miles north of Manchester. The Wardleys believed that God spoke directly to them and that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. Like other religious dissenters of their day, they denounced the official Anglican Church as the work of the Antichrist. The group that met in the Wardleys’ home felt the Holy Ghost in their midst and acted accordingly. Disturbed by their spastic singing and dancing, their neighbors called them jumpers, shiverers, or shaking Quakers.

Much of what the Wardleys preached derived from a group of French mystics who had settled in England at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes under pressure from the Vatican and his devoutly Catholic second wife. For a century, the edict had protected the rights of Huguenot Protestants to worship openly throughout most of France, though never in Paris. In response to their sudden loss of liberty, many Huguenots immigrated to England, Prussia, Holland, and North America. Others remained in France and waged a violent insurrection, burning churches and killing priests. They became known as Camisards for the light linen shirts (camisa) they wore to identify one another on night raids. Some Camisards were burned at the stake. Others were stretched on the wheel. Among those exiled to England, many settled in Manchester. The French Prophets, as they came to be known, danced wildly, spoke in tongues, wrestled with invisible devils, spoke of an imminent millennium, and specially prized the prophetic gifts of women.

—

By the time Ann Lee was worshipping with the Wardleys, the notion that the end of the world was imminent had special force in Manchester. The conditions in what William Blake would soon call Britain’s “dark Satanic Mills” were indeed hellish. The workers’ precincts were a knotted tangle of covered passages and narrow, winding alleys. Fresh water and plumbing were almost nonexistent. Slimy, stagnant creeks bubbled with miasmatic gases. The poorest workers went barefoot through alleys that dead-ended at muddy pools of urine and shit.

This gray, life-refusing landscape would have a powerful influence on modern utopian and socialist thought. A decade after Mother Ann and her Shaking Quakers left Manchester to build a new, perfected society in North America, Robert Owen, the founder of Indiana’s New Harmony community, came to town. Owen was born poor, but he ended up on the winning end of the city’s brutal economic equation. Even so, his sympathies remained with workers like Ann Lee. His time in the mills inspired dreams of a secular paradise in which working people would enjoy all the comforts and dignity of the wellborn. A generation after Owen left, the mills of Manchester inspired and bankrolled the writings of Marx and Engels.

Manchester’s factory economy, which took off when Lee was a young woman, left people who had formerly lived according to little more than the rain and the soil at the whim of a powerful new force: the global market. The constant presence of excess workers in the city was necessary for those rare times when cloth production peaked. When demand slackened, the looms slowed. Thousands of men, women, and children became instantly superfluous. Since they did not own (or hold tenancy upon) any land, they could not even raise the meager subsistence that their parents had. This situation—a permanently impoverished labor surplus—drove wages ever downward, creating huge fortunes for a small group of mill owners while ushering workers into lives of squalid confusion. Industrial accidents—crushed legs, mangled fingers, broken arms—were commonplace. In the damp slums, epidemics came and went like weather.

Many reformers assumed that the new competitive industrialism would not last long. How could something so inhumane survive? As one commentator later wrote of Marx, the utopian reformers in Manchester mistook “the birthpains of capitalism for its death throes.” The religiously minded fell back on the eternal conviction that justice, in one form or another, was coming. Wrongs will be made right; the least will come first; Babylon will fall.

Second Coming

And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

—REVELATION 12:1

In January 1762, when Ann Lee was twenty-six and had been worshipping with Jane and James Wardley for three years, she married a Manchester blacksmith named Abraham Standerin. Given Lee’s distaste for sexual coition, the match was probably made by her parents. Abraham might have been her father’s apprentice. Apparently he lacked his wife’s intense piety. Official Shaker history (a highly biased source) recalls him as a randy lout with a strong thirst for ale. Once married, Lee was constantly pregnant. She carried four children to term, but all of them died in infancy or early childhood. The fourth delivery was particularly painful. The baby, named Elizabeth, was extracted with forceps. She lived longer than any of her siblings, dying at age six. The trauma of these serial deaths convinced Lee that God was punishing her for some grave sin.*¹ She became terrified of Abraham’s advances, avoiding their marriage bed “as if it were made of embers.”

The early Shakers did not make any special effort to record their activities or beliefs. Lee, like most of the others, was illiterate.*² The most reliable record of the groups’ comings and goings in Manchester is their extensive rap sheet. Seeing themselves in heroic opposition to a corrupt Anglican establishment, the Wardley group went out looking for conflicts with the local authorities. On July 14, 1772, the Manchester constable noted that he had spent five shillings on beer for the twenty-four men who helped apprehend Shakers who were causing a “disturbance.”*³ Lee seems to have been particularly gung ho. A week after the mid-July “disturbance,” a shilling was paid to the jurors’ bailiff for the arrest of her and her father. Three months later, a certain “widow Shepley” was compensated two shillings for damage done to her ironwork during the (presumably violent) arrest of several Shakers. Barging into churches and haranguing the assembled worshippers was evidently a favorite Sunday outing for the Shakers. In May 1773, six shillings were spent to provide meat and drink for Lee after she was jailed “for disturbing the congregation in the old Church.”

On one occasion, after being locked up for “disturbing the Sabbath,” Lee had a vision. Sitting in her cell, she saw Jesus standing directly in front of her. He showed her “the most astonishing visions and divine manifestations…in so clear and striking a manner that the whole spiritual world seemed displayed before her.” She was able to look into the Garden of Eden at the very moment of the Fall. The true cause of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise suddenly became obvious. It had nothing to do with eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The true “root and foundation of human depravity,” Lee saw, was sex. Adam and Eve had misinterpreted the commandment to be fruitful. God wanted them to multiply in a spiritual sense, not to gratify Adam’s lust. By forsaking their angelic natures and entering into the ranks of “natural generation,” the first humans exchanged God’s intimacy for a cursed, animal existence.

Lee later argued that the true nature of the original sin can be inferred from God’s punishment. For the daughters of Eve, He made childbirth a painful and dangerous ordeal: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” It was a curse that must have resonated powerfully with Lee. Adam’s sentence was equally familiar to the denizens of Toad Lane: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” To Lee and her confederates, these twin punishments summed up most of what they knew of life—hard labor, twice over. And it was not because of Eve’s disobedience. It was because of Adam’s lust.

Decades after Ann’s vision, Shaker theologians found even more scriptural support for her interpretation of the Fall. They pointed out that Adam and Eve’s immediate response to their sin was to cover their genitals with leaves, thus indicating “the principal seat of human depravity.” If sex wasn’t the sin, “why did not the shame fall upon the hand that took the fruit, and the mouth that ate it?” Those same theologians also noted that there was something awfully familiar about the physical form that Satan took in the Garden. “It may easily be determined,” wrote one circumspect Shaker, “where it is that the head of the serpent lieth.”

In the afterglow of her vision, Lee concluded that the only way to restore man’s intimacy with God was to cease participating in “natural generation, or in any of the gratifications of lust.”

—

Released from jail, Lee rushed to a meeting of the Wardley group. As she recounted her revelation, the others were struck by a powerful change in her—a new and potent charisma. They “saw at once that the candle of the Lord was in her hand.” The force of her testimony was so strong that Lee, then in her midthirties, immediately assumed a position of leadership within the group. She adopted the title “Mother,” previously reserved for Jane Wardley. “From this time she was received and acknowledged as the first visible leader of the church of God upon earth.”

In the moment that Lee understood the true nature of sin, she was transformed from an ordinary woman into a “vessel to revive and bring to light His perfect law of righteousness for the direction and salvation of all souls.” The Shakers gradually came to regard Lee’s vision as the opening trump of the long-prophesied millennium: “Here commenced the real manifestation of Christ’s second appearance.” To them, Mother Ann Lee was not just a prophet or a seer of visions. In that damp prison cell, she became a medium for the Second Coming of Christ.

A Tree Like a Burning Torch

By the early 1770s, there were about thirty Shakers living in Manchester. Under Lee’s leadership, they all adopted strict celibacy. They also became more brash in their declarations of the dawning millennium. As a result, they suffered rougher persecution. In the Shaker version of events (the only record that survives), the purehearted believers are repeatedly aided by miracles as they elude mobs of Anglican thugs. When a gang tried to stone Lee, their rocks fell short. When a man departed for London carrying an anti-Shaker petition to King George, he fell dead from his horse.

The Shakers began to move around at night to avoid trouble. One Saturday evening, while walking twenty miles to a prayer meeting, a group of them stopped to rest and eat. By the side of the road, a young Shaker named James Whittaker had a vision of his own. “While I was sitting there,” he wrote, “I saw a vision of America; and I saw a large tree, and every leaf thereof shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch, representing the church of Christ, which will yet be established in [that] land.” The tree, the group decided, represented a flourishing Shaker society in the colonies. “God had a chosen people in America,” Whittaker claimed. It was the “favored land prepared for the building up of Christ’s Kingdom.” Whittaker’s vision was taken as a divine promise that the Shakers’ “millennial church” would be established in North America. They must also have understood that they would enjoy greater freedom of conscience in the colonies.

On May 10, 1774, Lee and eight of her confederates, including her brother William, her niece Nancy, and James Whittaker, boarded the Snow Mariah, a square-rigged packet sailing out of Liverpool for New York. Lee’s husband, Abraham, came along, too, despite his lack of faith. The Wardleys and Lee’s father, along with perhaps fifty other Shakers, remained behind in Great Britain. The crossing took three months. The Snow Mariah’s captain, a man named Smith, despised the Shakers’ loud, arrhythmic singing and herky-jerky dancing. He threatened to throw them overboard, but they kept at it. When, according to Shaker history, a rough sea knocked a board loose from the ship’s hull, Captain Smith announced that they were all doomed. Lee calmly assured him that God would protect his one true church. A moment later, a heavy wave hammered the loose plank back into place.*⁴

When the Snow Mariah docked in New York Harbor on August 6, the pilgrims split up to find work. William Lee, James Whittaker, and a relatively affluent Shaker named John Hocknell sailed north up the Hudson River to look for cheap land. Ann and Abraham stayed in the city. He found work as a smith. She was hired as a laundress in a home on Queen Street (now Pearl Street). When Abraham fell ill, Lee quit her job to nurse him. Once recovered, he refused to return to work and began spending his days carousing “with the wicked at public houses.” One evening he brought home a “lewd woman” and threatened to marry her if Ann did not resume her conjugal duties. Lee said she’d rather die. Abraham left.*⁵

Lee was alone in New York City, unemployed, penniless, and living in a small, cold room. A single line from the Shaker chronicle conveys her situation: “She sat down upon the stone, without any fire, sipped her vinegar, and wept.” (Why she kept rocks for furniture and vinegar for drink is not clear.)

The following year, Lee moved upstate and the eight Shakers reunited near Albany, on two hundred acres of land in Niskeyuna that Whittaker and Hocknell had leased from Stephen Van Rensselaer, lord of the manor of Rensselaerswyck. They planted corn and wheat, cleared a small section of forest, and raised a two-story log home. The women slept on the ground floor, the men upstairs. Over the next four years, as the colony around them descended into rebellion, the Shakers improved their meager plot and kept to themselves. The only growth in their ranks came from a handful of believers who emigrated from Manchester and a single American-born convert. Learning the skills of frontier living as they went, they scraped a thin subsistence from their farm and awaited the moment when Mother Ann would open her gospel and commence building the millennial church.

Bedlam

In the spring of 1780, after the skies turned black and the moon went red, pilgrims began coming up the Niskeyuna trail in droves to hear the gospel of Christ’s Second Appearing. Lee had seen their arrival in a vision, and the Shakers had been stockpiling food. At night, the cabin floor was covered with sleeping bodies. More people camped outside.

It is impossible to pin down a clear-cut Shaker theology, especially in the early years when the faith was unwritten. Even once Lee’s successors began to set their beliefs down on paper, Shakers from any two decades might not agree precisely on all of their doctrines. Generally, they believed that Adam and Eve, like all subsequent humans, combined a bodily animal nature with an immaterial soul. By succumbing to Adam’s lust, they allowed the former to dominate. Contrary to modern orthodoxy, the Shakers claimed that Jesus of Nazareth was a mortal man who had been imbued with the “Christ spirit” at the time of his baptism. Since they opposed “natural generation,” they saw it as significant that Christ had been born of a virgin and died without having sex.

The people gathered in Niskeyuna believed that the Second Advent foretold in scripture—an event anticipated by so many of their contemporaries—would not come with the appearance of the messiah or a sudden rapture of souls. The millennium would take the form of the reappearance of the “Christ spirit” and the birth of the millennial church. The Shakers eventually called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, not Christ’s Second Appearance.*⁶ The millennium would be a process: the gradual perfection of human society.

According to the Bible, the men and women of the earliest Christian community, the so-called Apostolic Church, experienced certain supernatural “gifts”—they could heal the sick, communicate directly with God, and experience bodily possession by the Holy Ghost. The Shakers, who saw themselves as the second and final iteration of this early church, believed that they had similar gifts. Their sensitivity to the Holy Ghost was manifested in their eponymous activity: shaking.

In their cabin in Niskeyuna, the British Shakers taught their American converts that the millennium had commenced in 1770, when the “Christ spirit” entered Mother Ann and, to a lesser extent, the group of “witnesses” who were gathered around her. Among the Manchester Shakers, Lee was seen as the lead prophet among a group of similarly inspired men and women. The heavenly “gift” was in all of them. As the embodiment of the Second Coming of the “Christ spirit,” Lee was not considered a deity, although later Shakers sometimes spoke of her as if she were. She was a human with a uniquely powerful capacity for revelation. She could take confession, forgive sins, and “search the heart” of her followers. Even after her death, Lee remained the spiritual pillar of the sect. Later generations of Shakers felt her presence actively influencing their lives from the beyond.

—

In the years immediately following the Dark Day, the daily existence of the believers bore little resemblance to the modern image of the Shakers. This was not a quiet community of old women making ladder-back chairs and singing sweetly about “simple gifts.” The converts who gathered at Niskeyuna spared little thought for their material conditions. They were determined to “come out of the World,” to separate themselves from the daily rhythms of life in the colonies and the messy uprising coming to life around them. In the green hill country north of Albany, they lived in the fever and thrill of daily revelation. Their worship was constant but contained no liturgy. Tradition was anathema; spontaneity was the hallmark of spiritual authenticity. No expression was too strange. They danced, shook, and giggled. They made animal noises; they shrieked; they rolled about in the dirt and stamped their feet. Their neighbors claimed that at night the Shakers stripped naked and ran through the dark. The Holy Spirit moved among them. Their bizarro carryings-on certified it.

One of the first accounts of an American Shaker meeting was recorded one week after the Dark Day by Valentine Rathbun, a Baptist minister and one of the sect’s earliest converts. When Rathbun arrived at Niskeyuna, there were only twelve people on the property. He was welcomed, fed, and invited to watch the group worship. They began by sitting on the floor, singing a wordless tune, and violently shaking their heads. The melody and shaking intensified until, as Rathbun describes it, all hell broke loose. The meeting, which sounds more like an Acid Test than an eighteenth-century prayer service, unraveled into complete “bedlam.”

In the best part of their worship every one acts for himself…one will stand with his arms extended, acting over odd postures…another will be dancing, and sometimes hopping on one leg about the floor; another will fall to turning round, so swift, that if it be a woman, her clothes will be so filled with wind, as though they were kept out by a hoop…some sitting by, smoking their pipes; some groaning most dismally; some trembling extremely…Then all break off, and have a spell of smoking, and sometimes great fits of laughter….They have several such exercises in a day.

Although there is no mention of nude dancing in the Shakers’ own reports, early apostates recall the practice with great consistency. Eunice Stanton, who followed her husband into “Zion” before leaving in disgust, contributed to a collection of anti-Shaker writings. “Their religion,” she wrote, “consisted in confessing sin to the leaders, dancing and whirling, speaking in their unknown tongues, as they called it, stripping and dancing naked together, men and women.” Others claimed that Lee’s spiritual ecstasy was fueled by a mixture of dark rum and darkly repressed sexuality. “I have seen the Mother at Niskeuna, in the State of New York, in times of her intoxication, come into a room where many were gathered for a meeting and were, by her own orders, stript naked; I have seen her slap the men, rub her hands on all parts of their bodies, press the men to her bosom and make them suck a dry breast all this time she would be humming and making an enchanting noise.”

The Grand Actress

In a time of intense millenarian expectation, these outlandish displays, so alarming to straight-backed New England Calvinism, struck a chord. Revolutionary New England, it turned out, was a very good place to start a new religion, and the sect grew briskly.*⁷ Along with the Shakers’ sudden popularity came unwanted attention. Valentine Rathbun, the convert who documented the early prayer meeting, was an ardent patriot who came to resent the Society’s stubborn pacifism. He left the sect to become a full-time Shaker baiter, whipping up hostility by claiming that the Shakers destroyed families and that they called all other Christians “boogers, devils and Sodomites.” Neither claim was totally untrue. Rathbun published a pamphlet titled Discovery of the Wicked Machinations of the Principal Enemies of America, which, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, claimed to reveal a secret, far-reaching conspiracy in which the Shakers endeavored to strangle the newborn American Republic in the cradle. The pamphlet even includes a fictional dialogue in which the dastardly King George celebrates Mother Ann’s ability to prey upon “the foolish and superstitious passions of the most ignorant of the Americans.”

In a time of aggressive, insecure nationalism, a group of recently emigrated Brits, led by a woman and denouncing any involvement in the war, raised more than a few red flags. In early July 1780, just a month and a half after the Dark Day, a newly minted Shaker named David Darrow tried to herd a flock of sheep from his farm in New Lebanon to Niskeyuna as an offering to the nascent community. A group of self-appointed patriots, suspecting that Darrow intended to convey the sheep to the nearby frontier, where hungry British soldiers were camped, seized the livestock and brought Darrow before the local magistrate. When the judge pressed him to swear allegiance to the cause of independence, Darrow refused, claiming that his new faith barred him from fighting or taking oaths. He was sent to prison.

Throughout the Revolution, the treatment of those loyal to the crown was brutal. Private mail was scoured for unpatriotic sentiments, and suspected royalists were tarred with scalding pitch. Loyalty oaths were administered door-to-door. Those who refused to sign might have their names printed up in the town square. In the region around Albany, the state of New York established a commission “for detecting and defeating conspiracies,” a sort of Revolutionary War–era House Un-American Activities Committee. Three weeks after Darrow and his sheep were detained, the commission issued a writ for the arrest of the leading Shakers. “Frequent complaints have been made by sundry of the well affected inhabitants of this County,” the warrant read, “that John Partherton, William Lees, and Ann [Lee] Standerren, by their conduct and conversation disturb the publick peace.” In a nicely Orwellian phrase, the commission charged that the Shakers were “daily dissuading the friends to the American cause from taking up Arms in defense of their Liberties.” Within three days, Jacob Kidney, an officer of the court, arrested the three Shaker leaders along with several others who happened to be with them.

The men were locked up in Albany’s Old Fort. Mother Ann created such a fuss that she and a Shaker sister named Mary Parrington were transferred downriver to a jail in Poughkeepsie. The state’s plan was to deliver Lee to British-controlled New York City, where the “grand actress,” as she was called in court, would become the king’s problem. Given their experiences in Manchester, the Shakers felt relatively at home in prison. Their evangelism continued uninterrupted. They even converted a few royalist inmates.

The men were released after four months. A month later, in December 1780, thanks to the intercession of Governor George Clinton, William Lee was finally allowed to pay his sister’s bail. Mother Ann was set free with a stern warning not to do or say anything “inconsistent with the peace and safety of this and these United States.”

—

Now certified traitors, the Shakers were unchastened. That spring, when the weather warmed and the roads dried, Mother Ann, William Lee, and James Whittaker left Niskeyuna on a missionary expedition throughout New England. For the next two and a half years they were constantly on the move, staying briefly in almost forty settlements throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and eastern New York. Traveling by foot along the roads and Indian trails that laced through the woods of New England, they went from village to village, spreading the good news of Christ’s Second Appearing and trawling for what Lee called “gospel fish.”

When the trio of missionaries (sometimes joined by others) reached bigger villages, they would set up a small revival. Even during the war, there wasn’t much going on in these towns. The curious, the hostile, and the bored could be counted on to turn out for a bit of hellfire from a strong-voiced evangelist. The outrageous spectacle of a woman speaking publicly about salvation (or anything) helped gather a crowd.

The missionaries’ usual approach was for James Whittaker to stand in the thoroughfare, exhorting passersby to come hear the new gospel. Whittaker, who later succeeded Lee at the head of the Society, was a handsome, fair-skinned man with dark eyes and black hair. His mother had been a member of the Wardley group, and he was the first man to grow up entirely in the Shaker faith. He was deeply devoted to Mother Ann. During one of her longer stints in the Manchester jail, he supposedly kept her alive by pouring milk and wine through the stem of a pipe inserted through the keyhole of her cell. In a style and vocabulary that would have been familiar throughout Puritan New England—the hectoring, semicrazed evangelism that was the legacy of Jonathan Edwards, the defining voice of the Great Awakening—Whittaker unfolded the peculiar notion that the millennium had begun and that the time to forsake sin was now.

When a small group of potential converts was gathered, Mother Ann took over. Unlike Whittaker’s forceful street preaching, Lee’s quiet charisma—her uncanny ability to elicit deep, emotional confessions from total strangers—worked best in private interviews. The conversions she inspired were occasionally so sudden that they seemed physical. Some described a feeling of being dowsed in cold water. Others likened her power to the “operations of an electerising machine.” Lee’s particular genius, her power to “search every heart,” was an intuitive knowledge of people’s needs. She tailored her pitch to the sinner—sometimes humming sweetly, sometimes scolding harshly, sometimes stroking an arm.

—

When Mother Ann and the other missionaries arrived in Harvard, Massachusetts, at the end of June 1781, the town was already in a state of spiritual upheaval. A contingent of Baptists was trying to break off from the township to incorporate its own village, and a small millenarian sect had set up shop in a large house at one end of the main street.*⁸ The sect, which might more properly be called a cult, had been founded by a pipe fitter turned New Light preacher named Shadrack Ireland who had died three years before the Shakers’ arrival. Like Mother Ann, Ireland preached celibacy. Unlike Lee, he had abandoned a wife and child to share his bed with a series of devoted “spiritual wives.” Ireland prophesied an imminent millennium and claimed he was perfect (freed from sin) and immortal. His home in Harvard, known as the Square House, was equipped with secret escape hatches and a hidden staircase that led to a lookout tower in which the paranoid mystic spent much of his time watching for the arrival of either Christ or the militia. After he died in 1778, Ireland’s followers placed his corpse inside a wooden casket and bricked it into a corner of the cellar. They waited ten months for his resurrection before giving up and burying the pungent box in a cornfield in the middle of the night.

When the Shakers arrived in town, a group of Ireland’s followers was still living communally in the Square House. A handful of them had traveled to Niskeyuna after the Dark Day and expressed interest in hearing more of the Shaker gospel. They were an eccentric bunch. One declared himself the Lord and went around in a brimless cap embroidered GOD. Much of what Lee preached—celibacy, communalism, the dawning millennium—was familiar to Ireland’s flock. She converted a few of them, purchased the Square House, and established it as her base of operations from which to evangelize the surrounding towns.

Word of Lee’s presence in Harvard spread, drawing hundreds of seekers to the town. Most of them were respectable artisan-class Yankees. Some were militiamen or soldiers in the Continental army. Inside the Square House, the Shakers schooled potential converts in their rowdy style of worship. They danced and sang around the clock, making as much noise as humanly possible. Shaker carpenters reinforced the floors of the Square House with heavy timbers so that it could withstand the believers’ violent stomping and leaping. The startled citizens of Harvard claimed that the Shakers’ “hooting and tooting” could be heard two miles away.

Since the days of Jane and James Wardley, the Shakers had required new converts to offer a full confession to a spiritual “elder.” The experience of enumerating all of one’s past sins in detail, lingering especially on carnal indiscretions, helped draw a bright line between the corrupt life in the World and the new, purified existence within “gospel order.” To the Shakers’ antagonists, this practice, combined with their belief in celibacy, carried a disturbing whiff of the church in Rome. At a time and place when it was common to equate the pope with the Antichrist, this imagined connection to Catholicism was almost as damning as the believers’ refusal to fight.

Not long after the Shakers’ arrival in Harvard, people in the town began demanding their expulsion. Angry crowds gathered outside the Square House, threatening violence. It was a drama that was enacted almost everywhere the missionaries stayed for more than a few days. Mobs, inevitably fronted by a coalition of local clerics and cider-soaked militiamen, accused Lee of heresy, witchcraft, treason, and luring wives and mothers from their husbands and children. The most inflammatory accusation, especially given Harvard’s proximity to Boston, the moral nerve center of the Revolution, was that the believers were intentionally subverting the long, exhausting war effort. The idea of a woman leading anything besides a schoolroom was so foreign that some people claimed Mother Ann must be a man in drag. And to the residents of war-addled New England, there was only one reason for a man to dress as a woman: he was a spy. On more than one occasion, thugs broke up prayer meetings, bloodying the lead members and driving off their initiates. Mother Ann may have been sexually abused under the pretense of finding out “whether she was a woman or not.”

While the Shakers probably did dissuade some men from joining the rebellion, they had no special loyalty to Great Britain. When, in October 1781, Lee learned that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, she knelt and offered a prayer of thanks. The Shakers struggled to remain aloof from the Revolution, but they believed that the fate of the United States was somehow entwined with the coming perfection of society. James Whittaker’s roadside vision of a burning tree—a vast millennial church to be built in the New World—had never faded from view. Lee preached that the Revolution was a work of God, intended “to open the way for the Gospel.”

—

During the summer of 1781, a rumor spread through Harvard that the Shakers were stockpiling food inside the Square House. Hoarding was a serious wartime offense, particularly in the eyes of the underfed mobs who dispensed patriotic justice with pitch and horsewhips. Someone also claimed to have seen Shaker men carrying a chest of guns into the house. In August, the local militia came to search the property. The Shakers let them in, but the soldiers failed to find any weapons or evidence of hoarding.

That winter, the lead Shakers traveled from Harvard to the home of a new convert in Petersham, Massachusetts. As a heavy snow fell, the house filled with initiates and curious locals. In the early evening, as James Whittaker read aloud from the Bible, someone in the crowd shouted, “Knock out the lights.” The room went dark and three men in blackface grabbed Lee by the waist. They tried to drag her outside, but a group of Shaker sisters grabbed her by the arms. After a violent tug-of-war, the men ran off.

Later that night, when everyone but the Shaker elders and their host had left, thirty men charged into the house. They moved from room to room searching for Lee, beating the men as they went. They found Mother Ann in an upstairs bedroom and pulled her feet first down the stairs, sending her dress over her waist. Outside in the snow, they loaded her onto a sleigh and drove three miles to a local tavern. Lee’s brother William was badly injured, but he gave chase on foot. By the time he reached the tavern, the mob had cooled off. The tavern keeper, under pressure from his wife, offered a free round if the men would let Mother Ann go. When Lee promised not to bring charges, they allowed her to leave with her brother.

—

Back in Harvard that summer, on August 18, 1782, the Shakers welcomed converts from throughout Massachusetts to the Square House for a large jamboree. As they danced and sang, creating their usual ruckus, local militiamen gathered outside. By dusk, almost four hundred men had congregated in the street. They demanded that “the Elect Lady” be sent out. Lee, however, was not there. The mob, which by now had been sent away from the Square House empty-handed too many times, refused to disperse. The confrontation devolved into a siege.

A leader of the mob announced that those converts who were from Harvard could return to their homes, but the “distant Shakers” had to leave town immediately. Seeing no other option, the believers formed themselves into a procession. The local Shakers refused to part with their out-of-town brothers and sisters. The entire group was marched seven miles to the edge of town. Men on horseback whipped them as they went. One Shaker later recalled that the forced march out of Harvard was “one continued scene of cruelty and abuse; whipping with horsewhips, pounding, beating, and bruising with clubs, collaring and pushing off from bridges into the water and mud…and every kind of abuse they could invent without taking lives.”

Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens

We shall have one meeting together which will never break up.

—JAMES WHITTAKER

The special appeal of the Shaker gospel was that it offered a total, all-consuming life of the spirit. While Mother Ann proclaimed the gospel of Christ’s Second Appearing, other revivalists—Universalists, New Lights, Freewill Baptists—rode the same trails, offering their own novel visions of salvation to the traditionally Calvinist population of New England. For a weekend, or a month, or even a full season, these traveling evangelists would set up in a tent or barn or open field and lead raucous prayer meetings. Since the evangelists were eager to save as many souls as possible, they tended to focus on the quantity, rather than the durability, of their conversions. When they packed up and moved on to the next town, local enthusiasm inevitably cooled. People who had been reborn in the emotional flurry of communal excitement slid back into the normal rhythms of life. Even when a revival created sufficient local enthusiasm to build a church and establish a permanent congregation, there were still six long days between any two Sabbaths. By contrast, the community that was forming at Niskeyuna and Harvard and in the homes of a few other scattered believers throughout New England left no space for secular life. The converts lived, worked, and worshipped under one roof. James Whittaker said that he wanted Shaker life to be a “permanent revival.”

Joining this endless revival meant giving up the trappings of “worldly” existence, most notably marriage and family. The Shakers not only denounced carnality, they viewed the nuclear household as an impediment to the new millennial dispensation: a citadel of old thinking and anticommunal loyalties. A short hymn expresses the Shaker view starkly: “Of all the relations that ever I see / My old fleshly kindred are furthest from me / So bad and so ugly, so hateful they feel / To see them and hate them increases my zeal / O how ugly they look! / How ugly they look! / How nasty they feel!” This strong prejudice against the biological family unit was shared by almost all nineteenth-century utopians.

Not surprisingly, many of the Shakers’ loudest critics had family members living “within gospel order.” The sect’s feminism made matters worse. Since every effort to promote the rights of women is eventually cast as an assault on the family, the Shakers’ attempt at gender equality was regarded as a direct attack upon the Christian household.

To replace their “old fleshly kindred,” the Shakers invented a new type of home. As they traveled through New England, the missionaries instructed converts within each region to gather onto a single property, usually the farm of some new Shaker. Believers would sell whatever land they owned and bring their livestock, their linens, their tools, and their savings onto the newly formed collective. If an entire family took up the gospel at once, they would cease to live as a family, entering Zion as individuals. An experienced Shaker would then be sent to live with them. To enter the Shaker order was to shed many of the most ancient and universal human customs. Like the secular utopians they would soon inspire, the Shakers actively and consciously redesigned the entire architecture of social relations to reflect their vision of the millennium.

—

On September 4, 1783, the day after John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the war with Great Britain, Lee and her companions returned to Niskeyuna. Their turbulent two-year odyssey through New England had yielded at least a thousand converts.

Over the next two decades, the various farms on which those converts had begun to gather would become the nucleus of the Shaker Zion, a network of eighteen large, prosperous villages. The believers gradually came to conceive of their fledgling community as a favored nation within, but walled off from, the corruption of “Babylon.” In the same way that “Israel” refers simultaneously to a piece of land and a group of people, wherever they may be, the Shakers used “Zion” to describe their physical network of villages and the unified body of believers. The scriptural dichotomy of Zion and Babylon—good and evil made manifest as cities—has been picked up by a wide array of separatists. Even the secular utopians of the nineteenth century spoke of building a communistic Zion within the belly of America’s “industrial Babylon.”

At the end of the Revolution, the Shaker Zion was still makeshift. The believers living on each communal farm began working the land, cooking, and keeping house collectively. Without articulating a plan—that came later—they began practicing an ad hoc sort of communism, pooling their wealth, raising their children cooperatively, and placing their possessions into a common stock.

Lee returned to Niskeyuna looking thin and frail. Life on the road, to say nothing of the beatings she suffered, had taken a heavy toll. She was only forty-seven, but years of poverty and fasting had wasted her once robust body. Her skin was covered in a downy fuzz, a symptom of malnutrition.

In her weakened state, Mother Ann continued to preach the values that would define the United Society in the next century. Speaking to her rapt followers at Niskeyuna, she equated cleanliness and chastity with saintliness. The Zion she conjured in their minds was the precise opposite of the world in which she was born. Toad Lane’s cramped, fetid squalor inspired a passion for uniformity, tidiness, restraint, and a well-scoured home. Order, the defining Shaker virtue, was a reaction to disorder. Lee’s message was stern: “Good spirits will not live where there is dirt.” And: “There are no slovens or sluts in Heaven.”

William Lee had been his sister’s first convert. He was a brawny, good-looking man. Like his father, he worked as a blacksmith. Before joining the Wardley prayer circle, he had served in the Oxford Blues, a mounted regiment of the Royal Guard. But during the forced march out of Harvard, he had been badly beaten with a stick, and eleven months after returning with Ann to Niskeyuna, he died. It is not clear what killed him, only that “he [gave] up his life in sufferings.”

Seven weeks later, on September 8, 1784, Lee sat up in the middle of the night to announce that she could see William descending in a golden chariot. He had come, she said, to collect her. Then she died, “without a struggle or a groan.”

The Albany Gazette carried the news: “Departed this life, at Nisquenia, Mrs. Lee, known by the appellation of the Elect Lady or Mother of Zion, and the head of that people called Shakers.” Mother Ann had never claimed immortality, but many of her followers had expected her to lead them into the millennial paradise. While Lee’s death caused some converts to leave the faith, it did little to slow the spread of her gospel. Her successors never matched Mother Ann’s otherworldly charisma, but they more than compensated with organizational acumen and an unwavering vision of the American Zion.

—

James Whittaker, Lee’s constant companion since he had fed her through the stem of his pipe, was her anointed successor. Soon after Mother Ann’s death, he took to the road, actively coaxing the converts Lee had won into collective homes. As head of the church, the thirty-four-year-old Whittaker emphasized an ascetic, separatist vision of Shakerism. Unlike many of the other early Shakers, he could read and write. Whittaker tightened and formalized restrictions on acceptable Shaker conduct and initiated a decisive break from the World. He was particularly energetic in his denunciations of sex, enjoining converts to become “eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake.”*⁹

George Darrow, whose brother David had been arrested while herding sheep to Niskeyuna, owned a large farm on a series of steep hillsides in the Berkshire foothills, near the village of New Lebanon, just west of the New York–Massachusetts line. Unlike the homestead in Niskeyuna thirty-five miles to the northwest, Darrow’s farm was on the east side of the Hudson River, making it more accessible to the new communal homes being set up throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut. Whittaker decided to make Darrow’s farm the headquarters of Zion, and converts began collecting on the property. They pooled their money and started buying up the surrounding farms. Whittaker called a moratorium on “preaching unto Babylon,” turning the Society’s energy inward and working to consolidate the remarkable gains of the previous few years.

A year after Lee’s death, on October 15, 1785, while the Berkshires flamed with autumn color, the Shakers in New Lebanon celebrated the completion of the United Society’s first official meetinghouse. The large, rectangular building was capped with a vaulted gambrel roof, eliminating the need for structural pillars and creating a wide-open interior space that was well suited to the dancing and shaking that formed the core of Shaker worship. The outside of the meetinghouse was painted bright white, making it stand out on a hilly landscape dotted with brown and red barns. The interior woodwork was painted a rich, dark blue. The only furnishings were movable, chocolate-colored benches.*¹⁰

The most peculiar feature of the building was that it had two identical front doors set side by side, both painted dark green. One was for men, one for women. This architectural doubling became a hallmark of Shaker construction. In the front yard of many subsequent Shaker buildings, twin gates led to twin walkways, which led to twin doors, which opened onto twin staircases. Inside and out, everything was built with fanatical symmetry—a visual emblem of equality, separateness, and order. Oddly, while the United Society went to great lengths to symbolically separate “brothers” from “sisters,” they never took the most obvious precaution: housing men and women separately. If monasteries and nunneries are built to protect their inhabitants from lust, Shaker buildings aspire to slay it altogether.

The meetinghouse was a sanctified space, a permanent, physical expression of the Sabbath. Except for nearly constant sweeping, no work was allowed within its four walls.*¹¹ Neither was fidgeting, chattering, or thoughtless movements of any sort. As the village in New Lebanon grew into the spiritual and administrative capital of Shakerdom, the building’s significance grew. Like the stone omphalos that formed the sacred navel of the Attic world, the meetinghouse formed the symbolic center of Zion, organizing the Shaker universe around itself.*¹²

Father and Mother

On July 20, 1787, three years to the day after the death of William Lee, James Whittaker died suddenly while visiting converts in Enfield, Connecticut. He was thirty-six. The title of “first elder” then fell to Joseph Meacham, the popular former New Light evangelist from New Lebanon who had led his flock to Niskeyuna in the wake of the Dark Day. Meacham was born in Connecticut, where his father had been converted in the church of Jonathan Edwards. Mother Ann had reportedly predicted his arrival at Niskeyuna, calling him “the wisest man that has been born of a woman for six hundred years.” (It is not clear which fourteenth-century prodigy she had in mind as his predecessor.)

In the same sense that the Apostle Paul is sometimes identified as the founder of Christianity, Joseph Meacham can fairly be called the founder of Shakerism. Like Saint Paul, he gave intellectual and institutional coherence to the often elliptical sayings of his chosen messiah. Like Paul, he channeled the feverish energy of a mystical sect into something stable and coolheaded, buttressing a young faith with customs, institutions, and hierarchy. Without the administrative genius of Meacham, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing might have faded away at the close of the eighteenth century.

A year after assuming leadership, Meacham made a surprising decision. He selected a twenty-eight-year-old Shaker sister named Lucy Wright to serve as his co-elder at New Lebanon, designating her “first in the female-line.” Meacham remained first elder, but Wright became his partner in the practical and spiritual administration of the sect.

Tall and attractive, Wright came from a well-to-do family in the Berkshires. She had married a merchant named Elizur Goodrich when she was eighteen, and the newlyweds were born again at a revival in New Lebanon. Along with several other members of the Goodrich family, they followed a trail of confounding rumors into the woods of Niskeyuna. Mother Ann had made a special effort to convert Wright. “If you gain her,” Lee told the other lead Shakers, “it will be equal to gaining a nation.” Wright and Goodrich forswore “fleshly relations” and joined up. (Like many other previously married Shaker women, Wright went back to using her maiden name upon entering Zion.)

Wright’s elevation to “first in the female-line” gave her more authority than any Shaker besides Joseph Meacham. Like the meetinghouse with its twin doors, the Society now had parallel lines of authority, one male and one female. This structure reflected the sect’s evolving belief that the Godhead, like everything within creation, has both a male and a female aspect. These two aspects, different but equal, were often personified as Almighty God the Father and Holy Mother Wisdom. This dual nature is reflected in Christ’s two earthly vessels: Jesus of Nazareth and Ann of Manchester.

Whether or not Meacham’s decision to “elevate” Wright was inspired by such theological considerations or more mundane, administrative concerns, his outlook on gender equality was ahead of its time. When he had first arrived at Niskeyuna as a pilgrim, he had found it difficult to reconcile the sect’s female leader with his Christian faith. After all, the New Testament is unequivocal about the subordinate role of women within society and the church. By the time he became first elder, his views had evolved. “The man cannot gather and build the church of Christ in this day without the woman nor the woman without the man,” Meacham wrote. “A just equality is necessary.”

The elevation of Lucy Wright was met with predictable complaints by some Shaker brothers. Submitting to the spiritual authority of an inspired female prophet (Mother Ann) is one thing; submitting to the temporal authority of a female administrator is a very different matter. Despite some early grumbling, the equality of the sexes in all matters—in theory, if not in practice—became a cornerstone of the United Society.*¹³ By the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when almost no American women occupied positions of authority outside of the home, Shaker “eldresses” administered an immense financial and religious organization.*¹⁴

Meacham and Wright extended James Whittaker’s moratorium on evangelism, focusing instead on gathering converts into “gospel order.” Now under the leadership of two native-born Yankees, the Shakers began to evolve from a small band of despised separatists into a widely admired national religion.

Unto Every Man According as He Has Need

On Christmas Day 1787, the brothers and sisters in New Lebanon sat down at several long tables for a holiday meal. Before eating, they recited a pledge: “There can be no church in complete order, according to the law of Christ, without a joint interest and union, in which all the members have an equal right and privilege, according to their calling and needs, in things spiritual and temporal.” For a decade, the believers had been sharing their food, their land, and their money out of a strong sense of solidarity and the necessities of rural separatism. The Christmas Day pledge formalized this collectivism. Every Shaker now held an equal “joint interest” in the total material wealth of the United Society.*¹⁵ Whatever was owned by one Shaker was owned by all Shakers. Labor and compensation were officially unhitched. Within a decade, this verbal covenant was set in writing for new members to sign.

Shaker communism may have begun as a practical matter, but, like Ann Lee’s vision concerning celibacy, it was soon stamped with the imprimatur of holy writ and reinforced with scriptural citations. The Shakers found biblical precedent for their economic arrangements in the Acts of the Apostles, the book of the New Testament, first written in Greek, that describes the comings and goings of the earliest Christians during the years immediately following the execution of Jesus. This first-century community started small—just 120 Christ-following Jews, including the apostles and Jesus’s mother, living together in Jerusalem. Following a mass conversion on the Jewish feast day known as Pentecost, the community swelled to about three thousand. While this group awaited their messiah’s promised return—they seem to have expected him soon—their leaders, the small group of men who had traveled around with Jesus during his life, organized their temporal affairs in the manner in which they believed their God desired.

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need….And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common….Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.*¹⁶ (Acts 2:44, 45, 4:32, 34, and 35)

For the Shakers, this sketchy account of collectivism in the Middle East during the first century presented a clear mandate for how a Christian community ought to be arranged. Many of the people described in Acts had actually spent time with Jesus. Others among them, notably Paul, had supposedly been visited by Christ after his crucifixion. If anyone would know how a Christian community ought to be organized, they would.

The Shakers were not alone in reading the book of Acts as a manual for Christian economics. Throughout the nineteenth century, American utopians, even those that were secular in their orientation, cited those five verses of scripture in support of what Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes called “Bible Communism.” Like the Shakers, Noyes claimed that Christianity not only sanctioned collective ownership, but demanded it. Étienne Cabet, the founder and leader of Icaria, took Bible-based communism to its furthest extreme. He claimed that communism and Christianity were not merely complementary, they were indistinguishable. For Cabet, the abolition of private property had been Christ’s central doctrine: “Le communisme, c’est le Christianisme.”

Acts may have been the spiritual inspiration, but it was the Shakers’ extraordinary material success that made communism seem practically feasible for almost every American utopian society of the nineteenth century. Using a metaphor that evoked the Jacksonian-era debate over the legitimacy of paper currency, John Humphrey Noyes called the Shaker villages the “specie basis” backing up the “paper theories” of subsequent utopian socialists. A broad range of reformers, both secular and religious, looked upon the prosperous Shaker villages and took the economic viability of communism for granted. “It is very doubtful,” Noyes wrote, “whether Owenism or Fourierism would have ever existed, or if they had, whether they would have ever moved the practical American nation, if the facts of Shakerism had not existed before them and gone along with them.”

Across the Atlantic, the Shakers’ effort to imitate the primitive church bolstered a more familiar strain of communism. In 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote: “The first people in America, and actually the world, to create a society on the basis of common property, were the so-called Shakers….Their barns are always full of grain, their storerooms full of cloth, so that an English traveler who visited them said he could not understand why these people who owned an abundance of everything, still worked.” For Engels, the prosperity of Zion was a succinct rebuke to the most persistent critique of collective ownership: that it could not produce or maintain abundance. While Engels’s history is dubious—the Shakers were not the first communists in North America, let alone the world—his claim that they were demonstrates the United Society’s influence on modern socialist thought.*¹⁷

Rising Up to Paradise

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

—REVELATION 21:2

The millennium, as it is described in the last book of the New Testament, is not only an era—the thousand-year reign of heaven on earth—it is also a place: the holy city of New Jerusalem, which God will lower down to earth at the end of history.*¹⁸ Convinced that the millennium had commenced unfolding at the time of Mother Ann’s jailhouse vision of Eden, the Shakers got to work constructing their own New Jerusalem.

The white, gambrel-roofed meetinghouse in New Lebanon was designed by a Shaker builder named Moses Johnson. When it was completed in 1787, Joseph Meacham dispatched Brother Moses to the other fledgling communities with a mandate to replicate the building. Within seven years, identical meetinghouses had been built in ten communities. These structures, situated near the center of most villages, set the tone for a style of construction—austere, unusually large, obsessively symmetrical—that came to define the United Society in the minds of outsiders.

While meetinghouses were being built elsewhere, the believers in New Lebanon started work on an immense wooden dormitory in which to lodge the converts pouring in from around New England. The Great House, as they called it, had no accommodation for families. Bedrooms were designed to be shared by several people of the same sex. As familial bonds dissolved, child care became the obligation of the whole society. Separate dorms were built for children as well as for the elderly and infirmed. The elders in charge of each village lived in their own small dormitories. Decades later, the Shakers began building special homes for novice converts, allowing people to enter the difficult austerity of Zion by degrees.

The village in New Lebanon became the proving ground for the Lead Ministry’s social innovations and the architectural prototype for the eighteen other villages that the United Society would build over the next three decades.*¹⁹ Father Joseph and Mother Lucy were understood to have inherited the inspired gifts of the first Shakers. Their directives, even those concerning the most trifling affairs—where to place a barn, what color to paint a bench—were handed down with the authority of revelation. As they built, Shaker carpenters and masons believed that they were working with heavenly blueprints.

By 1796, there were eleven Shaker communities: two in New York, four in Massachusetts, two in New Hampshire, two in Maine, and one in Connecticut. Along with meetinghouses and dormitories, each village had industrial-sized kitchens, bakeries, barns, and workshops for spinning, woodworking, and other light industries. At every turn, the Shakers encountered the economic advantages of their collectivism. Not only could they buy bulk materials on the cheap, they were able to invest in expensive but cost-saving improvements that individual homesteaders could not afford. They could, for instance, build and operate their own sawmills and gristmills. Individual homesteaders, who seldom had sufficient grain, timber, or capital to justify such an investment, had to pay someone else to do their milling.

By collectivizing all of the labor of rural living, the Society also enjoyed the benefits of specialization and expertise. The typical Yankee homesteader was, by necessity, a jack of many trades and a master of none. He maintained his fences, doctored his sheep, plowed his fields, built his home, shoed his horse, butchered his meat, and marketed his surplus. His wife was milkmaid, cook, weaver, teacher, laundress, midwife, and gardener. If a Shaker had a particular knack for breaking horses or weaving or keeping accounts, he or she could devote the days to that skill without worrying about who was milking the cows.

Two years after the village at New Lebanon was founded, its farm was thriving. The Shakers found a particularly profitable niche selling vegetable seed, a business that allowed them to cash in on their growing reputation for piety and fair dealing. Standing inside of a dry goods shop, anyone could judge the quality of a plow blade or a keg of molasses, but good seed is indistinguishable from bad. The word Shaker, stamped neatly on an envelope, functioned like a brand in an era before brands, assuring customers that the sellers had their good name on the line. As the Shakers’ reputation for quality and craftsmanship grew, they did a brisk business in herbal medicines, furniture, and produce. In New England it was proverbial that in a bushel of Shaker apples, the quality and size of the fruit at the bottom was the same as at the top.

—

Like almost all utopians of their era, the Shakers believed that a well-ordered environment would produce well-ordered citizens. A person riding a rural New England road could never mistake a Shaker village for a typical community. In most small settlements, growth was haphazard. Each landowner laid out his farm according to the location of water, drainage, windbreaks, and good tillage. Many people built their houses as far from their neighbors as the limits of their property allowed. By contrast, the Shakers planned their villages carefully, clustering buildings together for convenience and always striving for an appearance of order and uniformity. The meetinghouse, the workshops, and the main dwellings were usually arrayed along a straight central thoroughfare. The Shakers often laid slab sidewalks on either side of this road, a luxury familiar to city dwellers that was unknown in rural communities, where wading through mud and dust was an unavoidable fact of life. At the village in Canterbury, New Hampshire, there was a brother named Micajah Tucker whose sole job was to quarry, dress, and skid granite pavers into place with a team of mules. The Shakers’ passion for tidiness justified this enormous expense. Their collectivized labor made it possible.

Rather than adapt their settlements to the peculiarities of the landscape, the Shakers went to incredible lengths to bend topography to their will, becoming expert at grading land, draining marshes, straightening creeks, and forcing springs into underground pipes. Walls built over uneven ground ran level at the top. This approach to landscaping mirrored the sect’s general sense of human nature—their belief that sanctity is the suppression of wildness; that beauty is the triumph of the right angle.

Inside, everything was spotless. Slightly tattered bonnets were thrown away. Linens were always perfectly white. When a chair was not in use, it was hung on one of the peg rails that ran around the walls of most rooms, making way for one of the Shakers’ defining pastimes: sweeping.*²⁰ “Gentiles” who visited Zion found this fanatical tidiness striking. “The plan, the life, the thought of Mount Lebanon are written in its grassy streets,” wrote one English visitor. “The granary is to a Shaker what the Temple was to a Jew….The paint is all fresh; the planks are all bright; the windows are all clean. A white sheen is on everything; a happy quiet reigns around.” A Quaker who toured the village in Hancock, Massachusetts, marveled that the Shakers not only milled the timber for their workshops with great precision, they also cut their firewood to uniform lengths on the same water-driven blade. Thus cut, stove wood was “split and piled up as neat as a mason’s work in a wall.” Another visitor wrote that “the very dust in the road seemed pure.”

A Shaker’s entire village was her church. She tried to act accordingly. As a result, life within Zion not only had a distinctive look, it also had a distinctive pace. The believers labored constantly, but with a deliberate and placid slowness. They never took a day off, but according to many visitors, life within the villages conveyed a feeling of “Sabbath calm.” Ann Lee and her successors preached that manual labor could be an expression of faith—an all-day prayer murmured with broom and rasp. “Put your hands to work and your heart to God,” Lee is said to have told her followers. It is not a coincidence that the Shakers called less materially productive modes of worship—singing hymns, meditating, dancing—“laboring.”

The Shakers believed that their tidy, highly planned villages were an earthly reflection of how things looked in heaven. In 1843, when the United Society was at its demographic peak, spirit visitations were an almost daily occurrence in most villages. Often these spirits were notable characters from scripture or great historical personages.*²¹ During one episode, a group of young Shakers at New Lebanon were visited by the spirit of “first father Adam.” Communicating through a medium, Adam drew the youngsters a diagram of heaven. The result looks like a mandala, a highly geometric map of circles within squares within circles, symmetrical in the four cardinal directions. It shows a city bisected by a perfectly straight river that is flanked with golden sidewalks. The recipients of this vision claimed that this Euclidean paradise, clearly inspired by Revelation’s account of New Jerusalem, hovered directly above the actual village of New Lebanon. They believed that when the millennium came into full flower, their earthly facsimile of heaven would somehow expand and merge with the paradise above.

The Holy City, a “gift drawing” by sister Polly Jane Reed, New Lebanon, 1843.

The Philadephia Museum of Art/Art Resource, N.Y.

—

With heaven hovering over them, metaphysical conjecture and workaday concerns were inseparable. “Order is the creation of beauty,” advises The Youth’s Guide to Zion, a slim pamphlet printed for young believers at Canterbury Village. “It is heaven’s first law, and the protection of souls. Keep all things in order, as keeping the law of heaven and keep the order of Zion, that heaven may protect you.” To the youth of Zion, this was not just a mystical aphorism, it was also a reminder to keep the woodpile neat. Order, in its multifaceted Shaker sense, was understood as a terrestrial reflection of how things are in heaven. And heaven looked an awful lot like a Shaker village: “The beauty and glory of the heavenly world,” wrote Brother Calvin Green, is characterized by “its regular order, perfect symmetry of arrangement, proper proportions and mutual correspondent relation, and its beauteous colors of which the colors in the natural creation, and its harmonious order when unobstructed are an emanation and representation.”

Everything the believers produced was to be made, as Joseph Meacham instructed, “plain and without superfluity.” While the Shakers eschewed decoration, they did spend a great deal of time fussing over the way things looked. Theirs was not the incidental simplicity of the ascetic who can’t be bothered with material trifles. The Shakers spared no expense to achieve their precise aesthetic visions. They worked with the finest materials and built everything to last. They were especially finicky about color, favoring bright, rich tones and often using the most expensive paints.*²²

It is somewhat trite to say, as the writer and monk Thomas Merton famously said, that the Shakers built each of their chairs as if an angel might sit in it, but their spiritual orientation, particularly their belief in a heavenly realm that is dimly reflected on earth, clearly shines through in their handiwork. Shaker crafts reflect a platonic impulse to unite the messy, imperfect material world with a numinous sphere of eternal forms. Whether or not they expected an angel to have a seat—and there were plenty of reports of angels coming and going—the Shakers built their chairs to resemble, as closely as possible, the pure idea of chair-ness. Their stringent prohibitions against ornament and “superfluity” reveal an intuitive understanding that nothing is more mired in human affairs than decorative frippery; nothing says temporal like the fiddlehead scrollwork or pink-bottomed cherubs that constituted high design during the Shakers’ heyday.*²³

—

The most obvious expression of the sects’ ever-increasing fixation on order was their evolving method of worship. During their first, impoverished decade in the United States, individual Shakers demonstrated their union with the divine—their possession—through spontaneous, ecstatic noises and movements. They laughed, wept, and howled—yodeling animal nonsense into the night woods. Their bodies, bone tired from hard labor, were racked by “the jerks,” swaying trances, and the dervishlike “whirling gift.” Some mimed domestic tasks—sweeping and sowing, or picking and devouring spectral fruits. Others danced and chanted in crude imitation of Native Americans, Africans, and imaginary prehistoric races whose spirits supposedly possessed them. Shaker sisters spun until they collapsed, lifeless with the “fainting gift.” Shaker brothers crowded together and leapt up and down, soaking their woolen coats with sweat and bloodying their heads on the low rafters.

Father Joseph, who reportedly had no “gift” for physical possession, gradually supplanted these chaotic, individualistic expressions with a set of standardized hymns and dances. New “laboring exercises” such as the circle dance and the square order shuffle had the elaborate choreography and martial precision of a sexless cotillion. Ranks of believers—men on one side, women on the other—clapped, swayed, marched, turned, and stamped their feet in perfect unison. In the meetinghouse of Canterbury Village, copper tacks were embedded in the floorboards, Arthur Murray style, to help dancers keep track of the complex steps. This change in how the Shakers shook—from the Dionysian to the Apollonian or, approximately, from the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis to the Electric Slide—reflected the Society’s increasing preoccupation with order and communalism. Even their union with God was now expressed en masse.

The “whirling gift.”

Illustration from David R. Lamson, Two Year’s Experience Among the Shakers (West Boylston, MA, 1848)

—

For Meacham and the other lead Shakers, the orderly rhythms and appearance of life within a Shaker village not only sanctified the fellowship within, they broadcast the Society’s blessings to the wider public. At a time when most homesteads were encircled by stone walls or rail fences, people inevitably judged their neighbors by the quality of their enclosures, not unlike the way suburbanites announce their values with the lushness of their turf. The walls and fences that hemmed in Zion—laid straighter and neater than anyone else’s—proclaimed the orderly life they enclosed. Plant your rows straight, Meacham taught, that they may preach unto the World.

This silent, passive mode of evangelism was the only sort that interested Father Joseph. The decade of his leadership (1787–1796) was a busy time in the wider Republic. Independence had been won at a great cost. The financially strained and tenuously confederated states had turned their energy toward building the institutions required for an entirely new type of government. Rather than evangelizing to the preoccupied young nation, the Shakers let the orderly conditions of their life speak for them.

—

Meacham died at New Lebanon in August 1796. He was fifty-five. Under his leadership, the free-flowing mysticism of the early sect was channeled into a set of enduring customs and social institutions. From whole cloth, he created an elaborate, four-tiered hierarchy with which to govern the rapidly expanding millennial church. At the top was the Lead Ministry in New Lebanon, led by him and Lucy Wright. They received their authority from revelation and their spiritual union with Mother Ann. Meacham and Wright settled matters of Society-wide concern and dealt with questions coming in from the various villages. Should they allow a particular dance? Approve a new hymnal? Settle a certain lawsuit? Below the Lead Ministry, there were various categories of elders and eldresses, some of whom moved around within a particular region, conveying directives from New Lebanon and overseeing a cluster of villages known as a “bishopric.” Within each particular village there was a group of elders, usually two men and two women, who dealt with matters relating to that specific community.

Each village was itself made up of several “families” that were overseen by two elders and two eldresses. By the time Meacham died, these families had become the basic unit of Shaker life. As the population of a village expanded, it would be subdivided into separate families, with no one family exceeding a hundred Shakers. Each family functioned as an independent economic unit. Its members ate together, ran their own businesses, kept common accounts, and received discipline from the same small group of elders. For the average Shaker, these “family elders” were the most relevant sources of daily authority.

At each of these four levels of authority—family, village, bishopric, and Lead Ministry—power was divided equally between men and women. At no level, except sometimes at the very top, was a single individual in charge. Elders and eldresses enjoyed certain privileges, but all Shakers lived in the same spare, dormitory-style rooms and ate the same simple (usually vegetarian) food. And everyone worked. Even Wright and Meacham, who had their hands full with administrative and theological matters, put in time at the loom or in the field.

The genius of this structure, and a major reason the Shakers thrived for so long, was that having found the ideal scale on which to practice their intense brand of communalism, they could stick with it. Their system of communities (families) within communities (villages) within a single community (the United Society) allowed the Shaker population to expand and contract without much disturbance to their social and economic order. If enthusiasm for the gospel increased or decreased in a particular region, the nearest village would simply add or subtract a family. Limiting these families to one hundred members allowed for a group that was large enough to be financially self-sustaining—they could raise most of their own food, operate several light industries, and reap substantial economies of scale—but small enough to foster social cohesion, mutual accountability, and spiritual intimacy. In a group of one hundred, everybody knows one another. It is easy to spot a shirker.

The ancient question of just how many people ought to live in the perfect society was a pressing concern for all of the nineteenth-century utopians. Aristotle wrote that mutual familiarity among citizens and the uniform dissemination of information were the main prerequisites of a healthy polity. The state, in his view, should be large enough to be self-sustaining but small enough so that everyone can make personally informed choices about whom to elect for positions of leadership. As a rule of thumb, he suggested that a state, by which he meant a city-state, ought to be no larger than a crowd that can be gathered within earshot of a single herald or “can well be taken in at one view.”*²⁴

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view was similar. He claimed that true democracy—the organic operation of popular sovereignty that he called “general will”—could function only on the scale of a small city. He likely had his birthplace of Geneva in mind, or maybe the island of Corsica. Robert Owen, who modeled his American utopia on an industrial factory town, hoped to initiate the “New Moral World” with a nucleus of five hundred and then slowly build up many separate colonies of five thousand people. This put him very close to Plato, who wrote that the ideal republic would have 5,040 citizens: a bureaucrat’s dream figure, because it can be divided by so many other numbers, thus allowing for the formation of countless uniformly sized subgroups.*²⁵ Charles Fourier—a thinker defined by his numeric precision—believed that the ideal community should house exactly 1,620 people, twice the 810 personality types he had identified. He reasoned that by having one man and one woman of each type within every community, all of life’s necessary work can be accomplished by someone constitutionally suited to his or her job.

Economically speaking, the ideal size of a cooperative community waxes and wanes with changes in technology. During the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the Shaker villages and other similarly sized utopian communities had a significant edge over “isolated” family farms. Along with building mills and buying other expensive machinery, the communitarians could manage large swaths of land for cash cropping, purchase raw materials in bulk, and market their produce and handicrafts on a large scale. As industrialization supplanted traditional home industries, these financial advantages diminished. A group of twenty Shaker sisters making “fancy goods” could easily outcompete twenty farmer’s wives stitching independently. Neither could compete with factory-made products.

Gaining a Nation

Meacham had made it clear that Lucy Wright would assume sole leadership after his death. When she took over, some Shakers were anxious about the return to female authority. Whatever their feelings about the duality of the Godhead, the believers were people of their time. The concept of female authority was still novel, if not offensive, to most Americans. A Shaker brother named Angell Mathewson was kicked out after declaring that “wimmin are fools & that men that are willin to have a woman to rule over them are fools also.”

The apostasy of a few chauvinists had little effect. When Mother Lucy assumed the position of first elder in 1788, the United Society was large and stable. The federal census of 1800 counted 1,373 Shakers living in eleven villages throughout New York and New England. By then, Zion had also become a relatively comfortable place to live. The fields had been cleared of stone and the swamps drained. The mobs of drunken patriots had been replaced with gentiles eager to buy Shaker seed, flat brooms, and patent medicine. Hostility toward the sect continued, but the field of battle shifted mostly to the press and the courts. To enter Zion at the opening of the nineteenth century was to join a prosperous society that was, if not universally admired, at least tolerated.

At a time when state governments provided almost no services, life within “gospel order” offered a rare social safety net. Despite the hysterical protests of anti-Shaker activists, poor and unwed women frequently brought their infants to be raised by the Shakers. Countless orphans were fed, educated, and raised to adulthood within the Society. The guarantee of three squares and a warm bed also attracted many adults with dubious faith in the doctrine of Christ’s Second Appearing. Within Zion, these lukewarm believers were known derisively as “winter Shakers” or “bread-and-butter Shakers.”

—

Because foundlings and winter Shakers do not a millennial church make, Lucy Wright reopened the Shaker gospel at the start of the nineteenth century. Starting with the Dark Day, the Shakers always practiced a distinctly opportunistic form of evangelism, bringing their message to places where the public had already been excited by some other spiritual tremor. In 1802, word arrived at New Lebanon that a “marvelous light” had been seen above the home of a farmer named James Wicker in Pittsford, Vermont. People began to congregate on Wicker’s farm, and a spontaneous revival sprang up. Mother Lucy dispatched a young elder from Schenectady named Benjamin Seth Youngs and a recent convert named Issachar Bates to investigate the scene. On the day they arrived, a large crowd had gathered outside of Wicker’s farmhouse to hear the sermon of a circuit-riding Methodist. As luck would have it, the Methodist was sick. After waiting around for a while, the crowd asked the two Shakers to speak.

After they had delivered a long sermon about the arrival of Zion and the true road to spiritual perfection, a man in the crowd gripped Bates by the shoulders and said, “I want you to go with me and hear me confess my sins.” Bates and Youngs took over a room in Wicker’s home, and one by one, people from the crowd filed inside to make confession, the first step to entering Zion. By late afternoon, at least a dozen people had taken up the Shaker cross.

At the end of this emotional day of confession and conversion, a man rushed inside saying that something unusual was happening in the sky. Issachar Bates recalled the sight: “There was a bright road across the centre of the Horizon from east to west, about two rods wide, as it appeared, of a palish red, with a bright border on each side. O how soon we interpreted this sign: that this same light and power was going to reach those waiting souls in the west.”

—

Later that same year, the elders at New Lebanon began hearing strange reports from the southwestern frontier. The stories strained credulity. In the valleys of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, evangelists of every stripe—New Lights, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians—were preaching the Second Advent. In response, people were gathering by the thousands in the wilderness. They exhibited strange effects: writhing in the dirt, barking like dogs, tearing at their clothes, speaking in tongues. At a camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, one minister kept count as three thousand sinners suffered “the falling exercise”—collapsing on the ground as if dead. The Holy Ghost was said to be among them. It was a modern Pentecost.

This was the Kentucky Revival, the first western stirring of what would become known as the Second Great Awakening. Shrugging off the constraining Calvinist dogma of predestination—the belief that every individual’s salvation or damnation is determined and fixed before birth—the frontier revivalists preached that salvation was free for the taking. This powerful shift in theology, putting salvation in the hands of the sinner, unleashed a desperate, emotional faith—a rowdy land rush for acreage in the Kingdom of Heaven.*²⁶

The typical pattern of the revival was for an evangelist to spread word of a camp meeting, sometimes as far as a year in advance. In a forest clearing or large meadow, he would build a platform of unmilled logs, sometimes capped with a pitched roof. As people trickled in, a city of tents and tarp-covered buckboards spread out around the preacher’s scaffold. With crowds in the thousands, one man’s voice could not reach everyone. Other evangelists, preaching from stumps and tailgates with their hands cupped around their mouths, gathered their own crowds. At the height of a large meeting, six or seven preachers might be roaring away simultaneously, each offering slightly different paths to paradise, each painting slightly different visions of Hades. Enterprising frontiersmen came with barrels of whiskey to sell by the cupful. They found few takers. Stronger stuff was going around.*²⁷

With their plain-speaking preachers, open-air churches, and rejection of traditional denominational authority, the camp meetings expressed a distinctly American scorn for elites. Children, in their innocence, were considered uniquely receptive to the workings of the Holy Ghost. In the summer of 1801, on the third day of a five-day meeting near Indian Creek, Kentucky, a boy of twelve clambered atop a high stump. With tears streaming, he sermonized so passionately about sin and salvation that the crowd felt certain God spoke through him. After over an hour of steady preaching, the child was hoisted above the crowd by two large men. Exhausted, he wiped the tears and sweat from his face with a handkerchief. Dropping the sopping rag to the ground, he wailed, “Thus, O sinner!, shall you drop into hell.” The entire crowd collapsed.

An outpouring of ecstatic religiosity is one of the supposed signs of the end times.*²⁸ So, in a distinctly circular bit of logic, the participants in the Kentucky Revival saw their fervor as confirmation of their own prophetic claims. The more people who showed up and the more violent their possession, the more the revival looked like “the living work of God,” thus heightening their fervor, thus confirming their prophecy, thus bringing more people.

For the settlers in the West, people who often went weeks without seeing a nonrelation and months without seeing a stranger, the sheer scale of the gatherings created a powerful effect. “Before he began to speak, the preacher had already effected the release of his audience,” wrote the critic and historian Gilbert Seldes. “He had set them free from loneliness and the burdensome companionship of their own troubles. He had moved them bodily, had changed for a moment the orbit of their lives. The strange wind that had blown them together swayed the multitude like a field of grain. The preacher had only to put in the sickle and reap.”

Turtle Creek

The elders at New Lebanon were keen to put their sickle in, too. In the frozen predawn blackness of January 1, 1805, Issachar Bates and Benjamin Seth Youngs, the two missionaries who had done so well in Vermont, departed New Lebanon. They were joined by John Meacham, the son of Father Joseph. Bates, a father of nine who had fought in the American Revolution, was the eldest of the three, but the most recent convert. He was probably sent west because, along with having “a testimony as hot as flames,” he was an experienced fighter and brawny woodsman. By contrast, Benjamin Seth Youngs weighed less than a hundred pounds but had grown up entirely within the faith. As for Meacham, he had the increasingly rare distinction of having personally known Mother Ann.

The three men traveled on foot, their few possessions loaded onto a single horse. Seeking the headwaters of the new spiritual currents, they walked south and west across New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee. By March, having traveled more than a thousand miles in three months, they arrived in Kentucky. They were dressed in brown overalls, blue vests, gray coats, and white fur hats. Despite their long, difficult journey, they had kept themselves remarkably neat. In the town of Paint Lick, they addressed a revival of New Lights without much effect. From there they went to Cane Ridge, a wooded promontory near the town of Paris that had been the sight of the largest camp meetings. Turning north, they walked into Ohio.

Among their few belongings was an epistle written by the elders in New Lebanon. It was a broad appeal to an unknown audience. The document explained that for almost two thousand years the earth has been under the sway of the Antichrist. “Since the falling away of the Apostolic order” a few decades after Jesus’s death, Christianity has been “under a sackcloth and darkness.” At long last, the prophesied millennium has finally begun. The spiritual “gifts” manifested during Christ’s first sojourn on earth have been restored to a group of “witnesses” in New York. These modern apostles can “testify to all people that Christ hath made his second appearing here on earth.” The path into the millennium has been revealed in all of its simplicity: Stop having sex. It is “impossible for those who live in the works of natural generation, copulating in the works of the flesh, to travel in the great work of regeneration and the new birth.” Except for an oblique reference to the “first pillar” of the new dispensation, the epistle sent west from New Lebanon did not mention Mother Ann or any other woman.*²⁹

On March 22, the three missionaries arrived at the Ohio village of Turtle Creek, where they met Richard McNemar, a Presbyterian minister turned New Light revivalist. McNemar was impressed by the three visitors’ reserved manners and tidy appearance. When they asked to address his congregation, he happily turned over his pulpit.*³⁰

The next Sunday, Bates and Youngs offered the breakaway Presbyterians of Turtle Creek their usual pitch: The millennium has already begun; spiritual perfection is free for the taking. “The power of God, revealed in this day, does enable souls to cease from sin; and we have received that power; we have actually left off committing sin.” According to the Shakers, the doctrine of inherent depravity—the permanent taint of original sin—is “one of the most destructive errors that ever proceeded from the powers of darkness.” To regain the innocence of Paradise, one must come out of society and “take up a full cross against the world, the flesh, and all evil.”

Malcolm Worley, a wealthy local farmer known for his fickle spiritual enthusiasms, was deeply impressed by the Shakers’ sermon. He put them up in his house and quickly became their first convert in the West. Worley’s confession was soon followed by the conversion of his entire family and a former slave named Anna Middleton.

From Worley’s home, the three Shakers moved into the log cabin of Richard McNemar. Although he was an avid revivalist, McNemar was also a trained theologian, literate in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. After talking at length with the missionaries, he wrote: “For upwards of 15 years my soul has been on the wheel, forming into union with professed followers of the Lamb, but never did I find my mate, until I found the spirit of New Lebanon. Now I can say with the prophet, ‘This is my God, I have waited for him!’ ”*³¹

McNemar’s conversion, like that of Joseph Meacham, was a turning point for the Society. Much of his flock and several of his schismatic Presbyterian colleagues followed him into “the spirit of New Lebanon.” For frontier revivalists, the appeal of the United Society was the same as it had been in Niskeyuna in the weeks after the Dark Day. They had been whipped into a frenzy of millenarian anticipation by the camp meetings, but their world remained stubbornly unchanged. The missionaries’ stories of the life within the tidy villages of Zion—their recollections no doubt sweetened by homesickness—promised something immediate and concrete: a tangible sacrifice and a transformed existence. New Jerusalem is coming, shouted the revivalists. It is already here, came the Shaker response. “We have news of a Zion,” McNemar wrote from Ohio, “and what if her foundations are already laid. May it be that God has sent down the new Jerusalem for the refuge of souls, before he began to tear down the old buildings?”

—

By the end of May 1805, an informal community—“united in one common worship”—was gathered together in Malcolm Worley’s house. In midsummer, three more male elders arrived from New York. Among them was David Darrow, the farmer who had been arrested while driving sheep to Niskeyuna during the Revolution. He had been selected by Lucy Wright to serve as first elder in the West. To the western Shakers, Darrow was known as Father David, a spiritual “parent” on a par with Mother Lucy. The six elders from New Lebanon were soon joined by a contingent of eldresses, including Ruth Farrington, who as a teenager had participated in the New Light stir in New Lebanon. Working alongside Darrow, she became first eldress in the West.

The seasoned Shakers sent from the East lived among the new converts, organizing missionary outings and coaching the initiates in the routines of life within gospel order. They taught the westerners how to dance the square order shuffle, how to tie a Shaker bonnet, what to eat, and how to organize collective farms and industries.

The land around Turtle Creek was well forested, fertile, and almost totally clear of stone. At $3.00 an acre, it was also incredibly cheap. By merging the property owned by Worley and McNemar and purchasing more land nearby, the Shakers formed a new community, a western replica of the eastern villages. Within a year, there were 220 adult converts living collectively in the West. Over the next six years, the Shakers at Turtle Creek built a meetinghouse, a sawmill, and several large dwellings. The village became the staging ground for the United Society’s ongoing evangelism up and down the scorched revival circuit of the Ohio River valley.

The Shaker experience on the frontier echoed their early history in New England. Along with a rapid intake of souls, they encountered violent persecution from drunken rowdies and the families of converts. People threw rocks through their windows, torched their barns, and knocked over their fences. Shaker cattle were stolen or set free. Their horses were branded and had their ears cropped. At camp meetings, Shaker preachers were shouted down and cursed as devils. Equality of the sexes and celibacy remained the main sources of ire, but darker slanders circulated, too. Alarmed by the notion of coed homes full of unmarried adults, some claimed that the Shakers murdered the newborn “fruits of their unlawful embraces.”

All of this abuse came on top of the usual tribulations of frontier life: malaria, malnutrition, raids by freshly displaced Native Americans, and the brutal labor required to break ground in the virgin wilderness.*³² As it had in the East, the Shakers’ collectivism eased these trials, giving them many practical advantages over other frontier homesteaders. Before long, the neighbors who denounced the believers as devils were buying their products and paying to use their mills.

Millennial Laws

Lucy Wright died at Niskeyuna (by then referred to by the old Dutch name Watervliet) on the afternoon of February 7, 1821. She was sixty-one. She had led the United Society through a quarter century of remarkable expansion. After her death, no other Shaker would ever be designated Mother or Father. The thousand-mile journey into the (old) Southwest that she commissioned in 1805 had succeeded beyond every expectation. Within a decade of the three missionaries’ arrival in Ohio, there were five Shaker communities in the region. A decade later, at the time of Wright’s death, half of the four thousand active Shakers lived in the West, in a total of seven communities—four in Ohio, two in Kentucky, and one in Indiana. The community founded on Malcolm Worley’s farm in Turtle Creek came to be known as Union Village.*³³ It functioned as a sort of New Lebanon West, housing the lead western ministry and supporting the communities around it with money and instruction in the Society’s increasingly complex regulations and customs.

—

Even as Zion sprawled from Maine to Indiana, Mother Lucy resisted formally codifying Shaker beliefs. The expansion of the sect required a certain amount of written theology, but Wright kept it to a minimum, sensing the hazards of fixing their vital, changing gospel on paper. When a draft of Shaker regulations came across her desk, she forbade its publication.

After Wright’s death, leadership of the Society passed to a group of four elders, two men and two women. Within six months they authorized the publication and distribution of the Millennial Laws, a list of 125 rules governing every aspect of life in Zion. When two Shakers walk together, the Millennial Laws instruct, they must walk in step. When walking indoors, they should be as quiet as possible. When entering a meetinghouse, they should tiptoe. Shakers “should not slip their feet on the carpet or floor, but lift them up and set them down plumb.” In fact, there should not be any rugs at all; devils hide in rugs. Shakers should not play with cats. No pets allowed, period. There should be only one rocking chair per room, unless it is a room for the elderly. (Two youths rocking simultaneously might awaken carnality.) There should be no intermingling of plants in the garden. No gathering of nuts to give as gifts. When praying, a Shaker should fold the right thumb over the left, never the left over the right. No vulgarity, including, but not limited to, the phrases “My stars!” “My gracious!” or “Good heavens!” Suppertime presented a particularly daunting thicket of regulations: “When you take a piece of bread, take a whole piece.” “When you cut meat, cut it square.” When you are finished eating, “cross your knife & fork on your plate with the edge towards you.”

Looked upon from the bird’s-eye view of history, the native ordinances of any separatist enclave tend to reveal the aggregated compulsions and phobias of the community’s leader(s). The countless trifling regulations that gave Shaker life its distinctive texture can certainly be understood as a collection of the lead elders’ personal crotchets, writ large upon all of Shakerdom. Most significant, Shaker celibacy, the doctrine that propelled Ann Lee to the head of the Wardley prayer group and distinguished the United Society from countless other millenarian sects, was founded upon the rock of one woman’s seriously justified terror of childbirth.

By encircling daily life with countless small prohibitions, the Shakers tried to suppress impulse to the vanishing point, to transform themselves from animals to saints. When you cut your food into squares, dinner ceases to be a gratification of appetite and becomes an exercise in geometry. Just as important, the sect’s ever-multiplying regulations gave Zion its own idiosyncratic rhythms, separating the believers as much as possible from their former lives in the World.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the chaste Shakers birthed more and more regulations. Naturally, the rules concerning sexuality were the most stringent. Some are laughably obvious: When a sister mends a brother’s trousers, he must take them off first. Others are subtler, suggesting the extent to which a celibate coed village might sometimes have felt like an erotic powder keg. Men and women should not pass on the stairs. Men’s clothes should never be hung beside women’s clothes. No watching animals have sex.*³⁴ There is an occasional whiff of sadism to Shaker discipline. One ex-Shaker recalled how three young women at Watervliet were caught “attending to the amour of two flies in the window.” Hannah Matterson, the eldress who caught them, told the girls that “for thus gratifying their carnal inclinations, and as a mortification to the same, they must strip themselves naked and take whips…and whip themselves, and then whip each other.” When the girls were finished whipping one another, they had to dunk themselves in a cold brook. Two male elders apparently supervised this scene with approval.

Bow and Be Free

By the middle of the 1820s, less than half a century after the Dark Day, the Shakers had built nineteen villages in eight states.*³⁵ When they counted themselves in 1823, there were four thousand resident believers.*³⁶ That same year, the Summary View of the Millennial Church, an official account of the Shakers’ beliefs and history, was distributed by the church. Stephen J. Stein, the leading contemporary historian of the United Society, writes that the publication of the Summary View “signals the completion of the establishment of the Shakers as a society.” Their story, their theology, and their folkways were more or less fixed.

Two years later, on thirteen hundred acres of rich farmland along Sodus Bay, a natural harbor on Lake Ontario in western New York, the Shakers established their last successful colony.*³⁷ Equidistant from Union Village and New Lebanon, Sodus Bay Village represented a geographic bridge between the sometimes divergent worlds of eastern and western Shakerdom.

The population of Zion continued to expand for another two decades, peaking at the end of the 1850s at somewhere around six thousand believers, before beginning a long, gradual contraction that lasted into the middle of the twentieth century, when the Shakers all but vanished. Today, a tiny, noble remnant—two sisters and one brother—keeps the flame at Sabbathday Lake Village in southern Maine.

With the distribution of the Summary View and the establishment of Sodus Bay Village, the Shakers’ social structures and physical domain were set. The United Society had not yet reached the peak of its influence or size, but it had become what it was to remain. In the coming decades, despite a period of energetic revival and spiritualism that began in the late 1830s, the emphasis of Shaker doctrine shifted gradually from millenarian prophecy toward an array of distinctive social doctrines, most notably communism, pacifism, and the equality of the sexes.

—

The Shakers’ aversion to the world as they found it and their exuberant millenarian hopes combined to liberate them from any regard for the established forms of human association. Within their villages, they built an entirely new kind of society, one founded upon total equality, spiritual transcendence, and a utopian faith in the perfectibility of life on earth. “We are the people who turned the world upside down,” Ann Lee liked to say.

Ultimately, life within Zion was less about what the Shakers did than about what they didn’t do—namely, just about everything that might be called “worldly.” To them, this state of total abstention—what they called being “simple”—added up to a doctrine of radical freedom: freedom from appetite, from nature, from impulse, and, perhaps most important, from the conventions of the World. By scorching out the lusty, scuffling habits of Babylon, the Shakers hoped to perfect and liberate their souls and their community. Their best-known song celebrates this remarkable paradox: “I will bow and be simple. / I will bow and be free.”

---

*¹ Killing babies as a divine means of communicating with adults is a common enough theme in the Old Testament (see Job).

*² The only extant handwriting from a woman who famously crusaded against matrimony is the single X that she inked onto her marriage certificate.

*³ Several police reports related to the Shakers include a line-item expense for beer. Writing in 1892, one Manchester journalist wryly admired this “ingenious system for combining the secular consumption of ale with the sacred joy of harrying the sturdy protestants.”

*⁴ A slightly more plausible account of this incident reports that the Shakers manned the bilge pumps with “miraculous” strength.

*⁵ It is difficult to gauge the truth of this little morality play. What is certain is that when the Shakers reconvened in Niskeyuna, Abraham was no longer among them.

*⁶ The Shakers did not begin calling themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing until the 1820s.

*⁷ The village of Niskeyuna, just west of the Hudson River on the eastern edge of New York, is not technically in New England, but the distinction was more or less irrelevant. Many of the first converts came from across the Massachusetts line.

*⁸ Harvard remained a magnet for millenarian and utopian innovation. In 1843, at the peak of the nineteenth-century communitarian boom, the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and the English reformer Charles Lane founded the short-lived vegan commune of Fruitlands in the town. That same year, a large contingent of Millerites, followers of William Miller, a New York farmer who predicted that the Second Coming would be in 1843, awaited ascension to heaven on a hill outside of the town.

*⁹ One of the more extravagant libels told about the Shakers was that all of their men were actual, rather than spiritual, eunuchs. In 1840, at the White Water Shaker Village in Ohio, there was a legal battle in which non-Shakers claimed that two boys, aged fourteen and nine, who had formerly lived within the community had been “emasculated.” In response to these accusations, a mob surrounded the community and five Shaker elders were locked in the Cincinnati jail. The crisis ended when a local physician inspected the boys and determined that they “labored under a natural deformity and no privileges had ever been taken with them.”

*¹⁰ This precise color scheme was eventually mandated for all the subsequent Shaker meetinghouses. The Shakers’ “Millennial Laws” further stipulated that “no buildings may be painted white, save meetinghouses.”

*¹¹ The pine floor, according to one visitor, “was as clean as a dining table.”

*¹² For the Shakers, the building was made sacred only by the activity conducted within it. When the community at New Lebanon swelled to more than five hundred, the Shakers built a much larger meetinghouse nearby and retrofitted their old temple as a seed warehouse.

*¹³ Despite their stated beliefs, individual Shakers were people of their time. Tensions over what some brothers called “petticoat government” periodically threatened the stability of the church.

*¹⁴ During the twentieth century, the church’s membership became overwhelmingly female. By 1936, 88 percent of Shakers were women.

*¹⁵ The Shakers were surprisingly savvy about fiscal and legal matters. Realizing that their policy of “joint interest” made them vulnerable to lawsuits from without, they refused all applicants until their debts had been paid. Despite this caution, the Society spent a lot of money settling financial claims.

*¹⁶ Here, tucked deep within the King James Version, is the first draft of the famous Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!”

*¹⁷ The first communistic colony founded in the New World was Plockhoy’s Commonwealth, also known as Valley of the Swans, established on the Delaware River by Dutch Mennonites in 1663.

*¹⁸ According to the most literal interpretation of Revelation, New Jerusalem will be laid out as a perfect square (or maybe a cube), fifteen hundred miles on each side (or maybe all the way around). The city will be made of pure gold and surrounded by a jasper wall with gates of pearl.

*¹⁹ Variations in climate, topography, and local resources and markets gave each settlement a distinct culture and appearance.

*²⁰ A common spiritual “exercise” was to mime the act of sweeping away “devils” with invisible brooms.

*²¹ This era of rampant spiritualism was known as “Mother Ann’s Work,” because Lee, who by then had been dead for sixty years, was thought to be rallying her drowsing church.

*²² Scholars who study the United Society sometimes lament the public’s fixation on Shaker design and crafts. Interest in Shaker design does tend to eclipse all other, more meaningful curiosity about the Society. Stephen J. Stein opens his brilliant and definitive history of the United Society by quoting an aged Shaker sister who told a New Yorker reporter: “I almost expect to be remembered, as a chair or a table.” There is obvious irony in the spectacle of horn-rimmed design hounds bidding outrageous sums to acquire the washbasins of these long dead communists. However, Shaker artifacts can reveal deep truths about the disposition of the people who made them. What’s more, many of the first outsiders to study the United Society in any detail, notably the historians Faith Andrews and Edward Deming Andrews, were drawn to the subject by a passion for Shaker crafts and ephemera.

*²³ Decades of exposure to modernist design has made it easy to appreciate the sect’s ethereal minimalism. That was not always the case. While touring a Shaker village in 1842, Charles Dickens offered this assessment of Shaker aesthetics: “We walked into a grim room where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs, and the time was told grimly by a grim clock.”

*²⁴ Aristotle makes an allowance for the advance of communications technology. He says that if a polis can somehow employ the services of Stentor, the mythically strong-lunged herald of the Iliad, then it can expand a bit.

*²⁵ Among other exciting mathematical properties, 5,040 has sixty divisors. It can be divided by every whole number from 1 to 12, except 11.

*²⁶ To many orthodox Congregationalists, the emotional displays in the West were, at best, unseemly. From Boston, capital of the old Puritan empire, the frontier was often seen as a spiritual wasteland—an unruly wilderness sparsely populated by savages, papist immigrants, and drunken adventurers.

*²⁷ On the day of the Pentecost, according to Acts, bystanders mistook the hubbub of Holy Ghost possession for a raging wine party. In response, the Apostle Peter said it was too early in the day to be drunk: “It is but the third hour.”

*²⁸ “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2:17)

*²⁹ It would be two decades before the Shakers started openly and directly referring to Ann as the “second appearing” of Christ in their public evangelism.

*³⁰ Like the famously clean-cut Mormon missionaries, the Shakers understood that the bearing and appearance of their representatives was almost as significant as the gospel they proffered.

*³¹ According to one account (not McNemar’s own), the Shakers had cured his young son of a peculiar malady. After almost being killed by a large black snake, the boy periodically suffered screaming fits that could be stopped only by the firm embrace of his mother or father. His last attack supposedly occurred during the Shakers’ first meeting in the McNemar home. A third account of McNemar’s conversion claims that he saw the arm of a woman rise from the ground and beckon him to follow.

*³² An 1807 Shaker mission to Native Americans in western Ohio yielded no converts.

*³³ The Ohio villages, in order of their founding, were Union Village, Watervliet, North Union, and White Water. The Kentucky villages were Pleasant Hill and South Union Village. The village in Indiana was known as West Union Village.

*³⁴ This particular rule must have been difficult to obey on a farm. During Mother Ann’s ministry, a boy in Massachusetts took up the Shaker cross after admitting to having had sex with several farm animals. His confession to Ann apparently put an end to a spate of disease among the local livestock. “If you commit sin with beasts,” Mother Ann taught, “your souls will be transformed into the shape of beasts.”

*³⁵ The seven western villages are listed above. The twelve eastern villages were Watervliet, New Lebanon, and Sodus Bay in New York; Hancock, Harvard, Tyringham, and Shirley in Massachusetts; Enfield in Connecticut; Canterbury and a second Enfield in New Hampshire; and the villages of Alfred and Sabbathday Lake in Maine. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were two short-lived efforts to establish Shaker villages in the South, one at Narcoossee in central Florida, where the believers raised and sold pineapples, and one at White Oak in southern Georgia.

*³⁶ That number is almost certainly high. Shaker demographics are famously difficult to pin down.

*³⁷ There were a few subsequent efforts to start communities elsewhere, including in the South, but none of them lasted more than a few years.