One afternoon in 1957, as a young minister named Don Graham sat gazing out of the window of a Greyhound bus bound from Lexington to Harrodsburg, he became aware that the driver was beginning to address the passengers. Using a microphone as if he were a tour guide enlightening his flock, the driver declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be going through a little village where the men and women really knew how to get along. You will notice that there will be two doors on these buildings. The men lived on one side and the women lived on the other.” That was the burden of his little speech.
If people then or at any other time knew nothing else about the Shakers, they knew that the members of this sect had strange and perhaps even incomprehensible ideas about the relationships that ought to prevail between men and women. These ideas traced directly back to one of the more remarkable women in history, Ann Lee, who was born in 1736 into a blacksmith’s family in the English Midlands. To most people at the time, Ann would have seemed just another working-class girl destined for an obscure existence of fourteen-hours-a-day drudgery. She never spent a single day in school but like thousands of other children of the slums was put out to work in the Manchester cotton mills.
In two important respects, however, young Ann Lee differed markedly from most of her working sisters: she had a great deal of determination and drive, and at an early age she developed some very unusual ideas about sex. She believed that biblical prophets were sending her spiritual messages telling her that it was sinful for a husband and wife to have sexual relations and that, consequently, though she was only a child, she must not stand idly by at home but must make every effort to argue her mother out of engaging in such impure activities with her father—who seems to have expressed strong and angry disagreement with her point of view.
Though Ann’s outlook changed enough as she grew up to allow her to marry one Abraham Stanley (his name had various spellings), in 1762, she appears never to have felt at ease in this situation; then came a series of tragedies. Ann gave birth to four children, three of whom died in infancy; the other child was sickly, too, and lived only a few years. Such, she knew in her heart, was the awful result of her yielding to the depraved side of her nature. But she still had a husband, and he still had conventional ideas about marital relations. What should she do now?
As it happened, Ann had access to spiritual guidance from persons who saw the world very much as she saw it. A few years earlier, in 1758, in pursuit of escape from the debased and sinful reality amid which she lived, she had joined a small and earnest sect whose animated worship services had earned it the derisive nickname “Shaking Quakers” (just as the members of a later sect would become “Holy Rollers”), although its handful of members included disaffected Anglicans and dissenters, or Methodists, as well as Quakers. The head of the sect suggested a simple solution to Ann’s problem: she should practice sexual abstinence. Ann accepted this counsel, but, accustomed to acting energetically in all situations, she found herself unable even to abstain from something in a passive manner. Instead, she engaged in days of great agonizing and lamentation on the state of the world until she emerged, as it would have been put two centuries later, “born again.” Then came the transcendent experience, her life’s moment of crystallization. In 1770, after being thrown into prison for disrupting an Anglican church service, she experienced not only a vision but a high-level revelation: She herself was nothing less than the fulfillment of the second coming of Christ; Jesus had appeared to her and told her so. His great promise to the world, made more than seventeen hundred years earlier, had now been fulfilled.
When Ann emerged from jail and told her fellow Shaking Quakers about her revelation and her consequent decision to redeem mankind from the consequences of sin, they did not, as one might imagine offhand, respond with skepticism or disapproval. The eighteenth century was indeed a time of schisms, sects, and new denominations (notably the Methodists, who date from just about the year of Ann Lee’s birth), and, besides, it was a credulous age. (So, for that matter, was the late twentieth century, an era in which, for example, an American cult leader could persuade his followers to swallow lethal doses of poison in order to prepare themselves for a ride on a spaceship.) Since the Shaking Quakers already were looking for Christ to return at any time, Ann’s refinement of their established expectation seemed likely enough, and this determined and dynamic woman, though illiterate, seemed a perfectly appropriate vessel for the revelation. The couple who had established the Shaking Quakers not only accepted Ann’s vision but willingly took the logical step of hailing her as their leader and passing on to her the title of Mother; henceforth, she would be known as Mother Ann Lee (her family name actually was Lees; she deleted the s).
Mother Ann’s vision now became translated into a new religion, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. It rested on the foundation of celibacy, defined as a pure state and an absolute essential for the attainment of spiritual distinction. God was both male and female; Jesus represented the male principle, and the female principle was manifested in Mother Ann; or, as it was also said, Christ was the spiritual Son of God, and Mother Ann was the Spiritual Daughter. (One point that has never been completely clear is whether the Shakers believed Mother Ann to be the actual female reincarnation of Christ or a prophet foretelling a second coming in female form.)
The Shaker worship that grew up could hardly have differed more from Anglican forms, with its singing and dancing, shaking and shouting, and speaking in tongues. Mother Ann soon declared that she had seen in a vision that “God has chosen people in America,” and, indeed, what better place could the Shakers find not simply for the free practice of their religion but for the establishment of the heaven on earth—the utopia—they sought than this great and rich continent with endless room for newcomers and new ideas? In May 1774, with eight followers, Mother Ann boarded an old tub of a ship called the Mariah at Liverpool for the voyage across the Atlantic. (Somewhat surprisingly, one of the travelers professing his adherence to the principles of the faith and his devotion to the leadership of Mother Ann was the long-bemused Abraham Stanley.) Thus, during the summer that saw the English colonists in America moving toward the establishment of their own new commonwealth by setting up the first Continental Congress, this tiny band of English utopians was crossing the sea bearing its own dream of an American Eden.
The utopian dream almost came to a sudden end. When the Mariah—barely seaworthy, and certainly not suitable for a transatlantic voyage—encountered a storm, a wave ripped one of the rotted timbers loose, and water poured in through the gap in the hull. Though the ship appeared to be in imminent danger of foundering, Mother Ann showed no fear but devoted her efforts to soothing the worried captain. “Be of good cheer,” she is supposed to have said with her habitual great assurance, “there shall not a hair of our heads perish. We shall all arrive safe in America. I just now saw two bright angels of God standing by the mast, through whom I received this promise.” And in the next moment these angels made good on their promise: unlikely as it seemed, a huge wave lifted up the loose timber and slapped it neatly back into place, and, thanks to this miracle, the Mariah and her passengers did indeed survive the crossing.
During their first weeks and months in America, Mother Ann and her followers had to struggle simply to survive, but within two years they had established a permanent settlement at Watervliet, New York, outside Albany. By this time Abraham Stanley, having experienced some second thoughts about the soundness of Mother Ann’s sexual doctrines, was urging her to relent and live like everybody else. Not surprisingly, she turned him down categorically. “However pure her motives,” commented a journalist writing about the Shakers a hundred years later, her husband “thought himself badly treated, and consoled himself by pursuing a course diametrically opposite to the one she had adopted.” By turning to other women, Abraham became perhaps the first Shaker apostate.
Just ten years after landing in New York, Mother Ann succumbed to the accumulated stresses of her extraordinary life, to poverty, imprisonment, and the continuing demands of charismatic leadership. Dying in September 1784 at the age of forty-eight, she left behind an amazing achievement—a flourishing New World movement that, led by strong successors, would soon include ten communities, Watervliet and New Lebanon (which became the Mother Colony) in New York and eight in New England. And within a few more years the word would spread westward and southward.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, newspaper readers in the Northeast began seeing reports of a great religious revival out on the frontier, in Kentucky. By this time the state had more than two hundred thousand people, who lived in widely scattered settlements but had been coming together in vast camp meetings, with hundreds of wagons gathering on hilltops. As a later writer told the story: “Thousands of people sang, cried, danced, whirled, fell into trances, barked like dogs, spoke in tongues, proclaimed visions, and were saved.”
Among these northeastern newspaper readers was Mother Lucy Wright at the Shakers’ Mother Colony at New Lebanon. News of such a dramatic and promising religious upheaval proved irresistible, particularly in view of one of Mother Ann’s visions: “The next opening of the gospel will be in the southwest; it will be a great distance, and there will be a great work of God.” On New Year’s Day, 1805, three Shaker brethren—John Meachan, Issachar Bates, and Benjamin Seth Youngs—set out from New Lebanon for the exciting new mission field in the West. Traveling on foot, with their bags strapped on a single horse, they went down to New York City and on through Philadelphia and Washington to Virginia and then Tennessee, and up through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. The missionaries arrived at Paint Lick, in Garrard County, on March 3, and just four days later, at the settlement’s Presbyterian church, they gave the “first Public testimony of the gospel in the western Country.”
What quickly drew the attention of the three Shaker missionaries were the camp meetings over in Bourbon County, with the preaching of Barton W. Stone, the Presbyterian pastor at Cane Ridge who had presided over the great revival of August 1801 and would go on to found the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). But these visitors do not appear to have been greatly impressed by Stone, who respected them but disagreed absolutely with their view of marriage, and after a stay of only two days they went off to Warren County, Ohio (northeast of Cincinnati), where they “found the first rest for the soles of [their] feet having traveled 1,233 miles in two months and twenty-two days.” They also found a landowner named Malcolm Worley, who, within five days of their arrival, became the missionaries’ first convert in the West. Others—actually, an entire congregation—quickly joined as well, leading to the establishment of Union Village, near Lebanon, Ohio, which would become the Shakers’ chief center in the West.
After their successful mission to Ohio, the three men came back to Central Kentucky. Here, in August 1805, occurred the central event for the future of the Shakers in Kentucky: Benjamin Youngs and two of the Ohio converts met three men from Mercer County—Henry Banta, Samuel Banta, and Elisha Thomas—who “were determined to hear [them] speak” and “drew them to a private house for the purpose.” After experiencing the flow of Benjamin Youngs’s eloquence, the listeners “opened their minds” to Shakerism, with Elisha thereby becoming the first convert in the area. Thomas soon dedicated his 140-acre farm on Shawnee Run, a broad creek, as the site of a Shaker community.
By early 1806 Elisha had been joined in his conversion by members of many local families, the roll including, in addition to the Bantas and Thomases, such names as Shields, Vibbard, Maxwell, Sasseen, and Dean. As many as a thousand people came to services in barns, listening to preaching and engaging in singing and dancing through the night. Believers from Mercer and nearby areas began moving to Shawnee Run, and on December 3, 1806, forty-four members entered into a covenant, written with the guidance of the elders at Union Village, “dedicating themselves and all their property to the material benefit of each other,” and thereby accepting, as well, the other cardinal Shaker tenets—open confession of all sin; celibacy; and separation from the world.
This action represented the formal beginning of the Shaker colony in Mercer County, the first in Kentucky. A year later one of the missionaries reported to Mother Lucy, back in New York, that this flourishing new village was located in a “thick settled place of Kentucky,” a state that “contains a great deal of very beautiful land.” Knowing the appeal of level topography to the practical-minded farming Shakers, he added, “There is no mountain in sight and the soil is rich and fertile.”