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- [00:00]
Don Wildman
Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland. There is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe to bring the
- [00:28]
Doug Winiarski
Past Alive
- [00:32]
Adam Grant
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- [01:08]
Bleacher Report Narrator
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- [02:13]
Narrator (History Hit Intro)
It is the 1700s in Manchester, England, a northern city whose population has doubled, then doubled again in little more than a century, transforming from modest market town into the beating heart of the British industrial world. Here, within the red brick walls of a textile mill, the senses are overwhelmed. The mechanized motion of power looms. Carding engines, spinning frames all fills the air. Clattering, whirring Fibers are drawn, twisted to thread and thread becomes cloth, all to the steady percussions of wood and iron and stone. Thumping, spinning, thumping, spinning. An ocean away in the woods of Niskayuni, New York, the rhythm continues, but here it is the thumping of feet on wooden floors. The spinning is bodies turning, worshippers circling, all caught up in an ecstatic dance of devotion. To trace these rhythms and movements, from factory floor to forest clearing, from England to America, is to follow the extraordinary rise of the Shaker movement.
- [03:36]
Doug Winiarski
Hello, all.
- [03:37]
Don Wildman
Welcome to this episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Glad you're listening. In the early life of the American republic, as the new nation crossed from the 18th into the 19th century, an extraordinary wave of spiritual searching swept the land. It would later be called the Second Great Awakening and echoed the first one in the previous century. Out of this fervor emerged new sects, expanding Protestant denominations, and a remarkable array of reform movements and utopian experiments, many of them first taking root in the colony, then state of New York. Among them was one community whose influence proved unusually powerful and sustained. They were known as the Shakers. On this episode today, we trace their origins, their astonishing rise and their long, quiet fading from American life. And we'll do this with historian Doug Winiarski, professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond, the Tenacious Spiders. His research explores the extraordinary religious ferment of early America, having authored the award winning Darkness Falls on the Land of Light Experiencing Religious awakenings in 18th century New England, which won the Bancroft Prize. And he also edited Shakers at the Manifesting Spirits and spectacles in 19th century America. Fascinating. Professor Winiarski, you accomplished man. Welcome to American history Hit.
- [04:59]
Doug Winiarski
Thanks for having me.
- [05:01]
Don Wildman
We've all heard of the furniture, many of us sit upon it, the elegant lines of a Shaker table, the chairs, the architecture. But that all grows out of something much larger, a sweeping religious movement that rose in the 18th and 19th centuries, which once built communities across America with membership in the thousands. What exactly was Shakerism and who were the first to practice it?
- [05:26]
Doug Winiarski
So Shakerism is an 18th century sectarian movement that grows out of the evangelical ferment in Great Britain associated with the rise of the Methodist movement in and around the city of Manchester. In Manchester in the 1740s and 50s, there emerged a conventicle, a small sort of house church run by a couple known as the Wardleys. They gathered together a series of followers and engaged in charismatic and ecstatic forms of worship in which the Holy Spirit would descend upon the congregation, would animate their Bodies and the community would sing and dance possessed by the Holy Spirit. Among their earliest followers was a young millworker, a woman named Ann Lee, the son of a local blacksmith. And she experienced a series of visions during the 1770s in which Jesus appeared to her and convinced her that the original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was sexual intercourse. Only had been married to a woman named Abraham Standaren, who was also a blacksmith. And she had had several children, all of whom had died either in infancy or as young children. And that traumatic experience, her early motherhood, combined with her mystical, revelatory experiences of seeing Jesus Christ and him explaining to her that the original sin of Adam and Eve was sexual intercourse, led her to the idea that only those Christians that practice celibacy would ever enter the kingdom of heaven.
- [06:57]
Don Wildman
Wow.
- [06:58]
Doug Winiarski
And it is out of her experiences that the Shaker movement was born.
- [07:02]
Don Wildman
The headline right up front there, I mean, that's what everybody sort of knows about Shakers, but I didn't realize it was so central to the original founders of that, that idea. Let me back up just a little bit. The Wardley Society in England understanding all of this is happening against the backdrop of rising industrialism in England. All of you know, the pressures of urbanization and this new kind of society is being built at the time religion enters into that, just as it does later on with American society. Wardley Society believes that Christ's spirit could appear again in a new human vessel. Not unusual. Radical confession of sin, equality of men and women in spiritual leadership, which is very important to the discussion today, and a coming millennial kingdom of God. Those are the ingredients that I have here on my list. Does that kind of COVID it?
- [07:55]
Doug Winiarski
That does square with much of what we know. And the fact of the matter is that we don't know a ton about Shakerism at its earliest moment. We know some of the key players, the Wardleys, Ann Lee's brother William, and then a handful of other English, early converts to this so called shaking Quaker movement that emerges. And many people think that there's a connection between Shakerism and Quakerism, but they're really more of a. Only a sort of a family relationship between the two. I think the one point of contact between Quakerism and what would become to be called Shakerism is, is the notion that Christ is not a person, Jesus of Nazareth, but rather a spirit, the Christ spirit. Shakers, much like the Quakers with their idea of the indwelling spirit, the inner light, believe that Christ is not a person, but a Spirit that enters into a person's body.
- [08:50]
Don Wildman
For centuries before this has been discussed. It's the Monophysites and the duo, this whole conversation and really controversy about whether Christ actually was brought to the earth as an entity or he's a man who becomes a God. It's this whole real thing. And boy, did it matter a lot more to people then than it does now. That whole conversation. As far as the ecstatic dancing which will become such a big story of this, am I correct to relate it to Pentecostal behavior that we see the kind of worshiping that is done mostly in the American South?
- [09:21]
Doug Winiarski
Yes, although there's no, again, much like Quakerism, it's more of a family resemblance than some sort of directed genealogical connection. Of course, American Pentecostalism is a mid to late 19th century phenomenon.
- [09:33]
Don Wildman
Right.
- [09:33]
Doug Winiarski
But for those Protestants who believe in continuous and ongoing revelation, who believe that God has more to share with humanity than what's contained in the Scriptures, that there are new revelations to be had in the world, many of those Protestants cross over into a world where they expect the things they read about in the Bible. But among the apostolic Christians, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Glossolalius, speaking in tongues, faith healing and possession by the Spirit are things that they ought to expect to happen in their world.
- [10:04]
Don Wildman
Yeah.
- [10:05]
Doug Winiarski
So Shakerism is fundamentally a gift oriented form of Protestantism where gifts of the Holy Spirit and new forms, either old forms like speaking in, like Glossolalia, speaking in tongues, or all sorts of new forms of revelation can emerge. They are of course, the believers in Christ's second appearing. They believe that the Christ Spirit which first manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth, had come again in the form of their leader, Ann Lee. So what, the Shakers. The Shakers called themselves believers. And the thing that they believed was that they were living in the end times when Christ had already returned again to earth in the form of Anlee. And so they were living with these millennial expectations on an everyday basis in which charismatic use of the Spirit could be poured out upon their people at any time. And they did.
- [10:55]
Don Wildman
One of the big themes of this conversation is how this early form of Shakerism runs so counter to how we think of it today. You know, we think of it as so stripped down and simple and quiet and just as the Quakers were, you know, or are, versus how they were perceived in their earlier days. That shift is such an interesting pivot for this group. The amazing thing to me is that we're here in the early 19th century, even the 18th century, and we're talking about a female Christ. That's quite revolutionary.
- [11:24]
Doug Winiarski
So the gender aspect of Shakerism is, I think, one of the things that attracts many scholars to it. In the late 18th, at the turn of the 19th century, it was very difficult for women to assume any role of leadership in any Protestant denomination. All the major denominations in North America, where we haven't talked about this yet, but in 1774, as a result of a series of persecutions that the early Shaker community was facing in and around Manchester, Ann Lee and a small group of followers emigrate to the British North American colonies. And they arrive in Albany, New York, in 1774. And at that time, all of the either state supported colonial churches. The Congregationalists, the Anglicans, barred women from holding positions of authority in their communities. And almost all the other kinds of sectarian groups that had emerged in America, everything from, you know, small German perfectionist groups to radical New Light splinter groups in New England, like separate Baptists and then the. The Methodists, who were just emerging. Even those groups were skittish about allowing women to preach in public, to testify, to witness, to prophesy. And so along comes this woman who claims to be what many people at the time in the 1770s and 80s described her as being. The elect lady described in the Book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun, a prophetic figure, a person who's going to usher in the new millennium. The idea of that of a woman speaking in public, often in mixed congregations of men and women, oftentimes offering pretty stern commentary to men, which is simply not considered appropriate or even legal in many parts of British North America. And so, as a result, Ann Lee, in her time in North America, experiences a lot of mob violence and persecution. The Shakers arrive in Albany, and the American Revolution begins just a couple of years later. Early on, during their time in Albany, the Shakers are in prison for their pacifist beliefs. Shakers are also pacifists, but there's a sense that the Shakers are not American. They're not supporting the patriot cause. So Ann Lee was jailed in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a period of months. So was her brother William and other members of the community. In the 1780s, Ann Lee launched a series of missionary tours in New England, where she began working among some of the most radical evangelical New Light congregations in New England and gathering and converting some of the most radical Protestants in New England to her new, peculiar, celibate faith. And everywhere she went, she experienced mob violence. People thought that she was bewitching. People. They searched her for the witch's mark. She was dragged out of houses. She was beaten. Other members of the English Shaker communities were whipped savagely beaten. So the idea of a female religious leader draws a lot of attention and all of it very violent and very naive.
- [14:27]
Don Wildman
Yeah, she's imprisoned for 30 days or so for disrupting a service. And this is where she has that premonition about celibacy, am I correct?
- [14:35]
Doug Winiarski
So she was imprisoned in both Manchester and when she gets to the British North American colonies. So she spends several stints both in jail and in a essentially what is the modern equivalent of a lunatic asylum in Manchester. For while she's a member of the Wardley Circle for her radical prophecies and visionary experiences and then her really combative position with regard to more mainstream English churches. Yes, the Shakers were witnessing for their faith and they were causing a lot of problems in England. Same thing in North America. When Ann Lee arrives in New England and they open the Gospel as they described it in 1781, she goes on a long two year missionary circuit throughout New England and there's. She's cultivating the most radical evangelical New lights of the First Great Awakening and their children and grandchildren. So the places that Ann Lee visits are places where evangelical descent in New England had been strongest. And it's among those people sort of more charismatic, more interested in gifts of the Holy Spirit and continuous ongoing revelation type people that had come out of the Great Awakening revivals of the 1740s are most open to her message. But those same communities are communities where in New England the Congregational churches have broken apart as a result of the Great Awakening. So there's kind of these long standing scars from the Great Awakening that Annie opens up again. And that helps to explain some of the violence she experienced during her time.
- [16:02]
Don Wildman
Why is. I mean, we call the Great Waking first and second. Were people aware of what was happening in terms of how much activity theologically was going on in those days? Were they crafting this era or was this something that was entitled later?
- [16:16]
Doug Winiarski
I think what we're really talking about here is the emergence of a new way of being religious. The way that we today talk about born again Christians evangelicalism. This is the moment, at least in New England and it's a transatlantic phenomenon. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening, of which the so called First Great Awakening in New England is just one small piece. But what early evangelicalism is about is about creating distance between your new religious experience, being born again, taking Jesus as your personal savior. What George Whitfield, the Great British field preacher would have called the new birth. That's not a way that those New England Puritans had experienced religion previously. The idea that one could have a transformative single moment in which you could point to that at a particular time or a particular day and say you were born again is a radically new idea. And it creates all sorts of new kinds of religious communities among people that claim to have had that experience. So while in New England, the place where Ann Lee will make her first converts and American Shakers really is a New England phenomenon, those original Puritan churches were almost always the only game in town. In the 17th century, everyone in town was required by law to attend meeting and attend their Congregational church and pay taxes to that Congregational minister. Along comes George Whitefield in the 1740s and tells people they need to have a new birth experience. Once they do, they might want to turn around and say, why am I worshiping with these people who have not had a new birth experience? Why am I going to meeting with a minister who can't testify to having had that experience? Perhaps I belong over here with these people, sometimes even in a different town. And so suddenly you get the emergence of separate Congregational churches. Many of those separate Congregational churches will very quickly morph into separate Baptist churches that will want to restrict the sacrament of baptism only to adult believers that have experienced this event they call the new birth. And it's among those people that Ann Lee will target as her earliest converts. And of course in New England, because there's a close connection between church and state, to form a separate Congregational church is illegal in the 1750s, 20 years before Ann Lee shows up. So what people are doing when they're breaking away from the Congregational establishment is breaking away from their neighbors, diluting the tax base and sort of running in the face of long standing colonial laws. Saying not only do you need to do all those things, but you need to be celibate and pacifist. Confess your sins to me. You can imagine how combustible that might have been.
- [18:55]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Break.
- [19:02]
Adam Grant
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- [19:35]
Bleacher Report Narrator
The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports right now. The NBA is heating up, March Madness is here and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's a about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real time scores, breaking news and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.
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- [21:42]
Don Wildman
And to do this in the Puritan society of New England is extraordinary, a real threat to everything that they hold dear and true. But also it makes sense too, because, you know, we're talking about the birth of individualism in this country, this sense that I'm going to break away from the orthodox group and find my own way, which so much informs the American experience. Very few people walking around today think of this as having its roots in religion, but indeed it does. That's what the late 17 into the 1800s, that second great awakening is really about. And that even, you know, moves into mercantilism, the making of money. It's is a huge fundamental fact of American history. It's just extraordinary that all this is brought on by a woman at that time, because it would be that much harder for a woman to. To have stood up and these things. Never mind a woman from a working class background, you know, who doesn't have a formal education yet within decades, a few decades, thousands of people will be following this spiritual tradition, isn't it? It's amazingly persuasive for so many. Why so? Why do you think so?
- [22:47]
Doug Winiarski
There's a couple of reasons why. The first is because of Ann Lee's personal charisma and the idea of this millennial expectation she capitalizes on, on those radical New Englanders who are already looking for this kind of spirituality. Everyone's living in this heightened sense of expectation. So for a certain small set of New Englanders, they're looking for this kind of small P Pentecostal spirituality, this continuous and ongoing revelation kind of spirituality, even celibacy isn't a big bar to anyone. Because if you think you're living in the millennium, literally living in the millennium, human reproduction is kind of the least of the things you need to be worried about. So that though for those white hot seeker type people, Ann Lee is delivering them exactly what they're looking for. But after her death in 1784, Shakerism also goes through a period of organization where it takes the form that we know it today. Ann Lee, as you were just mentioning, Don, was not educated and didn't write anything down and was almost pure charisma. So early Shaker worship, there are no records for it. Much of what we know about American Shakerism in the 1770s and 1780s comes from outsiders who witnessed the Shakers at worship. It's not until annley dies in 1784 and then a group of her successors take over. A man named Joseph Meacham, who's one of her first American converts, emerges as the leader of the shaker movement around 1790. And it's at that point that Shakerism grows into what. What the tradition would call gospel order, in which they call that charisma of Anlee, and they give it institutional form. So they do several things. First, all of those disparate Shaker converts all over New England are gathered together in particular places that will become the nucleus of the first Shaker villages. So that's Watervliet, New York, New Lebanon and Hancock in western Massachusetts, Harvard in central Massachusetts, and then several communities in Connecticut and New Hampshire and Maine. Those become the beginnings of the first Shaker communities. And part of gospel order means organizing Shaker converts into what they would call families. A Shaker family is a group of, say, 25 to 50 or 75 men and women, many of whom have been previously married, who join Shaker communities and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters. So they will all work together, they'll own their own farm property, and they'll live together in a communal dormitory. And then additional things. Shakers will begin to first begin to tell their histories, write down their theology. They'll begin to regularize their worship practices by creating sort of clear forms of what the Shakers would call laboring, or what we would today call dancing, in which lines of Shakers would line up in their meeting houses, brothers and sisters opposite one another, and move in carefully choreographed motions to enact their sense of shaking off sin. And they'll begin to write down and produce their own music. You can see in all of these things, the Shakers are beginning to organize and institutionalize.
- [26:01]
Don Wildman
I think we just buried the headline shaking off your sin. That's basically what that name comes from. I suppose the Quakers were quaking off their sin. You know, in a sense, that's similar. You know, I was born into Quakerism, I say many times in the show, and still practice. And so much of this early phase of Shakerism parallels that of Quakerism. They split, of course. I mean, they're far apart coming into the 19th century as Quakers decide to join the world. I mean, that's basically what happens with Quakerism, whereas Shakerism won't. And that's what's so key. I want to circle back to a few details. The practice of Shakerism. We've talked about the dancing now, but was it basically a sermon? A minister of some sort sermonizing and A congregation listening.
- [26:45]
Doug Winiarski
So Shaker worship as it takes form under Joseph Meacham in the years after Ann Lee passes away takes place in very uniquely shaped buildings. Shaker meeting houses that look a lot different than other meeting houses of the time. Unlike, say, a Congregational meeting house in New England, where the sermon, the minister's sermon is the set piece, and sometimes the Lord's Supper and sometimes baptism. But people will gather together in pews that are directionally oriented toward a pulpit with a sounding board. The whole goal is to deliver the word of God to the congregation. Shaker meeting houses are completely open spaces. They have a unique trust system that runs through the rafters, that allows the weight in the building to be distributed to the outside walls. That creates a wide open, essentially like a ballroom, an open floor. There'll be movable benches on the inside of a Shaker meeting house that can be moved to the sides so that the Shakers can gather together in separate groups of men and women and labor, or dance and sing. Shakers also do have sermons. We might call them more like homilies, in which one of the elders or eldresses might give a message. But really, the central act of Shaker worship in the 19th century, with singing and dancing. And, by the way, they did all of this in front of tourists. So there's a spectacle to Shaker worship. Every Shaker meeting house has a set of benches or even risers around the outside where spectators can come and watch. On the Sabbath, the Shakers engage in their public meetings and do their thing with worship and dance.
- [28:18]
Don Wildman
And these communities that started, at what point were they established that people would know to go there to see these kinds of spectacles.
- [28:25]
Doug Winiarski
So that begins around 1790, give or take, depending upon the year, depending on the community. But what it takes is for all of those Shaker converts to come together and sign a written covenant, forming a joint interest in which most of these are families. The original Shaker converts tend to be married husbands and wives, often with several children in tow, who convert to Shakerism. And when they do so, they need to surrender their property to the community and sign the covenant and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters and have their children raised communally by the village. So that takes place around 1790 or so. And that creates the financial base for Shaker communities, for example, at New Lebanon or Enfield, Connecticut, or Harvard, Massachusetts, to purchase enough land to create large and prosperous communal villages. Each Shaker village, in its ultimate form, will usually comprise something like between 3 and 5,000 acres of really good farmland. It'll be divided between several different Shaker families, depending upon the size of the community. Each family, as we were saying before, maybe about 100 to sometimes 200 people. Those families are ranked so in terms of their religious experience. So there'll be a novitiate order, a gathering order for new converts to kind of learn Shaker ways. And then as your life as a Shaker continues, you might move into the second family or a directional family, the east family or the west family on a piece of the property. And eventually, by the time you reach your mature life as a Shaker, you'll be living at the center of the village in what's often called the first family or the church family or the center family. And so that's how kind of Shakers were organized. And each of these families will have its own farmland. They'll have their own herds of livestock and horses and sheep. They'll have their own mill complexes. Shaker villages in the 19th century, especially before the American Civil War, are very, very prosperous places. They have some of the highest standards of living of anywhere in the new United States. Lots of food, lots of technology. Shakers are not like the Amish. They are all. They're very pro technology. And there's a lot of stories about Shakers and their ingenuity that supposedly developed the clothespin and the circular saw. But, you know, in. For farm families in early, in early 19th century America, you, you sort of calculated your weight on the size of your. Of the barn on your farm. And you can imagine for a society of sometimes 100 to 500 people, Shaker Great barns, many of which survive today at various Shaker museums around the country, were some of the most, the largest and most technologically sophisticated agricultural buildings in the country at the time. So Shakers were wealthy, really wealthy by early 19th century standards.
- [31:16]
Don Wildman
Doug, a lot of people confuse Shakers with Amish, and by the way, Quakers are also confused with the Amish. It's a popular misconception. How do you compare the two?
- [31:27]
Doug Winiarski
The Amish are, of course, Pennsylvania based, outside Philadelphia, with German roots, right, and anti technology. And their Anabaptists, their, their adult baptism practices are what set them apart from what they would call the world or the world's people. The Shakers, of course, grow out of the English tradition. They're an evangelical group. They are celibate, Amish or not. And they are also very pro technology, as we've been talking about. So the Shakers have no concerns with labor saving devices. In fact, they're all in favor of innovations in technology of any form.
- [32:01]
Don Wildman
There you go. Let it be said, no similarity whatsoever
- [32:05]
Doug Winiarski
cultural or technological or theological. Nope.
- [32:08]
Don Wildman
One last theological question and then we'll move on to the notion of utopianism. Is this a Bible based practice? Are they following Christian ideals or is this in worship of their own Ann Lee?
- [32:19]
Doug Winiarski
So it's a mix of both, right? So the Shakers, as we were saying before, is the first American sectarian group really, that's formed on the principle of continuous and ongoing revelation. So it's not that the Bible doesn't count, it's that the Bible is incomplete. The Shakers recognized that the Bible, they did not believe the Bible was infallible. They recognized that the writers of the Bible, the Gospel writers, other early Christian writers, were fallible. They were human. There are errors in translation. So they kind of, they understood the Bible as being important, but they saw their movement as going beyond the Bible and in several different ways. One which we've talked about with the idea that of the Christ Spirit, that Christ could come again, this time in female form. And the Shakers will, in the 19th century, their theology will emerge to suggest that Ann Lee completes the work of salvation that's begun with Jesus of Nazareth. So Jesus begins the process of teaching people the road to salvation, and Lee, with reduction of celibacy, completes that process. They also believe that God is dual as well. So that God has both a male aspect and a female aspect. They call that female aspect Holy Mother wisdom. So the Shakers recognize that there is more to be learned about the Christian tradition than what's contained in the Bible. And that explains the works of their theology.
- [33:39]
Don Wildman
It is so fascinating to me that American history is really created by this kind of pluralistic idea of things, you know, these challenges of norms all over the place at this period of time especially. And yet we so nostalgically look back to when things were simple and people went to church. No, they went to church and they challenged the very nature of church all over the place. I'm not just talking about the Shakers, the Quakers, you name it, they were all over the place, the Mormons, everything at this time. This certainly burned over area of New York, which we need to talk about was an extraordinary revolution in not only religious practice, but also society itself. And that's really the fertile ground of American history, when you get right down to it. At the time, of course, we're coming out of the revolution and so this whole throwing off of tyranny and suddenly the freedom of expressing ourselves as a nation Feeds into this religious ferment.
- [34:34]
Doug Winiarski
Democracy, individualism, capitalism, these are all things that are coming at the turn of the 19th century. And the Shakers benefit from all of them. The idea that you can have an individual religious experience and you can seek out people that have that same experience is one thing. The idea that you can shake off your established religion and choose your own, the idea that there are different religious traditions to choose from, different denominations, these are all the hallmarks of modern American religion. The emergence of a competitive religious marketplace of religious traditions. And Ann Lee is an aggressive marketer of her faith and it. And she capitalizes on basically spiritual shoppers, people who are looking for something new, something that capitalizes on their own individual faith experiences. So in some ways, the idea of Shakerism is something that goes hand like, goes very closely related with those developments of modern America. Individualism, capitalist market economy, and political democracy. The Shakers sort of capitalize on all of them.
- [35:35]
Don Wildman
Like so many new religions, there's persecution involved, Right? What did the Shakers face in the United States?
- [35:43]
Doug Winiarski
They face both physical violence and legal actions. So we saw earlier that Ann Lee experienced a lot of mob violence. So did her earliest English followers. But remember, the Shakers are breaking apart families. So that is to say, when husbands and wives join the Shakers, they have to dissolve their marriage, essentially. They don't get divorced. They just simply live together as separate brothers and sisters. But in situations where one, but not deep, both of a couple joins the Shakers, that's where a lot of legal troubles come in. So there are a fair number of Shaker divorce cases. Many of them are very acrimonious, in which, for example, a husband would join the Shakers and leave the wife behind and then take all of his family's assets with them. It results in a series of legal battles that result in some very stiff state laws that target the Shakers, in which legislatures attempt to create avenues for women who have been abandoned by their husbands, who have joined a celibate religious group like the Shakers to gain back their legal rights that they wouldn't have otherwise as married women. Rights over child custody, rights over control of property. And those laws directly attack the Shakers. So the Shakers are one of the few religious groups in the United States, including the Mormon. And we could put the Mormons in that same area that experience legal action by state legislatures that directly targets their particular and peculiar faith practices.
- [37:07]
Don Wildman
And at the same time, you have this notion carried over from Europe of this utopian community. And this was a very specific thing. That we could work it all out. We still hear about it today. In many ways, the United States becomes a laboratory of this, where we throw off political tyranny and suddenly become this much more organic place where we're going to learn these new ways of living. The Shakers are right on top of that, aren't they?
- [37:31]
Doug Winiarski
One of the things that happens after the American Revolution, in the generations that follow in the early United states of the 19th century, as the United States expands by dispossessing Native Americans and urbanizes and industrializes, is that people feel certain atomization of their lives. They feel ice, they feel suddenly that those, those, the things that, that in the colonial era, that farm family is sort of falling apart. And so one of the ironies is, is that all of these white hot seekers who have stepped out of their inherited religious traditions and converted to Shakerism suddenly find themselves in religious communities where what they really want most is to combine and unite and be associated with like minded people. And they're very much willing to give up their personal freedoms to live in a tightly organized religious community. So the search for community is one of the big tropes in early 19th century American religious history. And we find it in all the utopian experiments are going on at the same time. The brook farms, the fruitlands, the Foyerist phalanxes, right? And then all the sectarian groups, the Rapites and the Harmonites, these are all forms of sort of a combination of work and religion in which people are living in real tight communities because that sense of community gives them a sense of purpose and mission in a rapidly changing America.
- [38:56]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [39:04]
Adam Grant
Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth, eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.compenven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details.
- [39:37]
Bleacher Report Narrator
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- [40:13]
Don Wildman
It's very simple when you come right down to the what you mentioned, these farm families. Once you have factories beginning in the cities, especially in New England, you have kids that are saying, I'm not going to do this farming thing. My own father was a, was a non farming Quaker in the turn of the 20th century. He said, no thanks. And that breaks up the families, of course. And that happens on a widespread basis. And that is directly affecting the feeling of America at the time. And religion is stepping into that reach. The Shaker movement peaks in about the mid 19th century. How many are we talking about? How many people joined this movement?
- [40:52]
Doug Winiarski
So at its peak, Shakerism has about roughly two dozen Shaker villages. There's kind of a second act which Shakerism expands to the west. So it begins as a New England phenomenon. Because of the second Great Awakening revivals in Kentucky and Ohio in the early 1800s, there are now half dozen communal villages in Kentucky, Ohio, and as far west as Indiana. Shakers will eventually set up satellite communities in Philadelphia, in Florida, in Michigan. But at its high water mark in about the 1840s, I think scholars would say somewhere between 4 and 6,000 people. You know, if you look at the Census records for 1840 or so, probably. But overall, if you consider all of the people that spent time in a Shaker community in the 19th century, we're probably talking as many as about 25,000 people at one time for a couple years, maybe just a couple months, have spent time living and worshiping in a Shaker community.
- [41:49]
Don Wildman
Yes, well, they had to be attracted to that prosperity that was going on in those communities. I'm sure for a lot of people, that was amazing. What is the era of manifestations? What does that refer to?
- [41:59]
Doug Winiarski
So that high water mark period of the 1840s is also a period of real religious renewal among the Shakers that scholars, that the Shakers themselves called the new era or the period of mother's work, scholars say call it the era of manifestations. It comes at a time when Ann Lee's first converts, those young husbands and wives that had joined the Shaker movement in the 1780s and 90s, are aging and dying. And their children that they may have brought in tow with them, may or may not have spent their lives as Shakers. They are also now kind of in their 50s or 60s at the time. So Shakers must reach a demographic moment where it needs to turn itself over and attract a new group of believers, because as a celibate community, they're not going to grow their own followers. They're going to need to gather those people out of what they would call the world's people. In that time period in the 1840s, the Shakers go through a dramatic period of about a decade in which they receive an inordinate number of new revelations in which gifted young Shakers that they called instruments received communications from the spirit world. And it's stunning. Shakers began talking again to the spirit of mother Anlee or the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. They would speak to angels. They'd speak to the celebrated dead George Washington, the marquis de Lafayette. Tecumseh started coming to Shaker villages with new messages and new revelations, one of the greatest outpourings of supernatural phenomena in American history. During the 1840s, the Shakers wrote down thousands, tens of thousands of pages, dream narratives of new revelations. They've developed new rituals. They wrote down thousands of new songs and hymns. They developed new dancing rituals. And probably the thing that many of your listeners will know the most, they produced many works of stunning spirit drawings, drawings describing works of art in which Shaker instruments essentially channeled what they saw in the spirit world and put it down in ink, on ink and in paper. And many of these things turn up in museum exhibitions all the time. They're fascinating works of art.
- [44:11]
Don Wildman
Yeah. How does this. How is Shakerism affected by the civil War? On what side do they fall and. Or are they involved in this at all, given their pacifism?
- [44:22]
Doug Winiarski
So the Shakers famously petitioned Abraham Lincoln to not serve in the war because they are, you know, committed pacifists. At the same time, Shakers also had, for the time, relatively advanced ideas about race. So they were anti slavery, although not necessarily abolitionists. That is to say, they opposed slavery. There were black Shakers from the very beginning. Some of the earliest converts in at Watervliet in near Albany, New York, were black Shakers. Some of those western Shaker villages that got established in Ohio and Kentucky took on black members. Sometimes Shakers actually purchased the emancipation of enslaved people in Kentucky. And so during the civil War, a couple things happen to the Shakers. Those. Those Kentucky communities are on the front lines of the civil War, and they experience a lot of difficulties, especially South Union Shaker village in Southside, Kentucky. Union Confederate armies march through the Shaker villages. Shaker buildings are used as hospitals. They're forced to feed and clothe and help, you know, both armies as they, you know, as the tide of war changes, I think in the long term, the impact of the Civil War on the Shakerism is a negative one, because in some ways the Civil War completes, you know, at least it, it quickly advances the industrialization of the United States. So many things change. The emergence of canned foods and transportation infrastructure. Everything just grows at such a rapid pace during the American Civil War that the things that made Shaker villages these reserves for people where you could live a high standard of living. If you're willing to conform and unite with Shaker principles, you could be sure that your family would be fed, clothed and taken care of. That world, I think, is easier to find after the American. Yes, after the American Civil War. And as a result, the allure of Shakerism, I think the allure of communalism as a whole kind of declines after the American Civil War and during the Gilded Age. And I think Shakerism, I think, winds up. Then most of its members wind up melting away. So after the American Civil War, Starting in about 1850, we see a really sharp decline in the membership of all the different Shaker villages by the end of the 19th century, by the turn of the 20th century, most of those Shaker villagers are beginning to shutter their doors and sell their properties.
- [46:43]
Don Wildman
Yeah, well, it's what happens to America in the 1800s, you really find that religion is replaced by money making as a. As mercantilism becomes its own kind of religion. And I don't mean that glibly. I mean religion was always about self improvement, about finding unity with God in order to improve your life and find purpose in your life. Suddenly money making becomes that force of nature, if you will, in America. And it slowly but surely to this day, very day replaces that kind of spiritualism with, with another purpose. It was fascinating, I guess, mark the Civil War as kind of the peak or beginning of the decline of Shakerism. Again, the running joke is, well, you can't build a movement if people can't make new members, you know, being the celibacy. But in fact, that celibacy has a kind of a very noble feeling. Quakers practice the same thing, as a matter of fact, in the fact that they, they're allowed to have sex, but it's, it's about not proselytizing. The idea is people need to find this movement on, on their own in order for the movement to build in its strongest form. That's kind of what this is all about, isn't it?
- [47:49]
Doug Winiarski
Well, I mean, it's often the knock against Shakerism that it's difficult to sustain a movement based on celibacy. But ask the Catholic Church and its monastic communities how well they fared over the last 2,000 years, and you'll probably see that it can be done. Today, Shakerism survives at Sabat Day Lake in southern Maine, one of the original Shaker villages that was formed during the 1790s, where brother Arnold Hod and sister June Carpenter and Sister April is a brand new novitiate member, still maintain the traditions. And what Brother Arnold often says is that Shakers is a living tradition. He actually doesn't see the tradition as being in decline. It continues to do its work in some ways, regardless of the numbers. And if you look at Sabbath Day Lake, if you were to go and visit Sabbath Day Lake today, you would see dozens and dozens of non Shaker members who are fascinated by the Shakers, want to devote their time and volunteer help on the farm, worship every Sunday with Brother Arnold. They love singing the music. So in some ways, Shakerism is very much alive and well in our world today. Just last year marked the 250th anniversary of Ann Lee's arrival in North America. Sabbath Day Lake sponsored a conference in which both Maine senators were there, the Postal Service issued a series of stamps. There were three days of lectures and discussions, really well attended. And Brother Arnold held forth on what's next for Shakerism. And he sees it as an ongoing and a living tradition. So he pushes back really hard against that narrative that the Shakers are in decline. And point of fact, Shakerism owns pride of place as being the oldest and longest lived sectarian movement in American history, and the only one that's really, I think we could say has done better than the Shakers. Has been the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons. But of course, Mormonism has morphed into something that they're no longer. They've moved long past their sectarian roots with Joseph Smith. They're now a full fledged global church. So, I mean, I think they're in a different sort of category of classification. Shakers are unique in that regard.
- [49:54]
Don Wildman
Every one of the big churches of Christianity and elsewhere have, and certainly Judaism have gone through their own reformations, and that split has then reunites down the road. In most cases, that did not happen with Shakerism, and that has a lot to do with it. Doesn't it? They stuck to their guns on what they believed.
- [50:13]
Doug Winiarski
For the most part, yes. Although in the late 19th and 20th century, I think there are changes in Shakerism that are carried down to today. So Shakers no longer engage in dancing to attend a Shaker meeting. It's going to look a little bit more like your Quaker quietism, in which people will sit and wait for leadings of the spirit. There'll be scripture reading and singing. So the Shakers have given up on that. They remain celibate. But there's. There's a kind of a. I think in the. After the Civil War, many Shaker communities made a lot of concessions to a consumerist American, you know, economy. You can see it in their architecture. The simpleness and the plainness of their architecture gives way to sort of more Victorian styles. You can see Shakers drive in automobiles and they put organs in their. In their meeting houses. So they began to sort of go a little more mainstream, a little. Look a lot more like a late 19th century American Protestant denomination. And I think part of that has helped to buoy the church in a time when things were changing so dramatically. The numbers were going down so quickly.
- [51:16]
Don Wildman
I have to understand. I mean, most people recognize Shakerism as an aesthetic, a kind of style, especially to do with Shaker tables and furniture. How conscious were the Shakers in creating that style? Or is that just something that kind of evolved and then was later on labeled?
- [51:33]
Doug Winiarski
So early on, the Shakers developed something they called the Millennial Laws. This was part of the institutionalization of shakers in the 19th century that governed everything from the kind of paint you could use, the colors you could use, the way the villages would be laid out, what kind of clothing you could wear, how much you could read, all that kind of stuff. So the Shakers were very clear in terms of governing its members and in terms of issues of style. But in the 20th century, Shakerism was rediscovered as a style by an art collector and early scholar and a guy named Edward Deming Andrews, who in the 1920s and 30s began collecting Shaker antiques as many of those Shaker communities were closing in upstate New York and western Massachusetts. Andrews went around collecting Shaker chairs and tables. And there were a series of exhibitions of Shaker art at major New York galleries like the Whitney Museum in New York, where Shaker clean lines and especially their visionary art of the era manifestations became thought to be elements of a sort of a new kind of modernist aesthetic that was taking hold in America in the early 20th century. And that's where this sort of Shaker chic emerges. And so ever since Edward Deming Andrews came along in the 1920s and 30s, there's been a strong market for Shaker antiques and collecting Shaker pageants, singing Shaker songs. One scholar calls it Shaker fever in the 19th century. And it goes hand in hand with other things that are going on in American history at the time. The Colonial revival, the emergence of Colonial Williamsburg, the emergence of living history museums. Shaker villages were thought to be those kinds of places where Americans could get in touch with their early roots, but in a way that seems strangely modern to them.
- [53:18]
Don Wildman
Yes, exactly. Well, I worked for a group called Pompanoosick Mills. I was part of their early stores up in Vermont. And indeed, one of their major influences is still Shaker Designs, and you can see that all over the place. It's very fascinating. Is there any future of Shakerism, do you think? Will it rise again at all?
- [53:34]
Doug Winiarski
Well, as I said before, there's a new Shaker member at Sabbath Day Lake. And I think as long as people are fascinated with the Shaker's alternative spirituality, with the idea of a kind of ascetic life, a life set apart from the. From the busyness and the commercialism and the consumerism of American life, as long as there are people that are fascinated by that impulse, that communitarian impulse in American history, the Shakers will do just fine. Keep in mind that the Shakers were never a large group. I mean, 25,000 sounds like a lot of people over the course of the 19th century. And a couple of dozen villages scattered from Maine to Indiana sounds like a lot. But in truth, you know, the Shakers have always been a tiny minority. They've always been that alternative voice calling Americans back to their. To. To alternative values. Pacifism, racial justice, gender equality. All of those things are what Brother Arnold would call the life of the Christ Spirit. Right? And as long as people are interested in that, there will be Shakers.
- [54:38]
Don Wildman
For a pacifist organization, they punched way above their weight. Douglas Winiarski is a professor of religious studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Darkness Falls upon the Land of Light, Experiencing Religious awakenings in 18th century New England, which was much awarded. Doug, where can people find more about you and what kind of work is coming up?
- [55:00]
Doug Winiarski
Your listeners can find me on the web@douglaswinjarski.com they can find lots of my articles and essays on Shakerism there. I'm working on a new book that's about to come out with University of Massachusetts Press. It's a book about. It's a collection of essays written with a group of colleagues on the era of manifestations, that period of intense spiritualistic activity.
- [55:20]
Don Wildman
Well, I hope we have you back to talk about just that. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much.
- [55:23]
Doug Winiarski
Thanks so much, Don. This is great. Appreciate it. Take care.
- [55:28]
Don Wildman
Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.
- [56:03]
Adam Grant
Hey, this is Adam Grant, host of ted's podcast Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth, eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.compenven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details.
- [56:36]
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