The Shakers

The Shakers began in the industrial north of England. Around 1747 a small group led by James and Jane Wardley, former Quakers, met near Manchester to wait for the second coming of Christ. Their worship was loud and physical: members trembled, shouted, sang and danced as the spirit moved them, earning the nickname “Shaking Quakers”. A note on terms: scholars often prefer “new religious movement” to the label “cult”, which is contested and often pejorative, and in any case the Shakers are generally regarded as a respected Christian community.

Among the Wardleys’ followers was Ann Lee, born in Manchester in 1736, the daughter of a blacksmith. She worked in textile mills and could not read or write. Married to a blacksmith, she bore four children, all of whom died in infancy, a loss that many historians connect with her later conviction that sexual relations lay at the root of human sin. She was imprisoned more than once for disturbing Sabbath worship, and during a spell in prison in 1770 she reported visions that revealed to her the original sin of Adam and Eve. Her followers came to see her as their leader and called her Mother Ann.

In 1774, guided by a further vision, Ann Lee sailed from Liverpool to New York with eight followers, among them her brother William Lee and James Whittaker; her husband, Abraham Standerin, also made the crossing but soon parted from her. After a difficult start, the group settled in 1776 at Niskayuna, later called Watervliet, near Albany. They attracted converts during a religious revival in 1779–1780, and from 1781 to 1783 Ann Lee toured New England preaching. Her pacifism and English origins made her suspect during the Revolutionary War, and she and her companions faced mob violence. She died at Watervliet in 1784.

Much of what is known about Ann Lee comes from testimonies gathered by Believers decades after her death and published in 1816, along with hostile accounts by former members and opponents. Historians therefore treat many details of her life with caution. What is clear is that she was a charismatic preacher who inspired fierce loyalty, that she taught confession, celibacy and separation from the world, and that the small band she led survived her death to become an organised church. Her successor James Whittaker, who had come with her from England, held the group together from 1784 until his death in 1787.

After Ann Lee’s death, the American convert Joseph Meacham and later Lucy Wright gave the movement its lasting shape. Believers were gathered into villages, each divided into “families” of several dozen people who shared a dwelling, workshops and land. From 1787 New Lebanon in New York, later called Mount Lebanon, served as the central ministry. Under Lucy Wright, missionaries carried the faith west, and new villages arose in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

Shaker life rested on a few firm principles. Believers practised celibacy, living as brothers and sisters. They confessed their sins on joining, held property in common and avoided war. Men and women were seen as spiritual equals, a conviction rooted in their belief that God was both father and mother and that Christ’s spirit had appeared in a woman as well as a man. Each family and each village was led jointly by elders and eldresses. In the dwelling houses men and women used separate doors and staircases, and daily life followed a carefully ordered routine of work, meals and worship.

Worship itself became the most striking feature of Shaker life. The early ecstatic movements developed into ordered dances, marches and shuffling steps performed by rows of brothers and sisters. Thousands of songs survive. In the Era of Manifestations, from the late 1830s to around 1850, young members in particular reported visions and messages from the spirit world, and sisters such as Hannah Cohoon produced the delicate “gift drawings” now prized as folk art.

Work was considered a form of worship, captured in the saying attributed to Ann Lee: “Hands to work, and hearts to God.” Shaker villages ran prosperous farms, sold garden seeds and herbal medicines, and made the plain, carefully crafted furniture and oval boxes for which they are famous. They welcomed technical improvements, and the flat broom is generally credited to Shaker makers, though many other inventions attributed to them rest on weaker evidence.

The Shakers reached their height in the 1840s and 1850s. Estimates vary, but historians put their numbers in the low thousands, perhaps 4,000 to 6,000, spread across some eighteen or nineteen principal villages from Maine to Kentucky. After the Civil War the society shrank steadily. Celibacy meant that it depended entirely on converts and adopted children, and many children raised in Shaker villages chose to leave as adults. Industrialisation undercut Shaker crafts, and new state agencies took over the care of orphans.

Village after village closed, and the remaining Believers were increasingly women. Properties were sold or passed into new hands, and several, such as Hancock in Massachusetts, Canterbury in New Hampshire and Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, became museums. When the last sister at Canterbury died in 1992, Sabbathday Lake in Maine became the only active Shaker community. A handful of members still live there, keeping up worship, farming and a library and museum open to visitors.

The Shakers left a mark on American culture far beyond their numbers. Their furniture influenced modern design, and their villages are among the best-preserved historic communities in the United States. The song “Simple Gifts”, composed by Elder Joseph Brackett in 1848, reached a wide audience when Aaron Copland used its melody in Appalachian Spring in 1944.

Historians also value the Shakers as an early experiment in equality between men and women, in which women held real authority long before most churches allowed it. Their story is one of the longest-lived communal experiments in American history, an attempt to build heaven on earth through order, work and shared faith.

Unlike many movements in this section, the Shakers ended not in catastrophe but in a slow and dignified decline. They are remembered with respect by scholars, neighbours and visitors, and their own literature, songs and buildings speak for a community that sought, in its own words, to live as a pattern of the kingdom of heaven.