Shakers
SHAKERS. Members of the American religious group the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing were popularly called Shakers. One of the longest-lived and most influential religious communitarian groups in America, the Shakers originated in 1747 near Manchester, England, in a breakaway from the Quakers led by Jane and James Wardley. The group may also have been influenced by Camisard millenarians who had fled from France to England to escape the persecutions that followed revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The nickname Shaking Quaker, or Shaker, was applied to the movement because of its unstructured and highly emotional services, during which members sang, shouted, danced, spoke in tongues, and literally shook with emotion. Under the leadership of Ann Lee, a Manchester factory worker who became convinced that celibacy was essential for salvation, the core of the Shakers emigrated to America in 1774 and settled two years later near Albany, New York. Until Lee's death in 1784 the Shakers remained a loosely knit group that adhered to Lee's personal leadership and to what they viewed as a millenarian restoration and fulfillment of the early Christian faith.
During the 1780s and 1790s under the leadership of two of Ann Lee's American converts, Joseph Meacham and Lucy Wright, Shakerism developed from a charismatic movement into a more routinized organization. Meacham and Wright oversaw the establishment of parallel and equal men's and women's orders. Adherents lived together in celibate communities and practiced communal ownership of property inspired by the Christian communism of Acts 2:44–45. Supreme authority was vested in the ministry at New Lebanon, New York, usually two men and two women, one of whom headed the entire society. Each settlement was divided into "families"—smaller, relatively self-sufficient communities of thirty to one hundred men and women living together under the same roof but strictly separated in all their activities. By 1800, eleven settlements with sixteen hundred members were functioning in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine. A second wave of expansion, inspired by the Kentucky Revival and drawing heavily on the indefatigable Richard McNemar, a new light Presbyterian minister who converted to Shakerism, led to the establishment of seven additional settlements, in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, by 1826.
The high point of Shaker membership and the last major effort to revitalize the society came during the decade of spiritual manifestations that began in 1837. Frequently called "Mother Ann's work" because many of the revelations purportedly came from the spirit of Ann Lee and showed her continuing concern for her followers, the period saw a rich outpouring of creativity in new forms of worship, song, and dance, including extreme trance and visionary phenomena. Following the great Millerite disappointments of 1843 and 1844 when the world failed to come to a literal end, hundreds of Millerites joined the Shakers, bringing membership to a peak of some six thousand by the late 1840s. Thereafter the group entered into a long, slow decline. The loss of internal momentum and the changing conditions of external society led the Shakers to be viewed increasingly not as a dynamic religious movement but as a pleasant anachronism in which individuals who could not function in the larger society could find refuge. As late as 1900 there were more than one thousand Shakers, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, only Sabbathday Lake, Maine, remained as an active community, with very few people living as Shakers there.
As the largest and most successful religious communitarian group in nineteenth-century America, the Shakers attracted the attention of numerous visitors, writers, and creators of more ephemeral communal experiments. The Shakers were known for their neat, well-planned, and successful villages; their functional architecture, simple furniture, and fine crafts; their distinctive songs, dances, and rituals; and their ingenuity in agriculture and mechanical invention. They also were sometimes criticized because of their sophisticated and highly unorthodox theology, which stressed a dual godhead combining male and female elements equally; perfectionism and continuing revelation; and the necessity of celibacy for the highest religious life. They were unique among American religious groups in giving women formal equality with men at every level of religious leadership, and they created a fully integrated subculture that has increasingly come to be viewed with interest and respect.
Lee, Ann.
Bibliography
Among the numerous scholarly treatments of the Shakers, the most important are the studies by Edward Deming Andrews, particularly his The People Called Shakers, new enl. ed. (New York, 1963). Andrews is excellent on Shaker material culture, especially furniture and crafts, but weaker on religious motivation. Another popular historical overview is Marguerite Fellows Melcher's The Shaker Adventure (Princeton, N.J., 1941). For the most incisive analysis of the group, see Constance Rourke's "The Shakers," in her The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, edited by Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1942). A provocative but sometimes misleading analysis that attempts to place Shakerism within a larger social and conceptual framework is Henri Desroche's The American Shakers: From Neo-Christianity to Presocialism (Amherst, Mass., 1971). Mary L. Richmond has compiled and annotated Shaker Literature: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Hanover, N.H., 1977), a comprehensive bibliography of printed sources by and about the Shakers that supersedes all previous reference works of its kind. Richmond lists the major repositories at which each printed item may be found. She also includes information on collections of manuscripts. The most important of these are at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and are available on microfilm from their respective libraries.
Benjamin Seth Youngs's The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (Lebanon, Ohio, 1808) was the first and most comprehensive Shaker theological and historical overview. A shorter and more accessible treatment is Calvin Green and Seth Y. Wells's A Summary View of the Millennial Church or United Society of Believers (Commonly Called Shakers) (Albany, N.Y., 1823). The most valuable primary account of Ann Lee and the earliest Shakers is the rare Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee and the Elders with Her, edited by Rufus Bishop and Seth Y. Wells (Hancock, Mass., 1816). Among the many accounts by Shaker seceders and apostates, the most comprehensive and historically oriented is Thomas Brown's An Account of the People Called Shakers: Their Faith, Doctrine, and Practice (Troy, N.Y., 1812). Anna White and Leila S. Taylor's Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (Columbus, Ohio, 1904) presents a thorough and insightful history of the Shakers from the perspective of the late nineteenth century.
New Sources
Morgan, John H. The United Inheritance: The Shaker Adventure in Communal Life. Bristol, Ind., 2002.
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