The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (commonly called the Shakers) was organized in the United States in 1774 under the prophetic leadership of Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), who had fled religious persecution in England. Lee, the daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, had little education and worked in a textile mill and an infirmary. In 1758 she joined a religious society formed by two dissenting Quakers, James and Jane Wardley. The Wardleys formed a group that was derisively known as the "Shaking Quakers" because they sang, dance, and spoke in tongues in imitation of the practices of the French enthusiastic group, the Cevenoles, who had come to England in the early eighteenth century. In 1762 Lee married; she bore four children, all of whom died in infancy. Deeply troubled by their deaths, Lee believed they were punishment for her sins, particularly sins of the flesh. Sin had entered the world, according to Lee, when Adam and Eve had sexual knowledge of each other.
In 1770 Lee was acknowledged as the leader of the Shakers. The Shaking Quakers took to the streets of Manchester preaching a gospel of repentance, regeneration, and the celibate life, attacked the worldliness of the churches, and refused to take oaths or observe the Sabbath. They were persecuted for their beliefs, and Ann Lee was imprisoned in 1772–1773. She later stated that Christ had appeared to her in prison, telling her that she was Jesus Christ in the female form. In 1774 eight members left for America. Lee believed that it would be in the New World that her vision would take hold and that a chosen people awaited her arrival.
After a brief stay in New York City, Lee and her small band went north to Albany. In 1776 they established their first congregation at nearby Watervliet, New York, and began to attract other converts by their preaching and celibate lifestyle. In the Shakers' early days, they gathered for enthusiastic meetings, with Lee preaching the Shaker gospel throughout New England from 1781 to 1783. They had occasional conflicts with local authorities, who suspected the Shakers' pacifist tendencies and thought they were British spies. The Shaker societies that developed over the next century held several core beliefs: that Mother Ann Lee had ushered in a period of spiritual rebirth; that she was the manifestation of Jesus Christ in spiritual form; that salvation would come through the Shaker family; and that sexual intercourse was at the root of evil and a covenant with the devil.
There were five separate periods in Shaker history. The first (1774–1783) was characterized by Lee's messianic style and premillennial beliefs. In the second period (1784–1803), two elders, Joseph Meachem and Lucy Wright, became leaders of the sect, organizing new colonies, requiring the membership to sign formal covenants, and regularizing the sect's practices. During the third phase (1803–1837), the Shakers moved westward, establishing colonies in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky under the guidance and direction of the central ministry at Watervliet. By 1826 nineteen permanent communities had been established. At Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, for example, the Center Family Dwelling House contained forty rooms and took ten years to complete. In this period the communities were organized into "families" of thirty to one hundred members. Within each "family" there were deacons and deaconesses who oversaw the temporal work while elders and eldresses supervised the spiritual life. An additional layer of elders (two men, two women) led the community and reported to the elders at the lead ministry in New Lebanon, New York.
As the Shaker societies grew and the older generation of Shakers passed away, a fourth phase (1837–1848) of intense spiritual and religious revivals, known as "Mother Ann's Work," occurred in all the societies. This revitalization movement was part of the evangelical upsurge following the Second Great Awakening, a period of renewed religious revivals in the early nineteenth century. During this phase members conducted seances, made spirit drawings and paintings, and created songs and poems to exalt Mother Ann Lee's mission. However, revitalization proved to be disruptive for the Shakers. In the final phase (1848 to 1875), the Shaker societies began to lose members and found it increasingly difficult to recruit new ones, particularly males. Earlier they had been able to attract adult converts and accept orphans abandoned by their families. At their height in the 1850s, the Shakers had about four thousand members in over twenty separate colonies. By 1880 the membership stood at 1,850, by 1900 at 850, and by the mid-1930s less than a hundred, as many of the communities closed their doors.
See also Quakers; Religion: Overview; Revivals and Revivalism.
Brewer, Priscilla J. Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986.
Fogarty, Robert S. Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Kern, Louis J. An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.
Robert S. Fogarty