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The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, more commonly known as the Shakers, are a Millenarianism Restorationism Christianity sect founded in England and then organized in the United States in the 1780s. They were initially known as "Shaking Quakers" because of their ecstatic behavior during worship services.
Espousing Egalitarianism ideals, the Shakers practice a Celibacy and communal utopian lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of Gender equality, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s. They are also known for their simple living, architecture, technological innovation, music, and Shaker furniture. Women took on spiritual leadership roles alongside men, including founding leaders such as Jane Wardley, Ann Lee, and Lucy Wright. The Shakers emigrated from England and settled in Revolutionary colonial America, with an initial settlement at Watervliet, New York (present-day Colonie), in 1774.
During the mid-19th century, an Era of Manifestations resulted in a period of dances, gift drawings, and gift songs inspired by spiritual revelations. At its peak in the mid-19th century, there were 2,000–4,000 Shaker believers living in 18 major communities and numerous smaller, often short-lived communities. External and internal societal changes in the mid- and late 19th century resulted in the thinning of the Shaker community as members left or died with few converts to the faith to replace them.
By 1920, there were only 12 Shaker communities remaining in the United States. , there is only one active Shaker village: Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, in Maine. Consequently, many of the other Shaker settlements are now museums. there are two members.
Future leader Ann Lee and her parents were early members of the sect. This group of "charismatic" Christians became the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (USBCSA). Their beliefs were based upon spiritualism and included the notion that they received messages from the Holy Spirit which were expressed during religious revivals. They also experienced what they interpreted as messages from God during silent meditations and became known as "Shaking Quakers" because of the ecstatic nature of their worship services. They believed in the renunciation of sinful acts and that the end of the world was near.
Meetings were first held in Bolton, England, where the articulate preacher, Jane Wardley, urged her followers to:
Other meetings were then held in Manchester, Meretown (also spelled Mayortown), Chester and other places near Manchester. As their numbers grew, members began to be persecuted, mobbed, and stoned; Lee was imprisoned in Manchester. The members looked to women for leadership, believing that the second coming of Christ would be through a woman. In 1770, Ann Lee was revealed in "manifestation of Divine light" to be the second coming of Christ and was called Mother Ann.
She said:
Having supposedly received a revelation, on May 19, 1774, Ann Lee and eight of her followers sailed from Liverpool for colonial America. Ann and her husband Abraham Stanley, brother William Lee, niece Nancy Lee, James Whittaker, father and son John Hocknell and Richard Hocknell, James Shephard, and Mary Partington traveled to colonial America and landed in New York City. Abraham Stanley abandoned Ann Lee shortly thereafter and remarried. The remaining Shakers settled in Watervliet, New York, in 1776. Mother Ann's hope for the Shakers in America was represented in a vision: "I saw a large tree, every leaf of which shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch, representing the Church of Christ, which will yet be established in this land." Unable to swear an Oath of Allegiance, as it was against their faith, the members were imprisoned for about six months. Since they were only imprisoned because of their faith, this raised sympathy of citizens and thus helped to spread their religious beliefs. Mother Ann, revealed as the "second coming" of Christ, traveled throughout the eastern states, preaching her gospel views.William J. Haskett. Shakerism Unmasked, Or The History of the Shakers .... author, E.H. Walkley, printer; 1828. p. 25–34.
Joseph Meacham brought Lucy Wright (1760–1821) into the Ministry to serve with him and together they developed the Shaker form of communal living (religious communism). By 1793 property had been made a "consecrated whole" in each Shaker community.
Shakers developed written covenants in the 1790s. Those who signed the covenant had to confess their sins, consecrate their property and their labor to the society, and live as celibates. If they were married before joining the society, their marriages ended when they joined. A few less-committed Believers lived in "noncommunal orders" as Shaker sympathizers who preferred to remain with their families. The Shakers never forbade marriage for such individuals, but considered it less perfect than the celibate state.
In the 5 years between 1787 and 1792, the Shakers gathered into eight more communities in addition to the Watervliet and New Lebanon villages: Hancock, Harvard, Shirley, and Tyringham Shaker Villages in Massachusetts; Enfield Shaker Village in Connecticut; Canterbury and Enfield in New Hampshire; and Sabbathday Lake and Alfred Shaker Village in Maine.
On April 12 of 1805, Benjamin Youngs and two companions held the first ceremony west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was held at the cabin of James Beedle, East of Lebanon, Ohio. In 2019, the cabin was relocated, by the Warren County Historical Society, to its current site next to Harmon Museum in Lebanon, Ohio.
Mother Lucy Wright introduced new hymns and dances to make sermons more lively. She also helped write Benjamin S. Youngs' book The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (1808).
Shaker missionaries entered Kentucky and Ohio after the Cane Ridge, Kentucky revival of 1801–1803, which was an outgrowth of the Logan County, Kentucky, Revival of 1800. From 1805 to 1807, they founded Shaker societies at Union Village, Ohio; South Union, Logan County, Kentucky; and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (in Mercer County, Kentucky). In 1806, a Shaker village, named Watervliet, after the New York town that was the site of the first Shaker settlement, was established in what is today Kettering, Ohio, surviving until 1900 when its remaining adherents joined the Union Village Shaker settlement. Ohio roadside historical marker #6–57, Watervliet Shaker Community. "Beavercreek Living" website article on "Watervliet, Vale of Peace...", with photo of and text from roadside historical marker (retrieved March 2, 2022). In 1824, the Whitewater Shaker Settlement was established in southwestern Ohio. The westernmost Shaker community was located at West Union (called Busro because it was on Busseron Creek) on the Wabash River a few miles north of Vincennes in Knox County, Indiana.
The expression of "spirit gifts" or messages were realized in "gift drawings" made by Hannah Cohoon, Polly Reed, Polly Collins, and other Shaker sisters. A number of those drawings remain as important artifacts of Shaker folk art.Jane F. Crosthwaite, "The Spirit Drawings of Hannah Cahoon: Window on the Shakers and their Folk Art," Communal Societies 7 (1987): 1–15.David A. Schorsch and Ruth Wolfe. ''A Cutwork Tree of Life in the manner of Hannah Cohoon. AFANews. February 23, 2013. Retrieved March 23, 2014.
Isaac N. Youngs, the scribe and historian for the New Lebanon, New York, Church Family of Shakers, preserved a great deal of information on the era of manifestations, which Shakers referred to as Mother Ann's Work, in his Domestic Journal, his diary, Sketches of Visions, and his history, A Concise View of the Church of God.Domestic Journal of Daily Occurrences (1834–46), New York State Library ms.; Sketches of Visions, 1838, Western Reserve Historical Society Cathcart Shaker Collection ms. VIII:B-113; A Concise View of the Church of God and of Christ on Earth, Edward Deming Andrews Memorial Shaker Collection, Winterthur Museum Library, ms. 861.
In addition, Shakers preserved thousands of spirit communications still extant in collections now held by the Berkshire Athenaeum, Fruitlands Museums Library, Hamilton College Library, Hancock Shaker Village, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, New York State Library, the Shaker Library at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, Western Reserve Historical Society, Williams College Archives, Winterthur Museum Library, and other repositories.
The end of the Civil War brought large changes to the Shaker communities. One of the most important changes was the postwar economy. The Shakers had a hard time competing in the industrialized economy that followed the Civil War. With prosperity falling, converts were hard to find.
Their message, surviving over two centuries in the United States, reads in part as follows:
Shakerism is not, as many would claim, an anachronism; nor can it be dismissed as the final sad flowering of 19th century liberal utopian fervor. Shakerism has a message for this present age–a message as valid today as when it was first expressed. It teaches above all else that God is Love and that our most solemn duty is to show forth that God who is love in the World.
In 1992, Canterbury Shaker Village closed, leaving only Sabbathday Lake open. Eldress Bertha of the Canterbury Village closed their official membership book in 1957, not recognizing the younger people living in other Shaker Communities as members.
On January 2, 2017, Sister Frances Carr died aged 89 at the Sabbathday community, leaving only two remaining Shakers: Brother Arnold Hadd, age 58, and Sister June Carpenter, 77. A profile of the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, published in The New York Times in September 2024, described Brother Arnold, aged 67 and Sister June, aged 86, preparing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Ann Lee's arrival in New York. Brother Arnold said: “We’ve survived 250 years. We are looking forward as much as our ancestors did to the next — whatever that involves. All we have to do is be ready.”
The Shakers at Sabbathday Lake "stressed the autonomy of each local community" and therefore do accept new converts to Shakerism into their community. This Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community receives around two enquiries every week.
After 1821, there was no one single leader, but rather a small nucleus of Ministry elders and eldresses with authority over all the Shaker villages, each with their own teams of elders and eldresses who were subordinate to the Ministry.
The Shaker Ministry continued to build the society after Lucy Wright died in 1821:
Subsequent members of the Shaker Ministry included:
Ann Lee's doctrine was simple: confession of sins was the door to the spiritual regeneration, and absolute celibacy was the rule of life.Edward D. Andrews, The People Called Shakers. Dover Publications, 2011, , p. 12. Shakers were so chaste that men and women could not shake hands or pass one another on the stairs.Edward D. Andrews, The People Called Shakers. Dover Publications, 2011, pp. 244–245.
When Shaker youths, girls and boys, reached the age of 21, they were free to leave or to remain with the Shakers. Unwilling to remain celibate, many chose to leave; today there are thousands of descendants of Shaker-raised seceders.Glendyne R. Wergland, "Our Shaker Ancestors", NEHGS New England Ancestors, 7.5–6 (2006): 21–27.
In their labor, Shakers followed traditional gender work-related roles. Their homes were segregated by sex, as were women and men's work areas. Women worked indoors spinning, weaving, cooking, sewing, cleaning, washing, and making or packaging goods for sale. In good weather, groups of Shaker women were outdoors, gardening and gathering wild herbs for sale or home consumption. Men worked in the fields doing farm work and in their shops at crafts and trades.
Shakers ran a variety of businesses to support their communities; many Shaker villages had their own tanneries. The Shaker goal in their labor was perfection. Ann Lee's followers preserved her admonitions about work:
Mother Ann also cautioned them against getting into debt.Bishop and Wells, comps., Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee (Hancock, Massachusetts: J. Talcott and J. Deming, Junrs., 1816), 264–268.
Shaker craftsmen were known for a style of Shaker furniture that was plain in style, durable, and functional.Jerry V. Grant and Douglas R. Allen, Shaker Furniture Makers (Pittsfield, Massachusetts: Hancock Shaker Village, 1989). Shaker chairs were usually mass-produced because a great number of them were needed to seat all the Shakers in a community.
Around the time of the American Civil War, the Shakers at Mount Lebanon, New York, increased their production and marketing of Shaker chairs. They were so successful that several furniture companies produced their own versions of "Shaker" chairs. Because of the quality of their craftsmanship, original Shaker furniture is costly. Shakers won respect and admiration for their productive farms and orderly communities. Their industry brought about many like Babbitt metal, the rotary harrow, the circular saw, the clothespin, the Shaker peg, the broom, the wheel-driven washing machine, a machine for setting teeth in textile cards, a threshing machine, metal pens, a new type of fire engine, a machine for matching boards, numerous innovations in waterworks, planing machinery, a hernia truss, silk reeling machinery, small looms for weaving palm leaf, machines for processing broom corn, ball-and-socket tilters for chair legs, and a number of other useful inventions.Edward D. Andrews and Faith Andrews, Work and Worship: The Economic Order of the Shakers, (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1974), 152–159. Even prolific Shaker inventors like Tabitha Babbit did not patent their inventions before or after putting them into practice, which has complicated subsequent efforts by 20th century historians to assign priority.M. Stephen Miller (1 January 2010). Inspired Innovations: A Celebration of Shaker Ingenuity. University Press of New England. . pp. 181, 184.
Shakers were the first large producers of medicinal herbs in the United States, and pioneers in the sale of seeds in paper packets.Andrews and Andrews, Work and Worship: The Economic Order of the Shakers, 53–74. Brethren grew the crops, but sisters picked, sorted, and packaged their products for sale, so those industries were built on a foundation of women's labor in the Shaker partnership between the sexes.Wergland, Sisters in the Faith, chapter 7.
The Shakers believed in the value of hard work and kept comfortably busy. Mother Ann said: "Labor to make the way of God your own; let it be your inheritance, your treasure, your occupation, your daily calling".
The earliest Shaker buildings (late 18th – early 19th century) in the northeast were timber or stone buildings built in a plain but elegant New England colonial style. Early 19th-century Shaker interiors are characterized by an austerity and simplicity. For example, they had a "peg rail", a continuous wooden device like a pelmet with hooks running all along it near the lintel level. They used the pegs to hang up clothes, hats, and very light furniture pieces such as chairs when not in use. The simple architecture of their homes, meeting houses, and barns has had a lasting influence on American architecture and design. There is a collection of furniture and utensils at Hancock Shaker Village outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that is famous for its elegance and practicality.
At the end of the 19th century, however, Shakers adopted some aspects of Victorian decor, such as ornate carved furniture, patterned linoleum, and cabbage-rose wallpaper. Examples are on display in the Hancock Shaker Village Trustees' Office, a formerly spare, plain building "improved" with ornate additions such as fish-scale siding, bay windows, porches, and a tower.
Other artifacts of Shaker culture are their spirit drawings, dances, and songs, which are important genres of Shaker folk art. Doris Humphrey, an innovator in technique, choreography, and theory of dance movement, made a full theatrical art with her dance entitled Dance of The Chosen, which depicted Shaker religious fervor.Ernestine Stodelle, "Flesh and Spirit at War," New Haven Register, March 23, 1975, quoted in Flo Morse, Shakers and the World's People (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 274–76, Google Books, Retrieved January 17, 2011.
The largest collection of Shaker artifacts is the Robert and Virginia Jones Shaker collection at Harmon Museum, in Lebanon, Ohio.
Scribes, many of whom had no formal musical training, used a form of music notation called the letteral system. Shaker Books and Articles American Music Preservation This method used letters of the alphabet, often not positioned on a staff, along with a simple notation of conventional rhythmic values, and has a curious, and coincidental, similarity to some ancient Greek music notation.
Many of the lyrics to Shaker tunes consist of syllables and words from unknown tongues, the musical equivalent of glossolalia. It has been surmised that many of them were imitated from the sounds of Native American languages, as well as from the songs of African slaves, especially in the southernmost of the Shaker communities, but in fact the melodic material is derived from European scales and modes.
Most early Shaker music is monodic, that is to say, composed of a single melodic line with no harmonization. The tunes and scales recall the folksongs of the British Isles, but since the music was written down and carefully preserved, it is "art" music of a special kind rather than folklore. Many melodies are of extraordinary grace and beauty, and the Shaker song repertoire, though still relatively little known, is an important part of the American cultural heritage and of world religious music in general.
Shakers' earliest hymns were shared by word of mouth and letters circulated among their villages. Many Believers wrote out the lyrics in their own manuscript hymnals. In 1813, they published Millennial Praises, a hymnal containing only lyrics. Millennial Praises, Seth Youngs Wells, comp. (Hancock, Massachusetts: Josiah Tallcott, Jr., 1813), reproduced with music in Millennial Praises: A Shaker Hymnal, Christian Goodwillie and Jane Crosthwaite, eds. (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
After the Civil War, the Shakers published hymnbooks with both lyrics and music in conventional four-part harmonies. These works are less strikingly original than the earlier, monodic repertoire. The songs, hymns, and anthems were sung by the Shakers usually at the beginning of their Sunday worship. Their last hymnbook was published in 1908 at Canterbury, New Hampshire.Roger Lee Hall, Invitation to Zion – A Shaker Music Guide (Stoughton, Massachusetts: Pinetree Press, 2017).
The surviving Shakers sing songs drawn from both the earlier repertoire and the four part songbooks. They perform all of these unaccompanied, in single-line unison singing. The many recent, harmonized arrangements of older Shaker songs for choirs and instrumental groups mark a departure from traditional Shaker practice.
Simple Gifts was composed in 1848 by Joseph Brackett, on or about the time he moved to the Shaker community at Alfred, Maine. English poet and songwriter Sydney Carter used the song as the basis for a hymn in 1963 "Lord of the Dance", also referenced as "I Am the Dance".
Some scholars, such as Daniel W. Patterson and Roger Lee Hall, have compiled books of Shaker songs, and groups have been formed to sing the songs and perform the dances.Daniel W. Patterson, Gift Drawing and Gift Song (Sabbathday Lake, Maine: United Society of Shakers, 1983); Daniel W. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979). Roger L. Hall, Love is Little – A Sampling of Shaker Spirituals (Rochester, New York: Sampler Records, 1992); Roger Lee Hall, Simple Gifts: Great American Folk Song (Stoughton, Massachusetts: PineTree Press, 2014).
The most extensive recordings of the Shakers singing their own music were made between 1960 and 1980 and released on a 2-CD set with illustrated booklet, Let Zion Move: Music of the Shakers. Shaker Music. American Music Preservation. March 26, 2014. Other recordings are available of Shaker songs, both documentation of singing by the Shakers themselves, as well as songs recorded by other groups (see external links). Two widely distributed commercial recordings by The Boston Camerata, "Simple Gifts" (1995) and "The Golden Harvest" (2000), were recorded at the Shaker community of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, with active cooperation from the surviving Shakers, whose singing can be heard at several points on both recordings.
Aaron Copland's 1944 ballet score Appalachian Spring, written for Martha Graham, uses the Shaker tune "Simple Gifts" as the basis of its finale. Given to Graham with the working title "Ballet for Martha", it was named by her for the scenario she had in mind, though Copland often said he was thinking of neither Appalachia nor a spring while he wrote it. Shakers did, in fact, worship on Holy Mount in the Appalachians.
Laboring Songs, a piece composed by Dan Welcher in 1997 for large wind ensemble, is based upon traditional shaker tunes including "Turn to the Right" and "Come Life, Shaker Life".
Shaker lifestyle and tradition is celebrated in Arlene Hutton's play As It Is in Heaven, which is a re-creation of a decisive time in the history of the Shakers. The play is written by Arlene Hutton, the pen name of actor/director Beth Lincks. Born in Louisiana and raised in Florida, Lincks was inspired to write the play after visiting the Pleasant Hills Shaker village in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a restored community that the Shakers occupied for more than a century, before abandoning it in 1927 because of the inability of the sect to attract new converts.
In the early 1960s, American folklorist Robin Evanchuk, after trips to Shaker communities including Sabbathday Lake, created a stage reproduction of a Shaker worship service. It included both the a cappella songs and also the dance-like movements traditionally used in the Shaker worship service. It was performed by the Westwind Dance Ensemble of Los Angeles, the AMAN Folk Ensemble of Los Angeles, and her own dance group, The Liberty Assembly. Performances by the AMAN Folk Ensemble continued until at least 1989, when the Shaker service was included in a concert tour of the AMAN Folk Ensemble that included concerts in the American mid-west, east, and New York City.
Robert Newton Peck's 1972 book, A Day No Pigs Would Die, depicts a family that lives by the "Book of Shaker". They are clearly not traditional Shakers, however, as they live in a family unit separate from others, strive for individual success, and have children.
Novelist John Fowles wrote in 1985 A Maggot, a postmodern novel historical novel culminating in the birth of Ann Lee, and describing early Shakers in England.
Janice Holt Giles depicted a Shaker Community in her novel "The Believers".
In 2004 the Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen and Boston Camerata music director Joel Cohen created a live performance work with dance and music entitled "Borrowed Light". While all the music is Shaker song performed in a largely traditional manner, the dance intermingles only certain elements of Shaker practice and belief with Saarinen's original choreographic ideas, and with distinctive costumes and lighting. "Borrowed Light" has been given over 60 performances since 2004 in eight countries, recently (early 2008) in Australia and New Zealand, and most recently (2011) in France, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In addition to Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham and Tero Saarinen cited above, choreographers Twyla Tharp ("Sweet Fields", 1996) and Martha Clarke ("Angel Reapers", 2011) also set movement to Shaker hymns. Playwright Alfred Uhry collaborated with Martha Clarke on "Angel Reapers" and used Shaker texts as source material. The music of "Angel Reapers" was successfully and uniquely arranged by Music Director Arthur Solari.
In 2009, Toronto-based, American-born poet Damian Rogers released her first volume of poetry, Paper Radio. The lifestyle and philosophy of the Shakers and their matriarch Ann Lee are recurring themes in her work.
Non-Shaker parents respected the Shakers' schooling so much that they often took advantage of schools that the Shaker villages provided, sending their children there for an education. State inspectors and other outsiders visited the schools and made favorable comments on teachers and students.Glendyne R. Wergland, One Shaker Life: Isaac Newton Youngs, 1793–1865 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), chapter 2; Glendyne R. Wergland, Sisters in the Faith: Shaker Women and Equality of the Sexes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), chapter 4.
In 1957, after "months of prayer", Eldresses Gertrude, Emma, and Ida, leaders of the United Society of Believers in Canterbury Shaker Village, voted to close the Shaker Covenant, the document which all new members need to sign to become members of the Shakers in Canterbury Shaker Village.
In 1988, speaking about the three men and women in their 20s and 30s who had become Shakers and were living in the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, Eldress Bertha Lindsay of the other community, the Canterbury Shaker Village, disputed their membership in the society: "To become a Shaker you have to sign a legal document taking the necessary vows and that document, the official covenant, is locked up in our safe. Membership is closed forever."
However, Shaker covenants lack a "sunset clause" and today's Shakers of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village welcome sincere new converts to Shakerism into the society:
On January 2, 2017, Sister Frances Carr died aged 89 at the Sabbathday community, leaving only two remaining Shakers: Brother Arnold Hadd, age 58, and Sister June Carpenter, 77. In the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of the Shaker newsletter The Clarion, the current membership was given as Brother Arnold, Sister June, and Brother Andrew. These remaining Shakers still hope that sincere newcomers will join them. If one wishes to join, they can learn more and watch sermons on their website, maineshakers.com. In September 2024, the New York Times published an article about the last two remaining members of the community.
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