Shakers Arrive in America

In 1774, Ann Lee, a former textile worker from Manchester, sailed to New York with a small band of followers and planted the seeds of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers. The movement grew into one of the most distinctive and long-lived communal religious experiments in American history, known for celibacy, shared property, and a design aesthetic that still influences furniture and craft today.

The roots of the group lay in England, where Lee had been drawn into a small religious circle led by James and Jane Wardley. The Wardleys were influenced by the Quakers and by French Protestant millenarians, and their meetings featured trembling, shouting, and dancing, which earned them the nickname "Shaking Quakers." Lee, born in 1736 and largely unschooled, married and bore several children, all of whom reportedly died in infancy. Many accounts say these losses deepened her conviction that sexual intercourse lay at the root of human sinfulness. She was also jailed for disturbing the Sabbath, and by the early 1770s she had become a leading figure in the group, whom her followers regarded as a spiritual mother.

Lee's followers later said she received a revelation directing her to go to America. She left Liverpool with her husband, her brother, and a handful of other believers; the exact number is usually given as eight. Her husband, Abraham Standerin, soon left her. The group settled near Albany, New York, and for several years lived quietly, working to support themselves. Their public emergence came later, during a period of intense religious revival in the years surrounding the American Revolution.

That war proved difficult for the Shakers. Their pacifism and refusal to swear oaths led to suspicion that they sympathized with the British, and Lee was briefly imprisoned in 1780. After her release she and her followers undertook a missionary journey through New England, attracting converts and also hostility. Lee died in 1784, and leadership passed to figures such as James Whittaker and Joseph Meacham, who gave the movement its communal structure.

In the early nineteenth century the Shakers established villages across the Northeast and later the Midwest, reaching a peak of perhaps several thousand members around the mid-1800s. Their communities were known for equality between men and women in spiritual leadership, though the sexes lived separately. They were inventive in agriculture and manufacturing, and their simple, functional furniture became celebrated. Because they relied on converts and adopted children rather than biological reproduction, membership declined sharply after the Civil War. Only a tiny number of Shakers remain today, but their buildings, music, including the hymn "Simple Gifts," and craftsmanship remain an enduring legacy.