Visiting the Shakers: 1850–1899
2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.28.3.0673
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoDuring the second half of the nineteenth century, visitors to Shaker villages were numerous and various, quite various. In 1865, a New York Times reporter offered these observations: “Not a smile illumines the hard, wrinkled features of male or female Shaker. The youngsters … must enjoy the gymnastics [the Shakers' dancing], but their enjoyment has little opportunity for display. Solemn old heads frown down the slightest demonstration of nature, (wicked human nature), and so the boys' faces are almost as expressionless as their own” (216–17). Just two years later, another observer visiting the same New Lebanon community, with presumably most of the same inhabitants, perceived something quite different: “The people are like their village; soft in speech, demure in bearing, gentle in face…. Life appears to move on Mount Lebanon in an easy kind of rhythm. Order, temperance, frugality, worship—these are the Shaker things which strike upon your senses first; the peace and innocence of Eden, when contrasted with the wrack and riot of New York.” Likewise, the New Lebanon children that this second visitor observed showed no resemblance to the ones described by the Times reporter: “Look at these cheery urchins, in their broad straw hats and with their drooping sash, as they leap and gambol on the turf, laughing, pulling each other, filling this green hill-road with the melodies only to be heard when happy children are at play” (231–32).Those hoping to discover details about the Shaker life and beliefs will find much to satisfy their curiosity in Glendyne Wergland's Visiting the Shakers: 1850–1899, but they will have to gather their information circumspectly. As Wergland cautions in her introduction, “Visitors … were not authorities on the Shakers, so we have to separate fact from opinion” (1). Although visitors' accounts make up 95 percent of Wergland's compilation, a companion piece to her earlier volume, Visiting the Shakers: 1778–1849, Wergland does indeed in her general introduction and her prologues to each visitor's account assist readers with that separation of “fact” from “opinion.”Considering the drastically different descriptions presented above, readers of Wergland's Visiting the Shakers might expect to encounter opinion more often than fact. However, both the skeptical interlopers and the enthusiastic guests of the Shakers agree in many of their observations, thus assuring readers that beneath the starkly contrasting opinions lie some underlying certainties about Shaker life. Visitors who wrote positive accounts and those who responded negatively offer many similar observations, in particular about three aspects of Shaker life: their prosperity, their plentiful and hearty fare, and the orderliness of their buildings and lands.Most authors concur that the communities displayed affluence, a result of their inhabitants' industry, thrift, and honesty. A group visiting Hancock village in 1864 recorded the following: “We are struck by the evident wealth of the people” (92). A Scottish minister touring the same village five years later wrote that “if you buy a Shaker brush or cart or chair … or preserved fruit, you may rely on it being the best. Hence Shaker goods are everywhere in demand” (101). Twenty-five years hence, another visitor amplified that same view: “The honesty of the Shakers is proverbial” (111). In the early 1860s a man shown New Lebanon's agriculture remarked on the amazing fecundity of the community's pear orchard. All the trees “exhibited such a burden of fruit as we had never seen before,” because, he concluded, the Shakers were extremely “thorough in whatever they undertake” (207). The well-known observer of communal societies in the second half of the nineteenth century Charles Nordhoff wrote in 1874 after visiting New Lebanon that “a farmer who is in the employ of the Shakers is considered a fortunate man, as they are kind and liberal in their dealing … and have the reputation of being strictly honest and fair in all their transactions with the world's people” (268).Sojourners who stayed long enough to share a meal also generally agreed that the Shakers belonged to no ascetic sect, at least when it came to food, and that the Believers and their visitors ate well, no matter what the village or the decade. A visitor to Watervliet, New York, in 1868 exclaimed that “a Shaker meal is a wholesome feast” (34). In 1865 a visitor's account was published, as Wergland informs readers, in the Shaker-owned Shaker Manifesto, presumably because he so exuberantly described the lunch he received for just “twenty-five cents!”: “Cold beef, Potato cake, White bread, Apple pie, Brown bread, Milk, Butter, Pickles, Boiled rice, Cream cheese, Baked beans, Cottage cheese, Blackberry jam, Cake, Blackberry pie, Doughnuts” (113). Even a visitor who derided as “deluded” the Shakers' dance and strange gesticulations, the “throwing out … hands in all directions” (212), agreed with “the oft repeated testimony to the superior quality and excellent preparation of their food” (209). An Englishwoman stopping at New Lebanon in 1866 stated that they “keep a good table,” which she detailed: “home-made bread, butter, coffee, cheese, pies, puddings, cake and preserves—also meat and potatoes, which they eat in moderation” (227). William Hepworth Dixon, who wrote one of the most positive accounts in the compilation, presumably because, as Wergland notes, he “spent more time at Mount Lebanon than the average tourist” (228), described with enthusiasm how Shaker agriculture and food accord with their social and religious “theories”: a Shaker “looks at the face of nature with a lover's eyes, and the great passion of his heart, directed from his money, from his wife, now turn upon the garden and the field” (241). In a less philosophical strain, Dixon described the Shakers' fare, which he connects, with Elder Frederick Evans's urging, to the Shakers' good health: “The food, though it is very good … and very well cooked, is simple; being wholly, or almost wholly, produce of the earth: tomatoes, roast apples, peaches, potatoes, squash, hominy, boiled corn, pies, tarts, candies, dried fruits and syrups” (235).Many visitors enjoyed partaking of this simple yet bountiful fare, but the most frequently repeated observation made by them concerned the cleanliness, order, and neatness of the villages. While their opinions of the effect of Shaker orderliness varied greatly, visitors to each village in various decades reached a remarkable consensus on the village landscaping and the buildings. Among the more positive visitors, some focused on a particular structure, as did a visitor to Watervliet in 1879 who described “the school-house … [as] perfectly neat” (42). But most saw order throughout the village and were thus more sweeping in their description, as was a visitor to Hancock in 1860: “Everything [was] neat and Shaker-like” (86); and another to the same village twenty-five years later: if one “visit[s] their rooms, the perfect cleanliness and order so characteristic of the Shakers will everywhere be observed” (111). Observations of Shaker tidiness seem endless: “If the neighboring farmers who smile at them would only emulate their care and cleanliness, they would be happier and richer” (197); “no [Dutch] Haarlem vrouw ever scraped her floor into such perfect neatness” (233); “the floor of the assembly room was astonishingly bright and clean” (280); “the huge stone barn … is wonderfully clean and neat” (308); “ventilation, dry cellars, pure water, perfect cleanliness of rooms, beds and clothing, and careful removal of all refuse … [was] likely to exhale the germs of disease” (316); “he … waved me into a room [Frederick Evans's] plainly furnished and of absolute cleanliness” (346).As to the effect of this order and spotlessness, however, two almost opposite reactions arose. A relative few observers saw it as connected to the Shakers' theology, a sign of inner contentment, their establishment of a heaven on earth, and a following of “Mother Ann's edicts about cleanliness,” as one of Wergland's prefatory notes clarifies when the “poet, travel writer, and journalist Bayard Taylor” mistakenly believes that the Shaker orderliness was designed to increase their lands' value (83). Other visitors saw the opposite effect of this unflagging order, something repressive and at times even ominous: an indication that Shaker life was darkly restricted by inviolable rules and structure. An insistence on a pristine and hygienic environment might have led to gains in physical health, but it also led to losses in psychological well-being. In short, the Shakers' obsession with neatness created a village full of tense and high-strung inhabitants, at least so thought many observers. One writer described the Watervliet meeting house floor as “polished as smooth as glass, and a positively uncomfortable air of neatness prevailed here and everywhere about the establishment” (33). This 1868 report published in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, newspaper article was, as Wergland notes, “plagiarized” from a Troy, New York, newspaper and was probably “reproduced elsewhere” (32). Such a wide distribution of this opinion, that Shaker orderliness produced deleterious effects, probably prompted other visitors to reach similar conclusions. A group touring New Lebanon in the early 1860s found the Shakers' desire for uniformity oppressive. Their spokesperson related that they “were struck with the ridiculous aspect” of much of the worship service and would have “whispered some things derogatory” but that “the slightest irregularity has the effect to call down a torrent of wrath on the head of the offender.” To amplify this sense of repressive regularity that hovered over them in the meeting house, the author surveyed a similar mood of deadening homogeneity throughout the village: “What struck us more forcibly than any thing else … was the perfect uniformity that prevailed in everything. Stoves are cast alike; wagons are built alike, rooms are furnished alike; in a word, there is upon everything the stamp of sameness” (212). A journalist visiting the same village about twenty years later came away with the same dread of a monochromatic life: “It was a characteristic Shaker dwelling, severe plainness and neatness being everywhere apparent. Indeed the neatness was painful to the eye, which almost longed to see a fly-speck or finger print, to break the dreadful monotony of cleanliness” (336). The unfailing order unsettled many: a woman visiting New Lebanon in 1874 felt threatened by the orderliness of “about a hundred women” she met in one of the community's families: “The women were all of that class that would make every article shine until it was almost painfully forbidding in its accusing, self-righteous purity” (285). Even in a generally positive description of one of the smaller villages, Tyringham, Massachusetts, a visitor found some of the “rooms so very neat that they have an achey look that makes me wish half a dozen youngsters would rush in and turn things over a little” (124).Thus readers of Wergland's compilation will come to understand that the general public harbored some deep misgivings about the Shakers. Even such generally agreed-upon positive attributes of the sect, its villages' invariably clean dwellings and orderly appearance, were turned to disadvantages by suspicious visitors. In a 2013 biography of an early Shaker leader, Carol Medlicott urges Shaker scholars to write extensive biographies to counter some of these suspicions. She posits that until researchers begin to focus on “the question of why,” in particular “why individuals would renounce spouse, children, sexual love, personal wealth, and property to join a radical, celibate, and persecuted religious order, … the study of the Shakers” will be pushed “to America's cultural margins” (Issachar Bates: A Shaker Journey, xvi).In both volumes of Wergland's Visiting the Shakers, especially in accounts written by those who only spent a few hours in a village, we can see this tendency to assign the Believers to “America's cultural margins.” Wergland's general introduction to the collection and her prologues to the individual accounts make readers aware of many “bits of misinformation [that] pervaded visitor accounts” (5). Some visitors, for instance, who perhaps just witnessed a Sabbath meeting and departed, “believed that sisters and brethren never spoke to one another, … [a] degree of separation,” as Wergland explains, that “would have made the ordinary business of daily life difficult” (5). Wergland also notes that many male visitors gave “short shrift” to the “sisters' … contribution to Shaker society” (150, 171). She points out, however, the opposite: female observers (and a few male ones) who recognized the equal stature Shakeresses shared with the brothers (291, 311), a subject about which Wergland is quite familiar, researching and writing at the time her own Sisters in the Faith, which she cites as “forthcoming” in a footnote of Visiting (424). Finally, Wergland clarifies matters for readers who mistakenly think monolithically about the Shakers and suppose that they always remained a marginal group, isolated and sometimes reviled by their neighbors. She explains that “public perception of Shakers shifted markedly through the nineteenth century” and that “by 1870, the Shakers had achieved a measure of public acceptance” (6–7).Unfortunately, such acceptance by the general public did not endure after many villages began to close in the early twentieth century. As fewer and fewer actual Shakers remained and interacted in normal social and economic communication with the surrounding population, inimical images of the Shakers that had existed in the public mind before 1870 were revived in twentieth- and twenty-first-century short stories and novels about the Believers. One of the most valuable contributions of Wergland's Visiting is that her collection of visitors' descriptions explains the vibrancy and partial origin of these enduring, but erroneous, images of the Shakers that readers today can see resurrected in novels about the sect. These images are more than “bits of misinformation” but, instead, fully realized stereotypes portrayed by vibrant fictional characters whose personalities and behavior reflect the suspicions common among the general public. Since many of the authors in Wergland's compilation were famous or published in widely read periodicals, these misgivings were widely disseminated. Specifically, these skeptical visitors saw, or believed that they saw, three threats lurking in Shaker communities: (1) women Shakers were invariably unhealthy, almost corpse-like beings; (2) the Shakers were automatons, encouraged never to think but always to servilely follow instructions; and (3) children in a Shaker village led a closely watched life, frighteningly similar to imprisonment.Numerous visitors, many of whom only viewed a worship service and then departed, described Shakeresses as extremely repressed beings because they are denied love and motherhood. Indeed many characterize them as so repressed that they have become the living dead, a rumor that fiction about the Shakers has kept alive for centuries, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Shaker Bridal” (1837) and William Dean Howells's The Day of their Wedding (1896) to Janice Holt Giles's The Believers (1956) and Jane Yolen's The Gift of Sarah Barker (1981). Perhaps the early fiction spawned the visitors' reports, or the reverse—those who toured the village told stories that prompted the published fiction. Most likely it was a vicious cycle, but one of the pieces in Wergland's collection summarizes the view common both to authors of fiction and to the visitors: a Shaker woman suffered a “melancholy lot” because in the celibate community “love—‘the first necessity of woman's nature’—is dwarfed … to most unnatural ugliness. She must renounce the natural affections; she must love none but her own unlovable associates” (161). New York Times readers in 1855 encountered a similar characterization of Shakeresses at Watervliet: “Each wore a white muslin cap of the plainest make, which made them look as if they were so many dead folks come up to Shaker meeting in their grave clothes” (25). A Swedish woman, whom Wergland introduces as a “feminist activist,” did eventually discover when she met some New Lebanon sisters face-to-face that they were lively, “heartily kind,” and enjoyed a “good laugh” (141), but her initial reaction accorded with that of others who merely witnessed the Shaker women during a service in the meeting house: “I was, on entering it, astonished by the sight of a number of corpse-like female figures, attired almost like shrouded corpses … rigid and as immovable as mummies…. I observed that [their] caps were very much blued, which still more increased the death-like hue of the countenances” (135).Wergland's assertion that the Shakers “by 1870 … had achieved a measure of public acceptance” is verified in two different accounts by J. E. A. Smith, a “historian and novelist,” who in 1876 wrote of how “the Shakers were respected” in “their neighborhood” of Pittsfield, Massachusetts (153). In his initial 1852 appraisal, however, he declared that “with no hope of a to-morrow happier than to-day, the Shaker women toil on, cheerless and forlorn; surely, nothing is less inexplicable than their sallow and inane countenance.” And although Smith does not exclude Shaker men from a final observation on their dance-worship, his focus was primarily on these wan and sickly women, when just after describing their “sallow” faces he told how the “dance recommenced. Round and round the soulless, joyless rabble went; more spasmodic—more like a band of galvanized corpses—than before” (162). This danse macabre motif surfaced again in an 1860 description. The author, whom Wergland identifies as a physician who characterized “the Shakers' religious convictions [as] evidence of mental illness” (198), focused specifically on the Shakeresses: “The women were, for the most part, thin and sallow, and looked with their spotless white collars more like walking corpses, giving thus a sort of Dance of Death” (204).This image of pitiful Shaker women, however, survived even after 1870. Richard Watson Gilder writing in Scribner's Monthly characterized only the women, pointedly excluding the men, in his description of a Shaker service: “It was as if Gabriel had blown his horn over just one select little moss-grown grave-yard—and only the women had heard and arisen. Dear ghosts of our grandmothers!—they flitted before us so pale, so sweet, so daintily arrayed for their resurrection morn” (255). Charles Dudley Warner, editor and co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age, described a Watervliet Shakeress in 1879 as “a slight, maigre little woman … with a kindly, pathetic face, from which all curiosity and questioning had long ago vanished,—an etherealized tenement for a woman's soul, if soul still existed.” Warner posited that such a degeneration happens to all Shaker women in “several stages,” in particular through “criticism, denial, mortification of the flesh, by which the body—all that is gross in it—was gradually expelled, so that death would be a scarcely perceptible change” (43). Decidedly, in the view of so many visitors, a Shaker village was no place for women to flourish or even survive.So pervasive was this view that the prominent New York editor Evert A. Duyckinck, friend of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, characterized the Shakers as “these misogynists” (149), a laughable conclusion for any visitor. Obviously he knew nothing of the many influential Shaker eldresses at various villages, not to mention Lucy Wright, who was the recognized national leader of the sect for nearly a quarter century. Other accounts do indeed acknowledge the equality afforded women in all the villages. As Wergland explains, even some male visitors, such as Benson J. Lossing, understood “the Shaker view of the duality of God as male and female” (171).All Shakers, male and female, are included in another often accepted, but misguided, view of the Shakers: the Believers led such a regimented life, beset on all sides by restricting rules, that the villages only attracted those of less-than-average intelligence who were easily indoctrinated. Furthermore, the Shakers, so many reported, intentionally opposed intellectual development and independent thinking because it hampered spiritual growth. Again, visitors' accounts about Shaker anti-intellectualism parallel fictional stories written about the Shakers from early in the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, from Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Redwood (1824) and Daniel Pierce Thompson's “Shaker Lovers” (1841) to Rachel Strachey's Shaken by the Wind (1928) and Ann Gabhart's The Believer (2009). Similar fictional stories about the Shakers read before visitors' arrival in a village might have influenced their perceptions during their visits, and then in turn their narratives, published in newspapers and periodicals, probably helped engender the same images issued in short stories and novels. An account written about a visit to Watervliet and published in 1868 stated that “the Shakers are notably thrifty, charitable, and simple minded” (34). A Harvard professor writing in 1864 after a brief visit to Hancock characterized the inhabitants similarly: “All the folks I have seen are evidently of American birth, and few carry the stamp of much intelligence” (93). When a Scottish minister visiting Hancock in 1869 asked why the children only went to school for four months, he said he received this reply: “Oh, … intellectual culture does not go for much here. We don't care about producing intellectual drones, and lumbering up the mind with the thoughts of other people. We go in for the useful” (98). Even as late in the century as 1885, a visitor to the same village similarly commented on the Shakers' shunning of outside knowledge: “In the way of literature the most searching eye will scarcely detect anything more than a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, an atlas or two, and a goodly array of Shaker books, pamphlets, and papers” (111). Evert Duyckinck, in addition to his accusation that Shakers were misogynists, condemned the Shakers' restriction on liberty, connecting it with their limits on education. Although Wergland speculates that his “dark and critical” description “may have been flavored by [his friend] Nathaniel Hawthorne” and that both “writer[s] … needed a marketable subject” (144), his characterization of the Shakers' constraints on the mind accords with what many other skeptics noted: “The Shakers [have] … submit[ted] themselves to a burdensome system of routine, restraint, and espionage, by which they are converted into machines…. They have become slaves of fanaticism and bind new burdens on themselves. No sect is more cramped, maimed, or lamed. Their education goes little beyond enough reading and writing not to be cheated in their dealings with the world; they have no libraries or literature, unless the title is allowed to a few volumes of spiritual gibberish” (149).The belief that Shakers were machinelike automatons, mindless slaves to a strange religion, was reiterated by others, in particular by J. E. A. Smith in an account published a year after Duyckinck's. He characterized New Lebanon as “the rural Vatican which claims a more despotic sway over the minds of men than ever Roman Pontiff assumed” (155). Few visitors of the likes of Smith and Duyckinck ever considered, as Wergland notes, that a scarcity of visible books might not indicate an attempt to assert a “despotic sway over … minds” but might simply be the result of the Shakers' predilection for order: “Books not currently being perused were returned to a shelf, not left out” (4).Other visitors expressed a fear that the Shakers asserted their “despotic sway” on another more helpless group: the children who resided in the village, whether they were orphans or progeny of parents who believed. At best, Shaker youths were prevented from behaving as normal children would because, in the words of one visitor cited earlier, “solemn old heads frown down the slightest demonstration of nature” (216–17). At worst, visitors felt that the children were imprisoned. Such a belief is still a common perception of the general public, reinforced by the short stories and novels published throughout the existence of the Shakers. The motif of the closely watched or even imprisoned Shaker child appeared maybe for the first time in Caroline Lee Hentz's “The Shaker Girl” (1839), but it is especially prevalent in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels for young adults: Jane Yolen's The Gift of Sarah Barker (1981), Louann Gaeddert's Hope (1995), Janet Hickman's Susannah (1998), Joan Holub's Doll Hospital (2004), and Linda Durrant's Imperfections (2008).Visitors' accounts closely match the plots in these fictional stories. Charles Dudley Warner proclaimed in 1879 that a Watervliet boy's whole life was work: “He evidently knew nothing about play. He lived in an atmosphere of affectionate care, but of industry. His amusement was pulling up weeds and picking off beetles from the vines. In all these children there was already the air of resignation and freedom from excitement that characterized their elders” (45). Intimations of imprisonment came from a visitor to New Lebanon in 1860: “There are almost no Shaker children to be seen in the streets. They keep them close and watch them narrowly for fear of losing them, or of them seeing more of the pomp and vanities” (205). An English minister, F. H. Williams, who recorded mostly positive comments about his sojourn at New Lebanon in 1870, recounted a scene at a nearby “rail-way-station” that probably convinced many who witnessed it that the Shakers were jailers and the children inmates. He related that while he was waiting for his train a girl and a “boy of about eleven years of age, in Shaker dress, entered.” The girl, the boy's sister, explained that she was trying “to get him away from the Shakers” and had succeeded after many attempts. When they noticed the arrival outside of two Shaker brothers, the minister and other sympathetic onlookers urged the boy not to go back, and finally the “ticket-seller kindly” took him into his office and hid him. Only later “while conversing with a gentleman” did Williams discover that the boy was probably “bound to [the Shakers] in a kind of apprenticeship, and that … in seeking for the boy they were merely endeavoring to take him back to fulfil his engagement” (253).Such a scene, however, undoubtedly gave rise to even more dire rumors about the Shakers' imprisoning of children, since many of the other witnesses were probably not privy to the information about apprenticeships and bound children provided by the gentleman to the Rev. Williams. And other stories, which do not even have this connection to an actual incident, accused the Shakers of some outlandish and wicked deeds. Duyckinck slipped into his description of a dance a quite damning libel about Shakers' kidnapping children: “It was a promenade all around in two circles, the adults of both sexes following one another in the outer, and the children (for children they get possession of, like the supernatural hags of old) in the inner” (146). Such an accusation must be what Wergland is referring to when she observes that Duyckinck “was a writer who needed a marketable subject” (144). That the Shakers resembled the children-abducting witches of fairy tales certainly adds some spice and marketability to the story. Another tale published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1860, with its wide circulation in New York City and beyond, must have also greatly increased the public's suspicions, even though in it the Shakers obtained “possession” of the children legally. The magazine's editor, George William Curtis, after touring New Lebanon, wrote that the Shakers “mainly recruited from the poor-houses, from which they take the children and mould them, telling them that if they venture beyond Shaker bounds the earth will yawn and swallow them” (197). Curtis described how one girl “persuaded some of her companions to run with her to the edge of the domain” (197–98). When “away she went, skimming the ground, flying for liberty and life and love,” the other “appalled children watched her expecting to see the angry earth open and engulf the swift sinner.” Seeing that it did not, “with one impulse, the eager children sprang forward and followed after.” Curtis concluded his account, or his tale—he gave no indication as to whether he saw the event or just heard about it—with a diatribe against the Shakers: “Mother Ann Lee lost the tender younglings, but … let us hope that somewhere, in happy homes, they themselves are mothers now, and are teaching such little girls as they once were, that the earth nowhere opens to engulf children who are flying from so harsh and unkindly a slander of nature … as that which underlies the Shaker system” (197–98).Wergland in her general introduction specifies that one requirement for inclusion in her compilation “was that the account had to have enough first-person details to show that the author had actually toured a Shaker village,” a wise stipulation that sections of Curtis's account fulfilled, though it is doubtful that he witnessed during his visit the scene described above (8–9). Nonetheless, such pseudo-first-person accounts are very instructive for both the curious reader and the Shaker scholar. Wergland's preservation of these accounts in this volume is to be applauded, for they show scholars and students of the Shakers how quickly history can turn to story and how easily fact and fiction can fuse, especially when observers are writing about a sect, to recall Medlicott's words, that has always been pushed to “America's cultural margins.” Underneath some of these rather obviously fabricated tales, however, careful readers, with the help of Wergland's introductions, footnotes, and occasional glosses in brackets, can ferret out many truths about Shaker life. Some of the longer accounts, furthermore, allow readers to go beyond these superficial stories and fairy-tale caricatures and meet vibrant and real Shaker personalities. In short, they are nascent biographies, called for by Medlicott, that at least give a hint of “why individuals would renounce spouse, children, sexual love, personal wealth, and property to join a radical, celibate, and persecuted religious order.” Among these more substantial visitor narratives is the extensive one by Hepworth Dixon, who presented a rounded picture of Antoinette Doolittle, a prominent eldress who “asserts that she talks with spirits” but who also “certainly makes neat and sensible speeches” (242). Another lengthy description by Hester Pool introduces us to a sixty-year-long Believer, a “Scotch gentleman” who is “elegant, scholarly, [and] of great experience”; Pool described him and a few of his fellow Shakers as “persons better informed upon history, politics, sociology, and religion” than those who “can … be found” anywhere (368–69). Herrick Kenyon's substantial account lets readers experience the exuberantly welcoming personality of a Sister Katie, who “sat for some time with us in our room, and by her willing information increased our knowledge of the habits and life of this industrious, staid, and law-abiding sect” (356).In short, there is little to criticize in Wergland's compilation and much to praise, especially her tracking down these accounts in many disparate sources—newspapers, personal letters, personal collections, portions of books, periodicals, and collections of Shaker archivists, Christian Goodwillie and Jerry Grant in particular. One might ask for a few more footnotes that explain the contemporary context of some remarks made by the Shakers or visitors, but that would have been a major undertaking that would have unfortunately delayed scholars' access to this valuable resource. Besides such a request is probably quibbling when a quick Google search can inform the curious that, for instance, Frederick Evans's allusion to Robert Dale Owen and “the Katie King affair” was a reference to a hoax in which an actress was paid to pretend to be a spiritual medium (344). Wergland has indeed included enough on both sides that readers will come away with a clear understanding that the Shakers aroused contentious views, but thanks to her introductions to each account, her footnotes, and her glosses, readers will also emerge with a better understanding both of the recurring suspicions about the sect and of the realities of Shaker life behind some of the more spurious accounts of skeptical visitors.
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