What Hath God Wrought (44 page)

The Shakers would attend camp meetings organized by more conventional evangelicals and seize the opportunity to spread their own gospel among rural Christians. Mother Ann had been illiterate, but by 1823 her followers and successors had embraced the written word with formal organization and theology, their lives governed by 125 “Millennial Laws.” In that year there were something over four thousand Believers scattered among nineteen villages stretching from Maine to western Kentucky.
³⁰
Although Shaker villages were not without their rivalries and strifes, overall their cohesion and commitment contrast markedly with the bickering and evanescence of the Owenite communes. More than twenty thousand Americans have been Shakers at one time or another, some of whom found a spiritual and material security that seemed a “heaven on earth.”
³¹

While taking economic self-sufficiency as their goal, in practice the Shakers marketed seeds, crops, and handicrafts to buy things they could not produce themselves. Through hard work and simple living, Shaker villages accumulated considerable property, much as medieval monastic communities did. The Believers consistently welcomed new technology and employed it, for example, in their mills. The buildings and furniture they made have endured as masterpieces of American folk art.

Central to Shaker doctrine and life was the notion of “gift”—a divinely given talent or revelatory insight. The song “Simple Gifts,” probably composed by the Shaker Joseph Brackett in 1848 and sung in the quick tempo of Shaker dances, was borrowed by Aaron Copland in the twentieth century for his
Appalachian Spring
suite.

 

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be;

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d

To turn, turn, will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.
³²

 

Few of the orphans adopted by the Shakers chose to remain in the community upon adulthood, and after the Civil War the society commenced a long, slow decline in numbers. The movement had always attracted more female than male members; by 1900, three-quarters of the surviving Shakers were women. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a handful of practicing Shakers still inhabited their one remaining village of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, their culture if not their theology revered by the American society that their predecessors sought to escape.

Similar to the Shakers in some ways were several pietistic religious communities that migrated from Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1804, George Rapp arrived in America with six hundred followers who had separated from the established Lutheran Church of Württemberg during the German counterpart to the Great Awakening in America. Peasants and artisans well suited to the pioneer life, thirty miles north of Pittsburgh they set up a community called Harmony. There they practiced celibacy, farmed their property in common, and enjoyed the music of their German band, while their premillennialist leader tried to calculate the date of the Second Coming of Christ with reference to biblical prophecies. He expected it soon. In 1814, Rapp led his people into Indiana, where, on the banks of the Wabash River, they built another community also called Harmony. Rapp sold the land and improvements at this New Harmony to Robert Owen in 1824 and went back to Pennsylvania, where his faithful followers built still another village, this time named Economy. Rapp was much surprised to die in 1847 without having led his people into the millennial kingdom. The Rappites continued to prosper greatly in financial terms, making donations to other millennial communities, including the Shakers and Mormons, and pioneering the Pennsylvania petroleum industry. But, having ceased to recruit new members, their celibate community died out at the end of the nineteenth century.
³³

The experience of several other communitarian colonies of German pietists in America roughly paralleled that of the Rappites. One group that has survived to the present, however, is the Amana Society, or the Community of the True Inspiration. Drawn from much the same social base as other German pietists, the Inspirationists did not have a tradition of authoritarian leadership, although they accepted the teachings of
Werkzeuge
, who were men and women inspired by the Holy Spirit. Beginning in 1843, about seven hundred Inspirationists migrated from Hesse to western New York state, where they established a colony called Ebenezer. In the 1850s, as their numbers swelled with additional immigrants, they found more room by moving to southeastern Iowa. There they live to this day in seven villages known collectively as the Amana Colonies (the name Amana comes from the Song of Solomon). Not celibate as the Shakers and Rappites were, the Inspirationists obeyed until 1932 the law of “all things in common,” following the example of the primitive Christian church recorded in the New Testament (Acts 2:44 and 4:32). Today the Amanans continue the practice of their religion with very little change. Their temporal affairs prosper through a balanced combination of agriculture, tourism, and the manufacture of Amana refrigerators.
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Most of the many communities of German pietists who came to the young American republic practiced versions of Lutheranism and did not hold their property in common. They thus contributed to the enormous growth of Lutheranism in many varieties throughout the United States but especially in the Midwest. One group of six hundred, fleeing from Saxony to St. Louis in 1838, became the origin of what is now a large and separate denomination. Their migration occurred under the leadership of Martin Stephan of Dresden, a charismatic preacher and critic of the established Lutheran Church in Saxony. Stephan had to be deposed shortly after arrival in America for misappropriations of both money and women; his dismayed community might well have returned to Germany if there had been any funds left to pay their way. Instead they found a new pastor, C.F.W. Walther, under whose forceful leadership the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod was organized in 1847. Religious services remained in German until the First World War. Walther’s durable dedication to vested authority, the historic creeds of Lutheranism, and the verbal inerrancy of the Bible gave Missouri Synod Lutheranism a distinctive character it has never lost.
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Catholic monasticism, the oldest form of religious communal life, also appeared in a still predominantly Protestant America. The parallels with other communitarian movements were considerable, including celibacy, self-discipline, and the rejection of worldly selfishness for alternative lifestyles. In Europe, the early nineteenth century marked a low point in Catholic monasticism, for the Henrician Reformation in England and the Napoleonic era on the Continent had suppressed hundreds of religious houses. Antebellum America represented an opportunity for the orders to begin a comeback. By 1830, eleven Roman Catholic communities functioned in the United States, with women’s orders more prominent than men’s. As they had in founding Protestant communes, German immigrants played a prominent role in American Catholic monasticism, particularly among the Benedictines. However, one order of nuns was founded by a noteworthy American-born woman, Elizabeth Seton, the first citizen of the republic to be canonized as a saint. Well educated, a widow with five children, and a convert from High Church Episcopalianism, Seton had honed her leadership skills in a Protestant benevolent association whose mission she understood at first hand, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. Mother Seton won the approval of Archbishop John Carroll for the Sisters of Charity in 1812 and ran their convent in Emmitsburg, Maryland, until her death in 1821. Fund-raising, managing a legal corporation, running a school, and combining charity with remunerative work, the sisters nurtured Catholic female talents in somewhat the same way that voluntary associations did among Protestants. The life of Mother Seton’s male counterpart, Isaac Hecker, illustrated the parallel between utopian communities and Catholic religious orders. A former participant in the Brook Farm community during the period in 1843 when it was adopting Fourierist principles, Hecker converted to Catholicism in 1844, retained his concern with the nurture of community in American society, and founded in 1858 the Paulist Fathers, the first American-based order of priests.
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Both pre-and postmillennial Christians have typically been interested in the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, since that is one of the events prophesied as heralding the Second Coming.
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One of the early Jewish Zionists, Mordecai Manuel Noah, took advantage of sympathy among American Christians in his call for Jews from all over the world to come establish a community in western New York state. He issued his “proclamation to the Jews” in September 1825 at a ceremony in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Buffalo. Noah hoped to create a Zionist haven named Ararat on Grand Island in the Niagara River, where Jews might study agriculture and plan the recovery of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. European Jewish opinion was not prepared to entertain his plan, however. Noah resumed his career as newspaper editor and playwright, but he never abandoned his faith in the restoration of the Chosen People to their promised land.
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Several Jewish agricultural colonies were actually established in the United States prior to the massive Jewish immigration from the tsarist lands in the 1880s. In 1846 Isaac Mayer Wise came from Bohemia to the United States, where he developed in the ensuing years not only the Reform Movement of Judaism but also a kind of Enlightenment millennialism, envisioning roles for both the Jews of the Diaspora and a democratic America in hastening a messianic age to benefit all humanity.

Meanwhile, a down-and-out former carpenter named Robert Matthews, impressed by Mordecai Noah’s Zionism, had decided that he himself must be Jewish too and adopted the role of Prophet Matthias, Spirit of Truth. In the 1830s, he attracted a band of followers (rich and poor, white and black, but all gentiles) with a message featuring millenarianism, female subordination, and professed affinity with the Jews. The commune disintegrated when its leader, after several sensational trials (he won acquittal on a murder charge), went to jail for beating his daughter. The prophet’s bizarre career may have inspired Herman Melville to write
The Confidence-Man
.
³⁹

One of the most radical and yet surprisingly successful of utopias in antebellum America was the “Perfectionist” community established by John Humphrey Noyes in the 1840s. Noyes’s career illustrates the smooth continuum between mainstream evangelical reform and utopianism. The son of a U.S. congressman, converted by Charles Finney in 1831, young Noyes felt called to the ministry and trained at Andover Theological Seminary and Yale. He elaborated Finney’s perfectionist doctrine and claimed a state of “perfection” for himself, provoking revocation of his preaching license in 1834. Now on his own theologically, Noyes developed a distinctive theory of eschatology. Christ’s Second Coming had occurred already, he decided, back in
A
.
D
. 70, during the lifetime of some of the original disciples. The overdue Kingdom of God could be established if only a few committed Christians with a “perfected” outlook would set the right example. Noyes studied the Owenites, the Associationists, and the Shakers to learn from their experiments. By 1841, he had collected a small group of his own followers in Putney, Vermont. When William Miller came preaching his own version of the millennium, Noyes denounced this rival more emphatically than did the mainstream clergy.
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Noyes’s Perfectionists shared everything: not only their property, which they held in common, but also their spouses. Noyes candidly explained it all in his book,
Bible Communism
(1848). According to their practice of “complex marriage,” all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man. After Noyes was indicted by the state of Vermont for adultery and fornication, he fled to Oneida, New York, followed by thirty-one adults and fourteen children. There for many years the authorities left them alone; antebellum New York tolerated diversity. Noyes’s community soon grew to more than two hundred adults, some of whom contributed substantial property. The Perfectionists required consent of their whole community before any couple engaged in sexual relations, and community consent had to be given again before the conception of children. Noyes insisted on “intelligent, voluntary control over the propagative function.”
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(His publications were among the first public discussions of methods of birth control; another was
Moral Physiology
[1832] by Robert Dale Owen, a son of Robert Owen.) Perfectionists employed as their method of contraception
coitus reservatus
, which Noyes called “male continence.” Experienced older women initiated young men into the practice. As a means of birth control, it evidently worked. “During the community’s first twenty-one years,” writes a scholar who has studied Oneida thoroughly, “an average of only about one accidental pregnancy a year” occurred among its two hundred sexually active members.
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It was the ultimate application of the Victorian virtue of self-control.