The War of 1812 ignited a fierce debate in New York about the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizens in wartime. Two counties in the Upper Hudson River Valley (Rensselaer and Columbia) openly revolted against Governor Daniel D. Tompkins's draft of local militiamen. In September 1812, opponents of the war met in a countywide assembly where they declared the federal draft of the New York militia an “assumption of power, unwarranted by the constitution, [and] dangerous to the rights and privileges of the good people of this state.” The assembly further resolved to defy the governor's detachment order, and as a result, less than a third of the 860 militiamen drafted from Columbia and Rensselaer Counties appeared at the designated rendezvous points. Within weeks, the governor convened the first of three courts-martial to prosecute militiamen “who failed, neglected or refused to obey the orders of the commander in Chief of the said State.” As late as 1818, the New York State legislature insisted upon making a “salutary example” of men who “disregard the voice of duty and the requisitions of law.”Footnote ¹⁵

If Mother Lucy Wright and the pacifist Shakers of Lebanon, New York quietly cheered their neighbors in Rensselaer County for opposing the war and the militia-draft, they may have also felt some anxiety about the contest between the governor and the militia-delinquents. After all, Rensselaer County war opponents included men widely recognized as model citizens; veterans of the American Revolution, a local sheriff, and even a candidate for Congress. By comparison, few people thought of the Shakers as model citizens. For decades, Shaker apostates and other critics had openly questioned the very capacity of Shaker men and women to be good citizens of a republic. Shaker brothers did not vote, take oaths, serve on juries, hold office, or train with the militia. Shaker sisters were neither republican wives nor republican mothers.

Shaker practices that seemed quaint or odd in peacetime suddenly looked quite menacing on the eve of the War of 1812. In his 1810 diatribe Shakerism Detected, James Smith described the Shakers of Ohio as an internal enemy of the United States. He charged: “Shakerism includes in it all kinds of political evils; it disturbs the peace of families; separates husbands and wives; robs women of their tender offspring[,] destroys natural affection; dissolves the marriage covenant, which is the main pillar of any state or kingdom it prevents propagation, [and] takes people's money without compensation; . . . it is raising a young generation systematically enemies to American liberty.” Smith wondered aloud why the government could not monitor the growth and development of the Society as it had free African American immigrants. “If a law can be past to prevent black and mulatto persons from residing in the state of Ohio . . . because they have been degraded and unmanned by slavery, can we not touch a treasonous nest [of Shakers] which is hatching and breeding among us?”Footnote ¹⁶

These prejudices notwithstanding, the Shaker leadership at Lebanon concluded that the local rebellion against the militia-draft was more of an opportunity than a crisis. The rebellion provided a unique—perhaps providential—occasion for the Shakers to air their own grievances. For years, the Society had paid an annual fine of $4.00 for every Shaker man who would not drill with the local militia company. By their own estimate, Lebanon had paid as much as $2,000 in such fees by 1815. The Society took small comfort in knowing that the legislature levied this fine on all conscientious objectors including Quakers or that the tax revenue went to a designated fund for the support of New York's fledgling common school system. To their minds, the tax was unconstitutional, prejudicial, and counterproductive. It was also sinful, requiring the Shakers “to aid or abet the cause of war and bloodshed.” Of course, if they refused to pay, the Shakers risked the arrest of their brothers as militia delinquents and the forced sale of their property.Footnote ¹⁷

Between 1815 and 1846, the Shakers drafted at least seven statements against the New York militia laws, but the crux of their arguments appear in three documents: A Declaration of The Society of People, (commonly called Shakers,) shewing their reasons for refusing to aid or abet the cause of war and bloodshed, by bearing arms, paying fines, hiring substitutes, or rendering any equivalent for military services (1815); The Memorial of the Society of People of New-Lebanon, in the County of Columbia, and Watervliet, in the County of Albany Commonly called Shakers (1816), and Observations on the Natural and Constitutional Rights of Conscience, In Relation to Military Requisitions on the People Called Shakers. Other historians have summarized the arguments the Shakers made against compulsory militia service as a violation of their natural right to liberty of conscience. Jane F. Crosthwaite has draw attention to Shaker rhetoric that draws “on common patriotic themes which stressed a divine plan for America.”Footnote ¹⁸ Less obvious is how the Shakers leveraged contemporary oratory that depicted the War of 1812 as a clash between republicanism and monarchism. For example, the Shakers suggested in Observations that enforcement of the militia laws against conscientious objectors represented a kind of backsliding into Toryism. They reminded the legislature that it had a special responsibility to act in the best interest of all the citizenry, including conscientious objectors. They asked, “If we must be denied the free exercise of conscience, what is the difference to us, whether it is done by a monarchial despot, or by the majority of a republican state?” In their appeals for relief from the New York militia tax, they proposed that the current political crisis served as a kind of litmus test of the legislature's commitment to the core values of the republic, and New York State was failing that test. With annoyance, the Shakers pointed out that even Kentucky, widely “distinguished as a warlike State” had exempted Shaker brethren from militia service during the War of 1812.Footnote ¹⁹

The Shakers also described a more practical legal problem with the militia tax. In Observations they accused the state of putting “the liberty of conscience to sale” and asked with irritation, “How much we must pay for this liberty?” More practically, they insisted the legislature could only levy the militia tax on individuals, not on societies (or corporations) and thus, the collectively owned property of the Society was de jure exempt from taxation. In the 1816 Memorial, they explained: “We have consecrated ourselves and all our property to religious and charitable purposes, upon the principles of peace, we consider it the highest degree of sacrilege to devote either to the cause of war.” Potentially more salient to a roomful of lawmakers, the Shakers insisted that everything they owned—land, tools, farm animals—had been bequeathed to them as “legacies and donations” to be held in trust. In other words, individual Shaker men and women had no “separate property” for the state to tax. By forcibly collecting the tax, the legislature would violate both an individual's liberty of conscience and an individual's right to freely dispense with his property as he saw fit.Footnote ²⁰

In Observations, the Shakers acknowledged: “One ground of objection against our right of exemption is that we are a wealthy people and would thereby be released from burdens which our poor neighbors have to bear.” This reference to their “poor neighbors” in the Upper Hudson River Valley was heartfelt. The Shakers knew experientially how poverty had shaped the regional economy. All of their evangelical work in the 1780s had occurred among New England immigrants in the impoverished, contested, and churchless frontier of eastern New York and western New England—the so-called Yankee Zone. Mother Ann Lee and her disciples ministered to these newcomers, who were commonly poor, or doing poorly, in the post-war economic recession. More recently, the Society had attended to the victims of the economic recession that gripped the area as a result of the Embargo Act of 1807. In other words, poverty was not a theoretical for the Shakers. They practiced charity because it contributed to spiritual development, but charitable acts had also become the principal means by which the Society engaged in the civic life of the community.Footnote ²¹

In the 1815 Declaration the Shakers reminded the legislature that the Society's communal economy was intended to facilitate charity not wealth. They professed: “We faithfully endeavor to alleviate the sufferings of our fellow-creatures, not by saying, Be ye fed and be ye clothed; but by actually ministering to their necessities.” They claimed to provide alms to the “the suffering poor, the widow and the fatherless within our vicinity, and to other objects of charity, who are continually applying for assistance from various parts of the country, the amount of which cannot be correctly ascertained, but as a very moderate calculation must exceed 1000 dollars a year.” Moreover, they provided this charity notwithstanding the fact that they did not receive financial support from local municipalities for their own poor; an expense that they insisted would “which probably would be much more every year than the amount of our annual muster fines.”Footnote ²²

Historians have noted the Shakers repeated claim of extraordinary charity, but have not considered why the reference to charitable work matters. Historians often overlook these claims because it is a truism that the Shakers were a charitable people. Even the apostates acknowledged this fact. However, if one looks carefully at what the Shakers say about their own charitable activity, and specifically at the wartime context for these claims, the discussion of charity is striking as a core element in a broader discussion of what constitutes good republican governance, active citizenship, and patriotism. Perhaps the Shakers aspired to do more than end compulsory militia service. Perhaps they aspired to elevate their charitable work as a legitimate civic practice on par with militia service. In other words, the context of a regional debate between Republicans and Federalists about how American men and women expressed Christian values, civic duty, and patriotism, the Shakers described their own ideal of active citizenship in the early American republic.

An extant record of the items distributed by the Lebanon Poor Office between 1806 and 1816 (crisis years for the local economy) verifies the Shakers' claims of extraordinary acts of charity. The record lists what the Shakers produced, who received relief, and indicates how the communal economy supported the region's poor. In 1807 alone, the Lebanon Shakers distributed alms to at least 124 recipients, in nearly equal numbers to men and women. They gave out aprons, handkerchiefs, shoes, coats, footings and stockings, shifts, mittens, jackets, garters, and “frocks for children.” Beyond clothing, they distributed blankets, quilts, pillow cases and sheets, pails and tubs, shoe leather, sheep's wool, furniture and even pipes and tobacco. Of course, they also distributed food: tin pails full of “meat and bread,” baskets of beef and pork, onions, tea, rye, potatoes, beans, “lickerish,” and seeds (cucumber, onion, and “garden.”) They noted that the Deacon had shipped 200 pounds of pork and 66 pounds of mutton to a local justice of peace in March 1807 for distribution to the poor. In 1810 the First Family produced or collected 27 pairs of footings along with straight-bodied coats, jackets, trousers, linen, and frocks for distribution on Christmas Day.Footnote ²³

The majority of relief recipients lived within 15-miles of Lebanon in towns and cities in the Yankee Zone. Knowing that many of the Shakers had lived in this region for many years, it is extremely likely that the men, women, and children who received charity were either related to, or knew personally, a Shaker at Lebanon or Hancock.Footnote ²⁴ Some alms-seekers came with recommendations from a justice of the peace or the poor masters. Others evidently knew about the Shakers and their almsgiving from the writings of the apostates. In 1807, the Deacon noted that two women crossed the Hudson River to visit Lebanon and brought with them a “riting from Daniel Rathbun”—presumably A letter . . . to James Whittacor, chief elder of the Shakers (1785). These women received petticoats, short gowns, shifts, stockings, jackets, trousers, a shirt, frock, and a sheet. Others charity recipients were themselves apostates. In September 1808, the Shakers outfitted a woman with a shift, gown, stockings, and shoes. They noted, “Her maiden name was Russel and lived with our people when she was a girl and purfessed to believe with the people at Enfield.”Footnote ²⁵

However, most of the others were transient paupers, individuals identified only as a “poor traveling man or traveling woman,” who came from New York City, Long Island, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, and elsewhere. William Robason, described in the records as “30 year old ragged & Louse,” received a shirt and trousers. A “french man” took seeds, a pipe, and $1. The Shakers provided a “traveling man” who claimed “he was a solger in Wian's arms” with a shirt in 1808. A “Scotchman” also received a shirt, trousers, and stockings, and an immigrant “from Dublin late from Canada” received a jacket and “a tin pail full of meat and bread.” A white woman with “two black children” requested shirts, short gowns, stockings, and garden seeds. In 1808, “a man and his family moving to the westward” received some bread and cheese, apples, and garden seeds. The Shakers also provided shirts, shoes, and buttons to Stockbridge Indians who were likely in the process of relocating from Western Massachusetts to the Oneida territory in Central New York. The record book identifies some of these Indians by name, including “Kankapot and one other young Indian,” but most just as Indians.Footnote ²⁶

Almsgiving was central to the Shakers' understanding of their mission in America and their notions of active citizenship, but even more important, the Shakers' insistence on charity as a form of civic engagement comes at a time when charitable work had moved from churches to civil authorities. Colonial Americans had understood charity as both an expression of Christian compassion and a means of reinforcing community. Communities provided economic assistance to family members and neighbors who “recognized an obligation to protect one of their own.” However, at this precise moment in history, the notion of charity as civic duty was unraveling in New York and elsewhere. The state legislature enacted its first laws for the “settlement and relief of the poor” in 1784 and thereafter steadily moved charity from religious to civil authorities. In 1800, New York eliminated the colonial era parish system and instituted a county-based system of poor relief that relied on “overseers of the poor.” These elected officials had no administrative power, only the responsibility of “notifying and informing the justices of the peace of all persons found in needy circumstances, or of any stranger who seemed likely to become a public charge.”Footnote ²⁷

Moving charitable giving from churches to courts altered perceptions of poverty. Once equated with misfortune, people increasingly equated poverty with criminality. In the emerging civil system for poverty relief, justices of the peace investigated claims to determine if they came from legitimate residents or transients. They distinguished between the worthy and unworthy poor and ultimately determined what assistance (if any) to offer. Transient paupers proved a special burden in Albany and Rensselaer Counties, both of which received thousands of New England immigrants between 1790 and the 1810s. By 1804, the migrating poor had already strained Albany's civil system of poverty relief. The Embargo of 1807 aggravated the problem as poverty rates steadily increased across New York between 1807 and 1819. New benevolent associations, including the Ladies Society for the Relief of Distressed Women and Children (1804) and the Albany Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality (1815), were established to fill the gaps. Rensselaer County established New York's first “House of Industry” in 1820, where “inmates were to work according to their abilities, as a means of stimulating industry and sharing the expense of their maintenance.”Footnote ²⁸

Charity was a Christian virtue, but it was also central to the Shakers' own narrative. At the same time that the Society was protesting New York militia laws, the Shakers were writing their own creation story. Published initially for internal consumption, The Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee, and the Elders with Her (1816) included a collection of narratives about the founding era that emphasized the early poverty of the Society. Believers could learn the very lesson of the corporal works of mercy from the life of Mother Ann Lee, who had know poverty, hunger, deprivation, homelessness, and imprisonment in her own lifetime. Her own spiritual mentors had died in an almshouse. On her arrival in New York City, Lee and her disciples scraped by as domestic servants and laborers before settling as tenants on the estate of Stephen Van Rensselaer in Columbia County. The founding generation had themselves been transient paupers once upon at time, surviving off the kindness of strangers (and the mercy of God) for nearly a decade as they evangelized through New England.

Now a generation removed from that experience, the pacifist, communal Shakers enjoyed a kind of affluence that was noteworthy to their neighbors and state authorities. As they moved from poverty and persecution to prosperity and liberty, the early history of the movement took on more salience for believers. English born Shaker Mary Hocknell marveled, “When I look back and see our poverty, (living at first in a small log-house, and several of the brethren under the necessity of going among the people of the world to work) persecutions, and various trials we passed through, and compare our condition then with the church at present, I am filled with admiration at the goodness of God, and the blessings and prosperity that have attended us.” Other accounts of founding members collected as late as the 1820s similarly emphasized the centrality of poverty and charity to the early Shaker experience. In 1826 Ebnezer Osgood remembered, “such kindness to poor people I never saw.” Mary Osgood remembered that “their charity and kindness to the poor was boundless” and that she had benefited directly from their charitable acts. She described herself as “a poor woman, with four small children” when she first encountered Mother Ann Lee. She described herself as an “object of their compassion” and remembered a time when Lee received a gift of money and sugar from a wealthy man and then turned to Osgood, “and gave it to me, saying you ought to be kind to the poor.”Footnote ²⁹

One suspects that in relating their charitable works to the New York legislature, the Shakers wanted to do more than point out their virtues. They offered their own rags-to-riches experience as an example of how charitable works actively contributed to regional development. In the Memorial, they emphasized that their poverty relief efforts made a positive difference for the Republic “by relieving the necessitous; by setting examples of virtues, humanity, and charity; by works of public convenience and utility; and by promoting good order in society.” In the Declaration, they cited how they helped rebuild communities in New York and beyond with public donations for the “relief of the suffering inhabitants of New York, Portsmouth, and other places, who had been distressed by pestilential fevers, fires, war, earthquakes. &C.” They noted their labors to repair local bridges and roads in the vicinity as evidence of their contributions to economic development. In Observations, they added their missionary work in the Ohio River Valley at their own expense as an example of how they contributed to the civilizing of the frontier. They warned the legislature that “whatever is taken from us by a compulsory law, can serve no higher purpose than to retrench our voluntary acts of benevolence”—and by implication the development of the nation.Footnote ³⁰

In sum, the Shakers in the Upper Hudson River Valley correctly understood the contest between Republican war supporters and Federalist war opponents as a debate over how men and women exercised democratic citizenship in the early American republic. The regional political conflict over the militia draft made clear that people had different notions of active citizenship. In protesting the New York militia draft (and tax), the Shakers set out to champion religious liberty and witness for peace, but also to propose a third way for expressing patriotism through alternative civilian service. They sincerely believed that they (and potentially other conscientious objectors) “provide more essential service to our country . . . by our voluntary acts of benevolence, than we possibly could do by support in the war, even if it were not contrary to our faith.”Footnote ³¹ As badly as the Shakers wanted out from under the financial burden of the New York militia tax, they aspired to convince others that their charitable work was a service on par with militia service. They boldly proposed that Americans define active citizenship by something more than militia service and partisan activity.