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Updated: June 19, 2025
Hervey Elkins, a person brought up in the society at Enfield, New Hampshire, in his pamphlet entitled "Fifteen Years in the Senior Order of Shakers," from which I have already quoted, gives some curious details of this period.
I should like to gamble a bit at Baden-Baden. I should like to go out to Colorado and have a lick at mining speculations. I want to rough it some too, and see how life is lived close to the bone: ship for a voyage before the mast; enlist for a campaign or two somewhere and have joy of battle; join the gypsies or the Mormons or the Shakers for awhile, and taste all the queerness of things.
They consume much fruit, eating it at every meal; and the Shakers have always fine and extensive vegetable gardens and orchards. After breakfast every body goes to work; and the "caretakers," who are subordinate to the deacons, and are foremen in fact, take their followers to their proper employments.
If, on the contrary, he believes in God, he finds hope and comfort in the social theory which Jesus propounded; and he will seek another way out, as did the Rappists, the Eben-Ezers, the Jansenists, the Zoarites, and not less the Shakers and the Perfectionists, each giving his own interpretation to that brief narrative of Luke in which he describes the primitive Christian Church: "And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods; and parted them to all men as every man had need."
The communists do not toil severely. Usually they rise early among the Shakers at half-past four in the summer, and five in winter; and in most of the other communes before or about sunrise. They labor industriously, but not exhaustingly, all the day; and in such ways as to make their toil comfortable and pleasant.
"The war cost us over one hundred thousand dollars," said one of the elders; and besides this they lost money by bad debts in the Southern States. Since the war they lost seventy-five thousand dollars in bonds, which, deposited in a bank, were stolen by one of its officers; but the greater part of this they hope to recover. Like all the Shakers, they are long-lived.
"I must go and get her right off," he said; "this thing is serious!" And yet, after a wakeful night, he decided, with the extraordinary respect for her individuality so characteristic of the man a respect that may be called foolish or divine, as you happen to look at it he decided not to go. If he dragged her away from the Shakers against her will, what would be gained?
Whittier may have assisted sometimes in editing the local newspaper, and he once published a volume of rather tame prose-studies of the Shakers and other strange people who are found in the southern counties of New Hampshire. I never met with but one copy of it, and it could not have had a large circulation.
"Oh, poor little Washington, that's too bad," said Eyebright, "but I'm too glad for any thing that we're going. I always did want to see the Shakers. Wealthy went once, and she told me about it. She says they're the cleanest people in the world, and that you might eat off their kitchen floor." "Well, if Wealthy says that, you may be sure it is true," put in Laura Wheelwright.
New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers.
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