Doug Winiarski

In that time period in the 1840s, the Shakers go through a dramatic period of about a decade in which they receive an inordinate number of new revelations in which gifted young Shakers that they called instruments received communications from the spirit world.

And it's stunning.

Shakers began talking again to the spirit of Mother Anne Lee or the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.

They would speak to angels.

They'd speak to the celebrated dead.

George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Tecumseh started coming to Shaker villages with new messages and new revelations.

One of the greatest outpourings of supernatural phenomenon in American history.

During the 1840s, the Shakers wrote down thousands, tens of thousands of pages, dream narratives of new revelations.

They've developed new rituals.

They wrote down thousands of new songs and hymns.

They developed new dancing rituals.

And probably the thing that many of your listeners will know the most, they produced many works of stunning spirit drawings, drawings describing works of art in which Shaker instruments

essentially channeled what they saw in the spirit world and put it down on ink and in paper.

And many of these things turn up in museum exhibitions all the time.

They're fascinating works of art.

So the Shakers famously petitioned Abraham Lincoln to not serve in the war because they are committed pacifists.

At the same time, Shakers also had, for the time, relatively advanced ideas about race.

So they were anti-slavery, although not necessarily abolitionists.

That is to say, they opposed slavery.

There were Black Shakers from the very beginning.