Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court: Shakers, Children, and the Law

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 4 Issue 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Article 3 January 1992 Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court: Shakers, Children, and the Law Barbara Taback Schneider Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Barbara T. Schneider, Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court: Shakers, Children, and the Law, 4 Yale J.L. & Human. (1992). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol4/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Schneider: Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court Prayers for Our Protection and Prosperity at Court: Shakers, Children, and the Law, Barbara Taback Schneider* INTRODUCTION At the top of Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, are the Fruitlands Museums, founded in 1914 by Clara Endicott Sears, a wealthy Bostonian who summered in Harvard. She befriended the last members of the Shaker communities of Harvard and Shirley that formed the Harvard Bishopric of the United Believers of Christ, and chronicled their histories.2 Miss Sears structured the Museum around the farmhouse in which Bronson Alcott and his family lived in a communistic experiment from June 1843 to January 1844. 3 She later added a Shaker building, an art gallery of early American itinerant portraits and Hudson River School landscapes, and a gallery devoted to the American Indian. As Miss Sears intended,4 the eclectic collection of the Museums forces the visitor to connect different aspects of the past, and the past with the present. * I thank William W. Fisher III, Martha Minow, E. Chouteau Merrill, Jane S. Catler, the reference librarians at Harvard Law School, and the volunteers and the staff of the Fruitlands Museums for their guidance, help, and criticism. 1. This title is adapted from an entry found in the Journalof Grove B. Blanchard, July 30, 1843. Elder Grove's entry on the evening before the Shakers of Harvard, Massachusetts, appeared in court to defend against a writ of habeas corpus noted that the community engaged in "[p]rayers... at home for our protection and prosperity at Court." All of the journals referred to in this paper are held by the Fruitlands Museums. 2. See EDWARD HORGAN, THE SHAKER HOLY LAND 150-51, 157-58 (1987). 3. See id. at 80-93. Bronson Alcott was a New England Transcendentalist who started the Temple School in Boston in 1834. The school was designed to revolutionize the education of children by "teaching them how to examine themselves, and to discriminate their animal and spiritual natures, their outward and inward life; and also how the inward moulds the outward." Elizabeth Peabody, Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture, in THE REFORM IMPULSE, 1825-1850 132 (W. Huggins ed., 1972); see also Priscilla Brewer, Emerson, Lane, and the Shakers: A Case of Converging Ideologies, 15 NEW ENG. Q. 254 (1982) (examining the relationship between the Transcendentalists of Concord and the Shakers of Harvard and Shirley) [hereinafter Brewer, Emerson. Lane, and the Shakers]. 4. The Fruitlands Museums' descriptive brochure notes that Miss Sears "wished to preserve not only objects and artifacts, but an appreciation of the diverse spiritual forces that helped shape our country." Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1992 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 4, Iss. 1 [1992], Art. 3 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 4: 33 This paper is my modest effort to make the same sort of connections through an examination of one aspect of the Shakers' lives: the method by which they obtained and retained children who came to Shaker communities without their parents. Because Shaker theology required that community members subscribe to a creed of celibacy, new members could only come from outside a community's boundaries. When adults joined a community, they signed a covenant and "consecrated themselves and their property to God."6 When these relationships crumbled, courts were faced with the broken pieces. For example, could a man who had signed a community's covenant, in which he acknowledged that his work would be for the good of all, recover wages if he left?7 When families, or only portions of them, joined the Shakers, different legal questions were posed. Did a woman have grounds for obtaining a divorce if her husband joined the Shakers?' The way that courts dealt with these issues has received some analysis by scholars of legal and Shaker history.9 Existing histories have not, however, undertaken a detailed analysis of the Shaker practice of recruiting followers by accepting and retaining custody of children, although most acknowledge that the practice was an important component of Shaker life.1t Nor have they focused on the 5. HENRI DESROCHE, THE AMERICAN SHAKERS: FROM NEO-CHRISTIANITY TO PRESOCIALISM 139 (J. Savacool trans., 1971). 6. EDWARD ANDREWS, THE COMMUNITY INDUSTRIES OF THE SHAKERS 12 (1932) [hereinafter ANDREWS, COMMUNITY INDUSTRIES]. 7. See, e.g., Waite v. Merrill, 4 Me. (4 Greenl.) 102 (1826) (upholding the validity of the covenant of the Shaker Society of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, against a claim by an apostate member for wages). 8. See. e.g., Fitts v. Fitts, 46 N.H. 184 (1865) (granting a divorce to a man from his Shaker wife based on a statutory provision that created grounds for a divorce if one spouse joined a sect that did not believe in matrimonial cohabitation); Dyer v. Dyer, 5 N.H. 271 (1830) (granting a divorce to a woman from her Shaker husband based on an earlier version of the same statute). 9. The most notable book to date is by Professor Carol Weisbrod of the University of Connecticut Law School. Her book, The Boundaries of Utopia, focuses on the lawsuits brought by first- and second-generation apostates from Shaker and other nineteenth-century utopian communities to challenge the covenants through which they gave their property and bound themselves to work for the good of the community without wages. Professor Weisbrod uses these contracts to illustrate the operation of freedom of contract in the nineteenth century. See CAROL WEISBROD, THE BOUNDARIES OF UTOPIA xi-xxii (1980) [hereinafter WEISBROD, BOUNDARIES]. Other works have described the types of legal disputes that engaged the Shakers. See, e.g., EDWARD ANDREWS, WORK AND WORSHIP: THE ECONOMIC ORDER OF THE SHAKERS 162-86 (1974) (describing cases and legislative enactments pertaining to military service, custody of children where one parent was a community member and the other was not, the validity of the Shaker covenant, and the extent of Shaker landholdings) [here (...truncated)