Words of Wondrous Import: A Voice in the American Wilderness

The Publick Universal Friend

She refused to be called by her given name. She would not use gender-specific pronouns. She said she was neither male nor female. She was an agent of the Lord sent to save a world in turmoil. The year was 1776.

America from its earliest days has been a land of seekers, spiritual adventurers, visionaries, and mystics. Some were sincere, some charlatans. Many straddled the line between deep truth and self-serving chicanery.

Jemima Wilkinson was born to a Quaker family north of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1752. As a girl she was intelligent, strong, a superior horseback rider. Brought up in her family's religion, she was also drawn to the New Light Baptist faith.

At the age of twenty-four, Jemima contracted an infectious disease. She lay bedridden and near death for several days. After the fever broke and she began to recover, she announced to her startled family that Jemima had in fact died. Her body had been reanimated by a divine spirit. She was now the "Publick Universal Friend.” (Quakers were officially the Society of Friends.) She felt a calling to preach to “a lost and dying world.”

The Friend began to travel through New England, proclaiming that the second coming of Jesus was imminent. She urged listeners to repent. Able to recite long sections of scripture from memory, she was a forceful preacher with a charismatic personality. “She seemed as one moved by that ‘prophetic fury,’” one listener remembered, “uttering words of wondrous import.”

The Friend preached pacifism and the abolition of slavery. Her message was unpopular with the majority but reached the ears of many, especially women. She attracted some prominent followers in New England, including Judge William Potter and his family. He expanded his Rhode Island mansion to provide a home and headquarters for her and contributed generously to the cause.

The Friend continued as an itinerant preacher. Rumors that she practiced faith healing and had claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ led to her being stoned in Philadelphia. During the 1780s, she decided to move to the wilderness.

The Iroquois Confederacy, which had long dominated western New York, had collapsed after the Revolution. Wilkinson and her followers were among the first white people to move into the fertile but remote Finger Lakes region. They purchased land near Seneca Lake, and eventually formed the town of New Jerusalem (today’s Penn Yan) on nearby Keuka Lake.

The P.U.F., as she was called, was not the only female preacher to build a utopian cult in the region. Ann Lee had brought the Shakers to Albany in the 1770s. Like the Friend, Mother Ann was a former Quaker and was thought by some to be the reincarnation of Jesus.

Gender equality was a prominent and radical feature of the Universal Friends. Women participated fully in the community. They were allowed to own property and to preach — things they could not routinely do in the larger society. The Friend wore androgynous clothing, usually donning the dark cloak of a clergyman. She wore her hair in a style more typical of men. Some of her female followers did the same.

The Universal Friends were for a time the largest nonnative community in western New York. In 1794 the Friend was invited to preach at the negotiations that produced the Treaty of Canandaigua. This was among the earliest pacts promising friendship between the new United States and indigenous peoples.

Followers had built the Friend a large home in New Jerusalem. They carried their prophet around in an elaborate sedan chair. The Friend was known as a “sincere, kindly, benevolent woman.” But she was not much of an organizer, and no religious establishment developed to carry on her teachings.

The house in New Jerusalem

The frontier settlement did become something of a tourist attraction. Those traveling to Niagara Falls sometimes made a detour to visit the utopian village, which was known as “the second wonder of the western country.”

The Friend died in 1819 at the age of sixty-one. Builders were already digging the Erie Canal, which would open the region to burgeoning settlement. That same year, the family of Joseph Smith settled in the town of Palmyra thirty miles north of New Jerusalem. In the decade to come, he would establish the Mormon religion, a faith that one editor claimed “partakes largely of Jemima Wilkinson-ism.”

In every era, the questing nature ingrained in the American character has come up against a contrary tendency rooted in conformity, orthodoxy, and a deep fear of those who challenge middle-class platitudes. The backlash against difference, even today, can take the form of violence.

Yet Jemima Wilkinson had seen the heavens open and her appeal was powerful. “I was sincerely a Seeker,” wrote Ruth Prichard, a Connecticut school teacher. She heard the Friend preach and declared that “it was the Voice that spake as never Man Spake.” The Friend beckoned her to “that peace that the world can neither give nor take away.” She became a follower and never looked back.

Jemima Wilkinson prefigured the explosion of spiritual energy along the Erie Canal during the nineteenth century. You can read more about this fabulous era in my book HEAVEN’S DITCH: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal. Believe it or not, the e-book is ON SALE during September for only three bucks. Get a copy here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466878990/heavens-ditch

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