Gifts of Power the Writings of Rebecca Jackson
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F Gifts of Power The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress Edited with an introduction by Jean McMahon Humez THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS uiii Acknowledgments tributed to defraying the costs of the project through a Faculty Develop- ment Grant. I was able to devote the extra time Ãecessary to bring the project to completion while working oî a related shaker research þroj- ect, supported by a feilowship from the National Endowment foi the Introduction Humanities. For_her instant appreciation of and her long-standing sup- Jackson, There uas no mortal that I could go to and gain instruction, port of my work on this book, I am indebted to the Direãtor of thã uni- so it pleased God. in Hi¡ loae and ntercl versity of Massachusetts Press, Leone stein. For careful and cheerful ro teach me in dredms and úsions and reaelation and gìfts, management of the editing and production processes, I would like to thank Barbara Palmer aodMary Mendell. ,{.nd for simply being there-Alex and Andrea Humez. Tsr auroBrocRApHrcAL \TRrrINcs of Rebecca Cox Jackson (r795-187r ), which appear here in print for the first time, are centrally Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Berkshire Athe'aeum and the concerned with how religious vision and ecstatic experience functioned for lwestern Reserve Historical society, for permission to use manuscripts in her and other women of her time as a source of personal power, enabling their collections as the basis for the text ôf tni, edition. them to make radical change in the outward circumstances of their lives.l sources of illustrations: Rare Books Department, Boston pubric Li- Born just outside Philadelphia at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- brary (fig. r);Free Llbrary of Philadelptria 1ng. 3); Historical Society tury, Jackson was a free black woman, a seamstress, a married woman of Pennsylvania (fig. Library Company oi ntitaaetphia immersed was her ir- 4); ^rr, (frg. 6)'; in family life. Her religious experience to propel Sl'raker Museum, Old Chatham, New york (figs. ,o, reversibly out of her settled condition and into a f.orty-year public career, r.JØestern ";J,ri; Reserve Historical Society (figr. 9, ..3, 14, and 15); Berkshire first as a preacher and later as the founder of a black Shaker community Athenaeum (fig. r6). in her city. Jackson owed the impulse to commit the details of her spiritual life to paper, as well as the drive to acquire the skills of literacy as a middle- aged adult, to her profound conviction that she was a chosen instrument for revealing the will of God. In these writings, she believed, as in her life itself, the divine purpose would be expressed: "I am only a pen in His hand," she wrote. Interior experience occupies the foreground. She barely mentions the facts of her life prior to the transforming experience of spiritual rebirth that set her on her pilgrimage as a "new creature" at the age of thirty-five in r83o. Yet, while recording interior experience, she also was able to throw tantalizing, fitful illumination on the religious ideologies and institutions with which she was associated in her unusual career-primarily the independent black Methodist churches of the North before the Civil \Var, and the utopian Shaker communities at the height of their prosperity, half a century áfter their founding. As modern readers, we may regret the underemphasis on the secular life in these writings. But like many other v/omen who wrote spiritual autobiography in England, Europe, and .America from the seventeenth r. See "A Note on the Text" for a desctiption of the manuscript sou¡ces of this volume and of editorial procedures. z Giftt of Power lntroduction 3 the women's rights movement. The idea that women might be not only through the nineteenth century, if Rebecca Jackson had not felt herself moral fefofm area, though based literaÌíy compelled to write about what God had done for and through equal but even superior workers in the sex differences were immutable, still ied women to her, shä wouÎd certainly never have writte* at ali. She recofded what she oñ a conviction that for public reforms. \Torking side by side believed were manifestations of a sacred force, which came into her try their powers in organizing social views, some came to question from the outside. The force coulcì be relied upon for protection, guid- with meà of similar ieligious and the appropriate separate "spheres" of the ance, instruction, and joy precisely because it was so much more powerful and challenge the doctrinì of sexes. middle-class women who went on to do overtly political than any human being waì. In an apparer"rt paradox familiar in religious two Many did so in part because of the im- thought, dãniat of the importance of her individual self en- work, as abolitionists or suffragists, then, Jackson's religion and the petsonal and. group abteã trei to make the strongest possible assertion of the power and petus provided by the ideology of èxperiènces they derived from working in church-based organizations. reality of her inner soLrrces of strength and knowledge. -Even women caught up by writings show with unusual clarity that her powers of the .-- the grèat majority of religious American ¡aikson's '. into political work probably religious imagination, her skills as an ecstatic and visionary, were,to a revivals who did not make such a transition sense of personal re- verfsignificant extent under her control. In part through her use of.tra- experienced, to a greater or lesser degree, a deep and au-to-nomy as a result of the emo- , ç ditional ascetic techniques of self-mortification, she invited the "gifts" newal and increased sçlf:respect For women, an increased sense or supernatural experiences of various kinds that gave her¡rowef-ovef tional upheaval of evangelical conversign. challenge to male domination,f the destructiv.e, menacing forces she confronted, both inside"herself and of autoñomy meant at least an implicit formal church organizations.i' in the outside'world. Faifrom "retreating" or "escaping" into the realm both in family relationships and in the middle-class New En- of visionary trance, she capably employed vision for her own self-protec- Nancy F. Cott suggests thãt the young, white, revivals probably tion and eáucation. Spiritual experience was all the more important be- gland woman who was converted during one of these wealth, áerived a complex satisfaction from establishing a new, intense relation- cause access to other Èinds of power-through schooling, .social status, or participation in civic ancl public political life-was denied to ship with God: her as a black woman in antebellum America. The submission required of those who were to be saved was con- sistent with female socialization, but this submission was also an act I ..MY female converts' Conver- BURDEN ROLLED OFF,,: of initiation and assertion of strength by sion set up a direct relation to God's authority that allowed female THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF A FREE BLACK METHODIST \íOMAN converts tõ denigrate or bypass man's authority-to defy man-for I Evangelical religion nurtured female and black self-development in com- God.2 plex ways in preindustrialized America. Historians of the great social important similarities betweeu white women's poten- ieform movements of the nineteenth century have shown that ultimately There are some liberation and that of blacks political liberationist movements like abolitionism and feminism were tial experience of coÃversion as personal wère great numbers under Methodist preaching in the àeeply rooted in the successive layers of religious enthusiasm that sPread who converted in nineteenth centuries. American Methodism, out over the northeastern United States in the first four decades of the latter eighteenth and early black converts on an equal basis with century. In the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, many women in its veìy early days, welcomed to the ''plain for the first time, under a religious whites. In emphasizing the role of lay preachers, sticking gained experience in public speaking , "spiritual extempore preaching," obligation to testify tõ the operations of divine grace on their souls' Ex- and simple Gôspel," and encouraging Methodism clid not set up barriers to full periencing equality at a fundamental level in the religious realm, some in the phrase of Richard Allen, meetings and leadership structure by slaves ot un- would be led to demand it in the civic realm as well. Moreover, the con- patticiþation in its viction that human institutions, like human souls, could be reformed,, z. Nancy F. Cott, "Young \Øomen in the Second Great Awakening in New -,975): even "perfected," by human effort under benevolent divine guidance was England," Feminist Studies 5, no. t/z $.al| zr. See "A Note on Bib- a prerequisite for the outburst of moral and social reform activity of the liography" for other recent studies of American women's experience with evan- rSzos and r83os. This work in turn nurtured abolitionism and, later, gelical religious ¡evivals. power 4 Giftr of Iniroduction j lettered free blacks, as did other ^A,merican churches of the Þeriod.B Like her sister autobiographers, as well as many other devout black the experience of being fiiled with the Y:l.."::t divine Spi;;, .ir..,tt.l and white Methodist women before the Civil rüZar, Rebecca was ror 'wtethodlst conversion, couid empower the Jackson victim of syitematic sociar a'believer in "sanctification," a second experience of divine grace in the oppression through assurance of a ãirect personar conneåtion with urti- sörl following conversion. According toihe Holin.r, c.rrr.ñt in Meth- mate authority' Knowredge of this u...r, to God offered in.reaseJpride odist thought and practice, the individual experienced "justification" at and self-respect.