Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

by T Fleischmann

  Although, as in the smaller towns, the people of the urban hubs were more often hostile than friendly, more gawking than welcoming. The All-Friend, for instance, visited Philadelphia with six companions for the first time shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, where they struggled to find lodging, turned away because of their strangely gendered attire. When at last a widow agreed to put them up for the evening, the people of the city battered her home with bricks. Over the following days, the Friend converted one person to their teachings, and met a man, a widower, who would become a lifelong friend and correspondent—few converts for a long trip, although curiosity about their strange preaching style and clothing, as well as the Friend’s striking beauty, meant that hundreds of people filled the halls of their sermons. They “appeared beautifully erect,” one man noted, while the Marquis de Chastellux, coming across some of the Friend’s followers in Philadelphia, was struck by the “young men … with large round flapped hats, and long flowing strait locks, with a sort of melancholy wildness in their countenances, and an effeminate, dejected air.” Who were these strange people, who call their leader “he”? And who was this preacher, so strikingly beautiful, and with a voice that sounded like a “croak”?

  Then as always, the words of the Comforter’s sermons were not unique, but largely stolen and repurposed from the Quakers who had raised and then disowned them. When they were caught plagiarizing the texts of Isaac Pennington and William Sewel and publishing those exact words as their own, as Some Considerations, Propounded to the Several Sorts and Sects of Professors of This Age, their followers simply explained that the holy spirit had spoken the same language to all the faithful. Why should the truth be different? they asked, with their leader who was different.

  Yet the Friend of Friends kept traveling, city to town and then back again, a dozen or so followers alongside, officially founding the Society of Universal Friends in 1783 and earning the notice of other religious leaders. “Saw Jemimy Wilkerson the Imposter with the number of Deluded Creatures that go about with her standing &c in the road,” the Baptist minister John Pitman wrote in his journal. A master equestrian, the Best Friend moved quickly, attracting bigger and bigger crowds with their companions in robes that obscured their shapes, side-saddle on their rides. But word preceded them most anywhere, critics with anonymous names like “VOX POPULI” and “Z” writing to local newspapers to decry the sinful preacher. These letters warned and damned and disparaged and despaired. These letters made demons out of the Friends, who were blasphemers, thieves, perverts, undermining the bedrocks of Christian society. Once the Comforter’s numbers had grown, the faithful in the hundreds, word spread of a near murder, the women of the sect attempting to strangle in her sleep a new member who had questioned the Friend’s mystical powers, although what those powers were, that remained unclear. Despite the controversies, however, followers kept joining. Some heard the plagiarized sermons and left their families behind, abandoning wives and husbands and children and aged parents, while others offered their families, homes, and fortunes to this strangely dressed prophet, all that they owned subsumed into the promise of the Friend.

  And so the followers came as full families, as widows and widowers, a few formerly enslaved people, a few unmarried adults. Some of the mothers adopted the Friend to all Mankind’s manner of dress (hair down like a man, unadorned and flowing robes), obeying the demands of plain speech, and likewise devoting themselves to celibacy. Use thee and thou, the Friend said, and punished those who didn’t, ordering one man to wear a small bell for several weeks after he talked informally. One follower in particular, who would come to live with the Friend and even hold their properties in her name, was the best at following these rules; she called herself Sarah Friend, and became as close to a second as there was in the society for years. She dined with the Friend, and she sometimes wore sackcloth, styled after the two witnesses to the apocalypse in the book of Revelation, who had the power to bring drought, plague, and famine to the earth. She even provided the Friend with more dreams than the other faithful would, taking seriously their belief that all dreams could be prophetic, and sharing visions of twin moons, and of deathly grooms in ash-colored clothing. Other followers listened to the Friend, but never quite as closely as Sarah did. Those women were granted permissions to marry and to bring babies into the world, set toward apocalypse though they may be. They wore their hair up.

  Can “yet in time” be removed from the world? The world was, at best, a distraction, all gossip and sex and other such unacceptable behaviors, at least so far as the Friend could make sense of it. This world would not do, and so the Friend sent a party of followers west, to what they would have called the frontier in New York, to found a settlement. They imagined it would be a land apart, where they could live according to the plain rules they preached, and wait out the clock of death. The Best Friend sent the strongest of the sect to settle this land, the repeated trips beginning in 1785 with a journey Ruth Prichard describes as “snow this day under the load of snow,” and the final spot chosen in 1787, when the sound of a waterfall drew followers to the shores of Seneca Lake.

  This land the Friend hoped to make apart from the world, yet still in time, was home to the Seneca people, who had joined the powerful Haudenosaunee Confederacy half a millennium before, brought together by the Peacemaker under a solar eclipse. For centuries the Seneca thrived, planning from their villages of longhouses commerce that stretched hundreds of miles, joining the fur trade, and conducting war and complex diplomacy with colonizing forces and other indigenous peoples, all from their strong position within a confederacy whose political structure the colonizers would, in part, appropriate for their own government. The confederacy had signed between fifty and sixty treaties with the British, French, and Dutch, beginning in 1613, each of which the Europeans violated. In 1775, they signed another treaty, promising to the Americans that the confederacy itself would remain neutral during the Revolutionary War. As the Americans pushed farther into Haudenosaunee territory, and as their rhetoric became increasingly hateful in speaking of the Haudenosaunee, some individuals of the confederacy joined forces with the British, just as some also joined with the Americans, but the confederacy on the whole kept its word. After the war, vengeful of what he saw as a betrayal and seeking land, George Washington sent Major General John Sullivan (that former commander from Rhode Island) with roughly one quarter of the Continental Army to wreak devastation on the Haudenosaunee. Begun in 1779 and finished in 1780, the Sullivan Expedition was one of many horrors, the burning of homes and crops and the destruction of any locatable resources, up the Susquehanna River to the Great Lakes, with the majority of the indigenous people driven north and west as refugees. For the most part, word of the march traveled ahead of Sullivan’s six-mile-long army, and the Seneca abandoned villages like those a few miles north of the eventual site of the Friend’s settlement by the time of the Continental Army’s catastrophic arrival. Still, were the Haudenosaunee to offer peace, Washington instructed, they should receive only “terror,” and Sullivan’s men continued on, writing in their journals of the beauty of the homes and orchards they destroyed.

  After Sullivan’s march, the Americans and the Haudenosaunee signed another treaty at Fort Stanwix, which marked a large circle of land, from Lake Ontario down along the Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, as belonging to the Confederacy, and promising that no settlers would come there. It is to that land that the followers of the Friend went, among the very first settlers to violate that boundary after the march of destruction—the Friend to All Mankind, as they called themself, the Best Friend. They went to await the apocalypse, prophesied to them with fire and darkness, those very things that had preceded them, and on which they built their dream, what they had always imagined to be right. The followers went a few years after the treaty at Fort Stanwix, girdling trees while the Americans kept promising, with new treaties and more laws, that settlers would not come to this place.

  The specific land t
he Friend and their followers bought was a part of the Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham Purchase, these two men having acquired millions of acres of Haudenosaunee land through complicated deceit. Colonel John Livingston also claimed much of the same land, which he had also acquired duplicitously. The parcel the Comforter purchased from these acres happened to lie on the Preemption Line, which was drawn by the governors of New York and Massachusetts when they divided the land between their new states. As no state or person in the new government could agree on who owned these lands, then, the Friend found their property in flux, shrinking from fourteen thousand promised acres to a slim tract, eleven hundred acres large, called “the Garter.” Eventually, their followers were able to raise enough funds to acquire roughly ten thousand more acres, for which they had to pay twice, after Massachusetts and New York decided to again move the Preemption Line, resetting the boundaries once more.

  By 1790, the Friend ceased their constant travels and relocated to the settlement, spending their first few years on the western edge of Seneca Lake. Their followers built the first grist mill in the region, and went from surviving on boiled nettles to sharing full and hearty meals, as their numbers grew first to one hundred, then two. Over time, living in this growing hub became less appealing, and the Friend planned another move just a dozen miles westward, to a place they would call Jerusalem. Sarah Friend went with them to select a spot on which to build their new home, which, like much of the land, Sarah kept in her name (legal papers being too earthly for the Friend), although the two could not agree on a location, with the All-Friend deciding on a hill farther north than the spot Sarah preferred. As followers began clearing the trees for them, however, Sarah fell ill, and after seventeen weeks of illness with the Friend as her nurse, she succumbed to her sickness and died. The Death Book tells us that the Friend preached for a long time at Sarah Friend’s funeral, when she “left Her weeping friends to mourn.” The “righteous is taken away from the evil to come; they shall enter into peace; they shall rest in their beds,” the Friend declared. Less than three months later, they left the settlement, and relocated permanently to Jerusalem.

  The home in Jerusalem was at first quite secluded, down a thing that was barely a road, with only a small number of settlers and of returned Seneca people for neighbors, but the Friend welcomed many of the celibate women and more impoverished members of their sect to join them and make a life on that hill, and the population soon grew. The followers built additions onto the Friend’s log cabin, then more, covering it later with clapboard. It was a strikingly large and handsome dwelling, and the Friend joined in sawing wood and hoeing the garden beside it. All the while the United States of America, now articulated as such, continued to grow around them—with its walls, and its slavery, and the disagreements it has with itself, and its ceaseless wars. The Friend, though they pretended to be hidden away, still took part in the building of the nation—with each house they built, each friend they brought west, each garden they hoed.

  Around the sect, too, the Haudenosaunee nations continued, consolidating near Niagara Falls. By 1794, when Colonel Timothy Pickering went to establish yet another treaty with the Haudenosaunee on behalf of the United States, the Friend was in prominent enough standing that Pickering invited them to visit the council. While some Seneca warriors had argued for war to defend their land, the Seneca women had vetoed that plan, as was their right, tradition ensuring their voices had a place in decision making. The Haudenosaunee then met with the representatives of the United States in Canandaigua, a town of settlers about fifteen miles from the Friend, built near the site of the Seneca town of Ganondagan, “the Chosen Spot,” which had been destroyed by both New France and Sullivan’s raid. The council began in Seneca tradition, honoring those who had died since the last meeting, and presenting the Americans with another promise to keep friendship. Over a thousand Haudenosaunee were present, and the council lasted for six months before the Six Nations reached a consensus, at which point the United States agreed to recognize the confederacy as a sovereign nation. A six-foot wampum belt records this truth, and is held by the Onondaga Nation. The boundaries established by the treaty endured, despite regular attempts by the United States to violate them, and just as the Seneca Nation will surely endure long after the United States has fallen and its borders have crumbled.

  The Friend even spoke at the council meeting they attended—unusual, at the meetings of the Americans, for someone who was not a man—falling into loud prayer, then spreading their same old message of apocalypse and redemption, ranting on until it was dark, past when their audience cared to listen. The following day, some Seneca women in attendance used the Comforter’s impromptu sermon as an opening to address Colonel Pickering’s council themselves. Describing this part of the negotiation, the Quaker preacher William Savery wrote in his journal “that one of the white women had yesterday told the Indians to repent; and they now called the white people to repent.”

  The Treaty of Canandaigua ceded Jerusalem and the settlement to the United States, securing the sect’s legal ownership, but the seclusion of the settlement did not offer everything the All-Friend had hoped. There were fewer converts, for instance, away from the coastal cities, even as they regularly hosted sightseers on their way to nearby Niagara Falls, and even as the development of their land made it easier for new waves of settlers to arrive to the region, most of them scorned the religious eccentrics once there. Traveling preachers even came to Jerusalem just as the Friend had previously gone from city to city, there to save the sinners. The Methodist Thomas Smith, for one, stood outside of the Comforter’s home and declared that they were the Jezebel of Revelation, boasting later that he had brought the Friend to tears. While the women of the sect were doing quite well—more of them single, without children, and heading their household than was the case with other women of the new nation, and many of the single women living in a cluster of homes near the Friend’s home—some of the men were in regular revolt, seeking to regain control of property and wealth they had given to the sect, as the numbers of the faithful dwindled into the nineteenth century. Still, life went on in Jerusalem as close to normal as it could. The Friend ate dinner privately or with a single woman companion in their room before everyone else ate dinner silently in the common room, and they taped the mouth shut of one follower who laughed too much, and when they spoke, they spoke often of fire. They continued to welcome celibates into what they called the Faithful Sisterhood, and wore strange undergarments, which they obsessively washed. And in the evening, they retired to their room, with a “looking-glass, a clock, an arm-chair, a good bed, a warming-pan, and a silver saucer,” and slept.

  In the end, it came down to simple things: horses, and the deeds to estates. One day, the Friend’s brother-in-law, Thomas Potter, became upset that they had reclaimed a mare earlier given to Patience, Thomas’s wife and the Friend’s sister. When the sheriff attempted to serve a writ demanding the return of the horse, the Friend denied the document on the ground that it was addressed to Jemima Wilkinson, who was dead. Soon after, a warrant was issued against them on claims of blasphemy. They managed to evade arrest for a while, first by speeding away on their horse when men surprised them on a path. A mob later arrived at their home, but the Faithful Sisterhood emerged from the small structure in which they made cloth, and they beat away the men with their fists. Soon after, thirty men, mainly former followers, returned to storm the home, breaking down the door with an ax. The men finally brought the Friend to court, where they were accused of blasphemy and undermining marriage, but the judges could not agree on whether blasphemy was a crime in their new state. The trial ended with the Friend delivering a powerful sermon that won the hearts of the assembled people, and they returned home certain of their absolution.

  The true fracturing of the sect, however, came when Sarah’s daughter Eliza married at a young age, and when her husband initiated a long and costly legal battle over the lands she had inherited. The Comforter was furious,
first that Eliza would abandon the Faithful Sisterhood and marry a man, and then that this man would drain the wealth of their settlement, the population of which was fewer and fewer. In October of 1816, the legal battles protracting and settlers of other faiths clearing the land around the Society of Universal Friends in greater and greater numbers, the All-Friend dreamed of their own impending death—“that everything was cut short, that the hair was cut short, and that the time was no longer than from mid night to mid day.” After that dream, it would be three years of dropsy before they actually died, but even then the remaining faithful delayed burial, and placed the body instead in a tomb they built in their basement, the architecture leaving open the possibility of life again, that they might arise.

  The Friend left time, and the Friend went from here, but no death can prevent time’s passage, nor the world itself, in time. Eventually, the remaining followers removed the body from the tomb and placed it in a grave, covering it with dirt like any other corpse that rots. In the days after, the critics of the Friend published their most vicious attacks, fresh screeds in newspapers and a whole book devoted to damning their work. Most of the remaining faithful soon left the society, and the grain mill often stood still. Shortly after the start of the Civil War, the last follower died, an aged person secluded near Seneca Lake. What a silly and violent idea, to think that someone could leave the world, and in that leaving could make a new one. Don’t you know? You’re always making the world you live in, friend, right up until the moment you die. And then after that, too.