'An Angel Might Come Down and Sit on It'

On this date, August 8, in 1864, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to the Shakers of Mount Lebanon, N.Y., thanking them for the rocking chair they had sent to him in Washington, D.C. Lincoln expresses his “cordial thanks for the very comfortable chair.” The letter is now in the collection of the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, N.Y., and is published as “To the Shakers” in Vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (ed. Roy P. Basler, 1953). Shaker elders had petitioned the president to secure legal conscientious objector status for the young men of their faith.

In the public mind, the Shakers are remembered today, if at all, for the oddness of their doctrines and the elegant simplicity of their crafts, in particular chairs and other furniture. They have, however, intrigued and earned the admiration of first-rate minds. Msgr. Ronald Knox examines the Shakers in “Some Vagaries of Modern Revivalism,” the second-to-last chapter in Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950). After looking at other American religious and utopian communities of the 18th and 19th centuries he writes:

“A child, I think, can be happy anywhere; but the grown-ups – did the privileges of communal marriage compensate them, in fact, for such a drab existence? [The Shakers were doctrinally celibate.] There was more fun to be had, you feel, in the cloistered shades of Mount Lebanon. The Shakers for us!”

Some thirty years ago I wrote a long newspaper story about the Darrow School, an exclusive private high school on the grounds of the Shaker settlement at Mount Lebanon, N.Y., the largest in the United States (from 1787 to 1947). It’s the site of the Great Stone Barn – fifty feet wide, four stories tall and almost two-hundred feet long. Guy Davenport admired Shaker aesthetics and was fond of citing Mother Ann Lee’s dictum that “every force evolves a form” (the title of his 1987 essay collection). He noted that it “sounds like Heraclitus or Darwin,” and went on to say:  “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”

In 1963, Davenport visited Thomas Merton in his cabin in the woods near the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Merton was writing an essay, “Pleasant Hill” (the name of a former Shaker colony near Lexington, Ky., where Davenport lived), that would appear as the introduction to Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture (Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews, 1966) and be collected in Merton’s own Mystics and Zen Masters (1967). As Davenport relates in the essay “Shaker Light” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), Merton said:

“The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come down and sit on it.”

It was Lincoln, of course, who said at the conclusion of his first inaugural address:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”