Ann Lee — Mother Ann, who buried four children and then said the flesh was the root of it.
Illiterate, married against her will to a blacksmith, she lost all four of her children in infancy and after imprisonment in Manchester in 1770 preached that the lust of the flesh was the original sin. She was beaten by mobs in New England, and Shakers insist to this day that she never claimed to be Christ.
Ann Lee was born in Toad Lane, Manchester, in 1736, worked in a textile mill and later as a cook, could not read or write, and married Abraham Standerin. All four of her children died, the last in 1766. Her revelation in Manchester prison in 1770 identified the sexual act as the origin of human separation from God, and from then she led the Wardley group. In America she and the small band who came with her were repeatedly assaulted: she was imprisoned in Albany in 1780 as a suspected British sympathiser because of the pacifism, and on the missionary journey through Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1781-83 she and her followers were dragged from houses and beaten. She died on 8 September 1784 at Watervliet, aged forty-eight, and Shaker sources have insisted for two centuries that she taught she was not Christ but the one in whom the Christ Spirit appeared a second time — a distinction hostile writers ignored from the beginning.
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