A lady came to our house who had made a great noise in the country, and has been made the occasion of various conjectures. She calls herself Caroline Augusta Harriet, Duchess of Brownstonburges. Says she has resided in the Court of England for several years, that she eloped from the palace of St. James. She appears to be a person of an extraordinary education, and well acquainted with things at Court, but she is generally supposed to be an impostor.
Three days later he writes that he “conveyed the extraordinary visitor to town in a chaise.” With this glimpse of Sarah—if Sarah she were—visiting in a little New England town in a sober Puritan family, and riding off to Boston in a chaise with the pious Puritan preacher, she vanishes from our ken, to be obscured in the smoke of battle and the din of war, and forced to learn that to American patriots it was no endearing trait to pose as an English princess.
CHAPTER VII.
THE UNIVERSAL FRIEND.
Sir Thomas Browne says that “all heresies, how gross soever, have found a welcome with the people.” Certainly they have with the people, and specially they have with the Rhode Island people. The eighty-two pestilent heresies so sadly deplored by the Puritan divines found a home in Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. It was not strange, therefore, that from the heart of Narragansett should spring one of the most remarkable and successful religious woman-fanatics the world has ever known. Jemima Wilkinson was born in the town of Cumberland, R. I., in 1758. Though her father was a poor farmer, she came of no mean stock. She was a descendant of English kings—of King Edward I.—and later of Lieutenant Wilkinson, of Cromwell’s army, and she was a second cousin of Governor Stephen Hopkins and Commodore Hopkins.
When she was eight years old her mother died, leaving her to the care of older sisters, whom she soon completely dominated. She was handsome, fond of ease and dress, vain, and eager for attention. She was romantic and impressionable, and when a new sect of religious zealots, called Separatists, appeared in her neighborhood—a sect who rejected church organization and insisted upon direct guidance from heaven—she became one of the most regular attendants at their meetings.
She soon betook herself to solitude and study of the Bible, and seemed in deep reflection, and at last kept wholly to her room, and then went to bed. She was at that time but eighteen years old, and it scarcely seems possible that she deliberately planned out her system of life-long deception which proved so successful; but soon she began to see visions, which she described to her sisters and visitors, and interpreted to them.
Finally she fell in a deep trance, which lasted thirty-six hours, during which she scarcely breathed. About the middle of the second day, when surrounded by anxious watchers (who proved valuable witnesses in her later career), she rose up majestically, called for clothing, dressed herself, and walked about fully restored and calm, though pale. But she announced that Jemima Wilkinson had died, and that her body was now inhabited by a spirit whose mission was to deliver the oracles of God to mankind, and who was to be known henceforth by the name of the Universal Friend. It ought to be noted here that this girl of eighteen not only maintained these absurd claims of resurrection of the body and reincarnation, at that time, in the face of the expostulation and arguments of her relatives and friends, but also with unshaken firmness, and before all hearers, till the day of her death at the age of sixty-one.
On the first Sunday after her trance, the Universal Friend preached in the open air near her home to a large and excited gathering of people; and she electrified her audience by her eloquence, her brilliant imagination, her extraordinary familiarity with the Scriptures, and her facility and force of application and quotation from them. Her success in obtaining converts was most marked from the first, as was her success in obtaining temporal comforts and benefits from these converts. In this she resembled the English religious adventuress, Johanna Southcote. For six years she lived at the house of Judge William Potter, in South Kingstown, R. I. This handsome house was known as the Abbey. He enlarged it by building a splendid suite of rooms for his beloved spiritual leader, on whom he lavished his large fortune.
Her success as a miracle-worker was not so great. She announced that on a certain date she would walk upon the water, but when, in the face of a large multitude, she reached the water’s edge, she denounced the lack of faith of her followers, and refused to gratify their curiosity by trying the experiment. Nor did she succeed in her attempt to raise from the dead one Mistress Susanna Potter, the daughter of Judge Potter, who died during Jemima’s residence at the Abbey. She managed, however, to satisfy fully her followers by foretelling events, interpreting dreams, and penetrating secrets, which she worded by ingeniously mystic and easily applicable terms.
Her meetings and her converts were not confined to Rhode Island. In southern Massachusetts and Connecticut many joined her band. In New Milford, Conn., her converts erected a meeting-house. In 1782 she started out upon a new mission. With a small band of her disciples she went to Philadelphia, where she was cordially received and entertained by the Quakers. In Worcester, Pa., her reception was enthusiastic. Scarce a diary of those times but contains some allusion to her or her career. In the journal of Jacob Hiltzeheimer, of Philadelphia, I read:—