Not Your Founding Father
How a Nonbinary Minister Became America's Most Radical Revolutionary
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling celebration of a forgotten early American renegade, Not Your Founding Father reconsiders just how radical the American experiment could have been.
Early in the morning of October 9, 1776—in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry trees—twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died, and the Public Universal Friend was born.
Old Cherry Wilkinson’s children had already gained a reputation for scandal. Two of his boys had been dismissed from the local Quaker meeting for joining the colonial militia, and one of the girls was expelled for having a baby out of wedlock. Now, here was another Wilkinson child, riding about the countryside, claiming to be a genderless messenger of God.
Yet something about the Public Universal Friend set war-ravaged New England ablaze. The young minister seemed to embody the possibilities offered by the new nation, especially the right to total self-determination. To authorities, however, the minister was “the devil in petticoats,” a threat to the men who sought to keep America’s power for themselves.
And so the Public Universal Friend ventured west to create an Eden on the frontier, a place where everyone would have the right to not only life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness, but also peace and shared prosperity. But into every Eden comes a snake. And soon, financial scams, contested wills, adultery, plagiarism, allegations of murder, and murmurs of another war with England would threaten to destroy this new American utopia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1776, 23-year-old Quaker Jemima Wilkinson awoke from a deadly illness transformed into a genderless messenger from God named Universal Friend, also known as Public Universal Friend. In this riveting biography, historian Sankovitch (American Rebels) brings to vivid life the striking minister in "genderless clothing" who preached "repentance through gratitude" and "salvation guaranteed for all" in Rhode Island and eastern Pennsylvania, and later at outposts founded by the Society of the Universal Friend in western New York. The book elegantly embeds Universal Friend's rise within the tumultuousness of the era, including the destabilizing upheaval of the American Revolution that led many to connect with the minister's message of "Unity and Fellowship"; the concurrent explosion of other new religious movements building separatist communities, such as the more working-class Shakers; and the chaos of "conflicting claims of land speculators" during post-Revolution western expansion. The latter became a source of significant internal strife within the Society as several members, almost entirely men, undermined the group's property claims and betrayed Universal Friend, accusing the minister of blasphemy. Most astute is Sankovitch's argument that Universal Friend better achieved the ideals of the Revolution than many male contemporaries, establishing a community in which women were "unrestricted" and African Americans were "integral and welcome." It's a transfixing look at a remarkable leader whose belief in "the equality of all souls" still resonates.
