This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In August 1780, five years after her Atlantic crossing, Ann Lee was arrested in New York along with her brother William and fellow Shaker James Whitaker on suspicion of spying for the British Crown, a documented wartime arrest distinct from the mill background and prison visions her first article covers. Wartime rumor held that the Shakers, gathered in a small pacifist community near Albany, were harboring British agents or trading secrets to the enemy, and Lee was held without trial for months. She was not released until December 1780, and only with the assistance of New York Governor George Clinton, a documented political intervention distinct from anything in the account of her ecstatic worship or her 1774 founding voyage.
The arrest was one episode in a longer pattern. As Lee and her followers traveled through New England on missionary tours in the years that followed, congregations and mobs repeatedly met them with verbal abuse, stoning and expulsion from towns, provoked as much by the sect's trembling worship and unmarried celibate households as by any wartime suspicion, a documented pattern of persecution distinct from the single institutional founding narrative her first article tells.
That the same woman remembered for sailing to America with almost nothing and founding a community that would outlast her by more than a century spent part of the Revolutionary War itself in custody as a suspected enemy agent, and years afterward absorbing mob violence on the roads she traveled to build that community, marks Lee's 1780 arrest and the persecution around it as a documented case where the cost of her mission was paid in the years the first article passes over in a single sentence.