Rebecca Cox Jackson, a Thunderstorm and a New Authority

Rebecca Cox Jackson's own account of her 1830 conversion is specific and dramatic: caught in a violent thunderstorm she had feared would kill her, she experienced what she described as a cleansing of sin and a direct encounter with the voice of God, which she treated as the true source of her religious authority rather than any ordination, which as a woman in the AME Church she could not have received. She began preaching on the strength of that experience, and by her own account she gained the ability to read scripture through that same spiritual transformation, having depended before on her brother to read to her. That brother, an AME minister named Joseph Cox, became one of her sharpest critics, troubled both by her independent preaching and by her growing insistence that celibacy, not marriage, was the higher spiritual path, a position that estranged her from her husband. Conventional AME structures had no place for the kind of unmediated authority Jackson claimed, and by the early 1840s she had found a religious community that did: the Shakers, whose theology already held that direct spiritual gifts were ordinary features of communal life, and whose practice of celibacy matched the conviction she had already reached on her own. She rose to become a Shaker eldress, and in the 1850s returned to Philadelphia to establish a small Shaker family of her own there, whose membership was largely Black and female, unusual for an otherwise overwhelmingly white movement. Jackson's manuscripts, records of visions and theological argument written once she gained literacy through her conversion, were not published in her lifetime; they survive today as Gifts of Power, one of the fullest surviving first-person religious narratives by a nineteenth century Black American woman.