User:Finnleys/Hannah Jenkins Barnard

Personal Life
Hannah Jenkins was born in 1754 in what is speculated to be Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Baptist parents, Valentine Jenkins, and his wife. She did not receive any schooling, and was illiterate until adolescence due to her family’s poverty. She experienced “considerable native intelligence,” despite her lack of formal education, and went on to join the Quaker Friends in 1772. She was married before 1780 to Peter Barnard, who had been widowed in 1775. In 1797, she signed her maiden name, Jenkins, on a Quarterly Meeting address, implying that she was married between 1798-1799. They were of modest means- living in a frame home built by Peter in 1780, which they established themselves, as a carter and a minister respectively. Barnard went on to have three children before 1790.

Early Ministry
By 1786, Jenkins-Barnard was a representative of the Friends eight times at the New York Quarterly Meeting, and became one of the representatives of the Nine Partners Quarterly Meeting- which spanned the areas of the Hudson River, north of Millbrook. She went on to become a representative for the New York Yearly Meeting in the years 1793, 1794, and 1796. During the same period as her first year representing the New York Yearly Meeting, she was authorized to travel through New England, simultaneously serving on the Nine Partners School Board from 1795-1796. Barnard was highly regarded by the Friends during this period, and was noted as an “eloquent speaker”, and was known for her powerful ministry work throughout the Friends community, particularly in her home base in Hudson. The same meetings that would later condemn her, according to a letter from Peter Barnard dated October 26, 1797, his wife’s ministry was “sound and edifying, attended with a comfortable evidence of her call there unto,”. The year before this, in 1796, Jenkins- Barnard had asked permission from the Quarterly meeting to travel to the British Isles and to Ireland in order to engage with the Friends in that region, and gauge the religious environment. At the time, it was difficult for women to assert their status in the Friends community- and although Jenkins- Barnard was highly regarded by the Meeting groups and the School Board, her request for travel was denied for two years, before she was eventually given the green light to travel in 1798.

Time Abroad/Disownment
She arrived in Falmouth, where she and a female companion, a single mother named Elizabeth Coggeshall from Rhode Island, visited 320 families in twenty counties. Her main purpose in this work was to convince the Quaker Hierarchy in London to adopt a liberal policy that would allow ministers of other churches to use citizens' homes in order to preach, in return for the lending of their churches to the Friends. The pair then traveled to Baltimore, where they experienced far more political and religious tension than they had in their previous endeavors. Jenkins- Barnard determined that this was because of a recent change in religious leadership. Under the leadership of Abraham Shackleton, British quakers began to reject strict, traditional readings of the Old Testament, which they deemed to be a violation of the Quakers’ testament to peace, in lieu of more liberal teachings .This differed greatly from the evangelical branch that was on the ascend in England, and was the main subject of the status quo in Ireland. Jenkins- Barnard quickly fell into Shakleton’s group, called the “New Lights”, which caused increasing tension between the American travelers and the committee of Friends in Britain. The pair ended up traveling to Ireland, where an American Minister by the name of David Sands had begun his evangelical continuation of British Quakerism, and was taken aback by Jenkins-Barnard’s teachings. Despite the shock given to a great deal of traditional British and Irish Quakers, Jenkins- Barnard’s teachings became popular with the communities she reached, and she was granted a certificate of approval from the Irish Committee of Friends in 1800, just before leaving the country. At the same time, she had also put in a travel request for her and Coggeshall to journey to Germany- but this request was outright denied, and Jenkins- Barnard was extradited and investigated for heresy in Britain. There is record of her apprehension, but no unanimous decision could be made against her guilt or innocence. After fourteen months of trials, she and her counterpart were sent back to America, after the London Quarterly Meeting entirely censured her teachings. Jenkins- Barnard’s teachings, although not greatly published, emphasize a need for balance in religious discourse, “even to the point of her advocating the critical examination of tenets that the orthodox placed beyond questioning: the miraculous conception, the historical validity of certain miracles that Christ worked, and the vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind,”.

Jenkins- Barnard was not out of the woods upon her return home. The London Quarterly had swiftly reported her to the Friends Quarterly and Yearly Meeting committees in Hudson, who were quick to disown Barnard from their Meetings. She was charged once more in 1801 in Hudson, New York, with heresy, and found herself going through the same motions as she had in England. This time, the court was determined to reach a proper judgment. By the end of 1801, Jenkins-Barnard was formally expelled from all Meeting groups in the Hudson, and was not allowed to return to the British Isles, or Ireland to rekindle with the Friends.

Correspondences with Martha Routh
During her time on trial, Jenkins-Barnard exchanged many correspondences with the members of her inner circle, including Samuel Weatherill, a cloth manufacturer from Philadelphia, and Martha Routh, fellow Quaker Minister from Hudson, New York. Jenkins-Barnard emphasized through these correspondences the treatment she faced in the British Isles and Ireland, and the treatment she endured when she arrived back to her trial in Hudson. The letters she wrote showcased her state of mind during these trials- as one letter of an unknown date to Martha Routh reflects how Jenkins-Barnard felt her ministry was being degraded, and censured unjustly. Throughout her correspondence with Routh, Jenkins-Barnard discusses their time as friends, and her ideas of God as a being of love, and a being of order. Although she was banned from membership of the Meetings in Hudson, she utilized her correspondences to share her beliefs and contentions she held with current religious proceedings.

Correspondences with Samuel Weatherill
Her correspondences with Routh differ from those she had with Samuel Weatherill mainly in their content- to Wetherill, she discussed mainly her treatment by the other members of the Hudson Monthly Meeting group, and the proceedings as they occurred. She and Weatherill had shared experiences, in which she most likely found solace, as he was disowned from his Philadelphia Meeting group in 1779, allegedly for supporting the Revolutionary cause and Quaker progressivism. In her correspondences with Weatherill, she noted how the London Yearly Meetings coined heras overly rational, and was then removed from her Hudson Meeting group as a response to this judgment. She also discussed falling ill in 1802, during the same period as her disownment from the Hudson Friends, though it is not stated with what illness she was afflicted. Despite her illness, and loss of community, Jenkins-Barnard did not grieve her former membership and ministry- she compared her exile to bringing the darkness to light- insinuating that her removal from the Friends is more telling about their own religious and political motivations than the validity of her convictions.

Category:1754 births Category:1825 deaths Category:People from Dutchess County, New York Category:Quaker ministers