Jemima Wilkinson (November 29, 1752 - July 1, 1819) was a charismatic evangelist who preached total abstinence to her congregation of "Universal Friends."
As a young woman, she was beset by a debilitating illness which culminated in a fevered ecstatic trance during which she sermonized, and subsequent to which she collapsed and was declared dead. After having been already placed in a coffin she revived and knocked on the inside. This propelled her to claim that she was an incarnation of JesusChrist, and preach a regimen of strict abstinence, which she may have, according to some stories, only imperfectly observed herself.
After her death, her body was left unburied, to await her raising from the dead, and the faithful retained this expectation for decades, despite visible decay of the body.
In October JemimaWilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island, became ill with a fever and had a vision in which she died and her body was now by the Spirit of Light; repudiating her birth name, Wilkinson declared herself the founder of a new religion, the Publick Universal Friend.
Wilkinson's success-and notoriety-stemmed in part from her religious message, which blended the Calvinist warning of a lost and guilty, gossiping, dying World with a Quaker-inspired social gospel that advocated plain dress, pacifism, and the emancipation of slaves.
Although she was touted by some of her disciples as a messiah, Wilkinson's attempts at faith healing and prophesying scandalized even the tolerant Quakers and Baptists of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, where she was attacked by a stone-throwing mob.
JemimaWilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island was a 25 year old woman in 1776, and shortly thereafter became the first American-born woman to found a religious group.
JemimaWilkinson, born November 29, 1752, was probably the 8th child of Jeremiah and Amey Elizabeth Whipple Wilkinson of Cumberland, RI.
Jemima was described as "a tall and graceful woman with dark hair and dark eyes." She possessed a magnetic personality and powerful preaching style that seems to have provided an outlet for numbers of fervish patriotic worshipers.
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