Primary Source: Sarah Bancroft, Antinomian Prophetess of the Annapolis Valley, 1791

In the early 1790s, in the lower Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, there lived a woman known locally as “The Prophetess.” Her name was Sarah Bancroft, and she was an antinomian preacher in the radical New Light tradition of Protestant evangelism. As a prophet, Bancroft preached publicly about the urgency of recognizing and confessing one’s sins in the hopes of experiencing a spiritual conversion (or New Birth) through God’s grace. The New Light message of spiritual rebirth had been promulgated throughout Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley about a decade earlier, during the American Revolution, by the popular self-trained evangelical preacher, Henry Alline. Inspired by New Light teachings that all people – regardless of gender, class, or race – could access divine revelations and exhort others to repent, Bancroft garnered a local reputation and following. This was an especially powerful spiritual prospect as the 1790s, amid imperial wars and revolutions, was a time seen by many (especially by common laypeople) as a period of global turmoil unfolding in anticipation of a coming millennium of peace.

Bound volumes of Inglis's journal and letters, Nova Scotia Archives. Photo by Colby Gaudet.

While recently consulting the journal and letters of the Anglican bishop Charles Inglis, I encountered a reference to Bancroft “the Prophetess” which caught my attention. Inglis was the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, and the first such Church of England bishop in North America. While historians have noted Bancroft in wider studies of evangelical history in the Maritimes,[1] I want to focus on Inglis’s entry to squeeze as much contextual insight as possible from his passing reference. After all, this is one of the only references we have to Bancroft, a woman who left no writings of her own and who – despite a strong measure of personal enthusiasm and charisma – was likely not literate beyond oral knowledge of biblical texts. As with so many female preachers of her time, Bancroft likely based her messages and teachings on the spiritual visions she experienced personally. The historical traces of any such women are usually the references made to their actions and reputations by male observers – usually in disagreement or outright opposition.

In August 1791, Charles Inglis travelled through the lower Annapolis Valley on a pastoral tour, inspecting the Anglican churches newly constructed in several villages, including Lower Granville on the Annapolis Basin. To amply grasp the context of Inglis’s mention of Bancroft, I will reproduce most of the entry, dated 24 August 1791:

“Set out early to view the new church in the lower District, where I had never been before. … View[ed] the Glebe which seems to be an excellent lot, about 100 acres are cleared; 14 tons of English hay cut on it this summer. Stopt at Cap’t Thorne’s who not being at home, went on to Mr. Cornwall’s, where I was joined by Cap’t Thorne, and went to the Church which is well situated, a mile below Goat Island, and about 7 miles above the Gut of Annapolis. The Church is completely raised, and the frame appears to be good. … Dined with Mr. Cornwall and lodged at Cap’t Thorne’s. … Heard much of the Prophetess Sarah Bencraft [Bancroft]. She lives at a Cap’t Shaw’s in this vicinity. She lately told Mrs. Shaw and the family that it was a great honor to them to attend and wait upon her, as she, the Prophetess, would be a pillar in heaven. Rode to the top of the North Mountain, which is very steep and commands a most extensive prospect of St. Mary’s Bay, Digby, Clements, and Bason, Granville, Annapolis and many miles east of the town.”[2]

What can we learn from this passage?

It is clear from the account that this was a newly settled area outside the older settlement of Annapolis. The “lower district” Inglis mentioned was only occasionally visited by clergymen such as himself. Indeed, Inglis noted that he had never visited this settlement before. In such out-settlements laypeople could more readily assume authorities both religious and civil in the regular absence of those authorities typical of villages and towns (as embodied by Inglis). The newness of the rural settlement is clear in Inglis’s description of the land as recently cleared and the church as recently built. We also learn that men named Thorne and Cornwall were the leading Anglican residents of the district as they were the families that Inglis visited during his tour. Edward Thorne, forty-five, who accommodated the visiting bishop, was a Loyalist from New York (as was Inglis) and had been appointed magistrate for the township of Granville. Meanwhile, George Cornwall (sometimes Cornwell), with whom the bishop dined, was also a respected Loyalist settled at Granville.[3] Further, we learn that, at the time of Inglis’s visit, Sarah Bancroft was lodging with the family of Moses Shaw, fifty-six, also a Loyalist from New York. Moses’s wife, Mehitable, was originally from Boston.[4]

            From the bishop we learn he had “heard much” of Bancroft over dinner and during his stay in Lower Granville. While Inglis did not encounter Bancroft personally, his comments suggest that she had a growing reputation in the district. While some published information is available about the Bancroft family of the Annapolis area, it is unclear who precisely Sarah was. A nineteenth-century history of Annapolis County lists Sarah Payson as the wife of Jeremiah Bancroft, but this is an unsatisfactory answer to the question of Sarah Bancroft’s identity. The Bancrofts had come to Nova Scotia in the 1760s during the Planter migration. Jeremiah’s mother was also named Sarah, but she is recorded as having returned with her husband to the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution. Considering this, the most logical identity for Sarah Bancroft is Sarah Payson, Jeremiah’s wife. However, Inglis described the Prophetess Bancroft as residing with the Shaw family in 1791. If she was indeed the wife of Jeremiah, the couple had been married in 1789 and had two children by 1791.[5] It seems unlikely that such a young married woman, with a growing family of her own, was lodging with the Shaws and pursuing a prophetic calling. But if not Jeremiah's wife or mother, who could this Sarah Bancroft be? Inglis’s reference suggests that the woman he was hearing about was single, perhaps young, and free to take up a public ministry. According to the bishop, Bancroft had told the Shaws that it was “a great honor” for them “to attend and wait upon her,” which the family evidently believed by lodging her. If this prophetess was indeed also a young wife and mother with two children, her ministry would have been all the more remarkable, and undoubtedly controversial, as her critics would have argued that her ministry detracted from her wifely and motherly duties at home.

            Inglis’s account also suggests that Mehitable Shaw was among Bancroft’s keenest followers as she was the prophetess’s host and attendant and the recipient of Bancroft’s message about being “a pillar in heaven.” This message was evidently well-known in the district as the bishop had heard it while socializing with Cornwall and Thorne during his visit. People throughout the area were talking excitedly about the Prophetess and her teachings. As a female exhorter, it is unlikely Bancroft was permitted to testify in any of the local churches. Instead, she would have relied on the support of individual followers. She would have led small worship services and prayer gatherings at the Shaw family's home or perhaps in an out-building on their property, or even outdoors considering the summer weather.

            This strained bit of information that Inglis underlined in his journal – that Bancroft branded herself a prophet and figurative pillar in heaven – evokes much of what historians know about female evangelical preachers and exhorters of the late eighteenth century.[6] Despite the limited nature of Inglis’s comments, we can link Bancroft to other female prophets who emerged in northeastern North America at this time.[7] As the colonial bishop of the Church of England (the established state religion of Nova Scotia at this time), it is evident that Inglis squarely disapproved of Bancroft’s ministry. An Anglican figure of high standing, Inglis would have condemned unlicensed public preaching, especially by a woman. This kind of religious behaviour was labelled “enthusiasm” and dismissed by critics as being the result of an overheated imagination and misplaced personal ambition that led laypeople well beyond their rightful places in church and society.

In referring to herself as a pillar in heaven, Bancroft evoked a spiritual message akin to other well-known female spiritual leaders such as the Shaker Ann Lee, who lived in New York from 1774 until her death in 1784. Among her followers, Lee was known as “the woman clothed with the sun, having the moon under her feet” – a reference to a biblical prophecy contained in the Book of Revelation.[8] In her own way, Bancroft similarly positioned herself as a central figure (literally a pillar) in the heavenly domains of the much-anticipated spiritual millennium. Like other regions of eastern North America, the late-eighteenth-century Maritimes saw a proliferation of “spiritual novelties” in which women often predominated. Historian D.G. Bell writes that such popular activities and attitudes “included bibliomancy, dream interpretation, visions, millennial expectation, celibacy, free love, glossolalia, plain dress, holy dance and immersion.”[9] The interest in spiritual messages conveyed variously in visions, dreams, and portents had been a key dimension of Henry Alline’s preaching that influenced many women. Bell claimed that in “the disordered generation” that followed Alline, some women influenced by Alline’s New Light tradition, including Bancroft and Sarah Babcock of Shediac, New Brunswick, “declared themselves prophets and voiced spiritual communications.”[10]

Inglis’s comment that Bancroft had convinced the Shaws and others of her followers “to attend and wait upon her” suggests a confidence and pride on Bancroft’s behalf that edged close to the spirit of antinomianism pervasive in the 1790s Maritimes. Antinomianism (which had been present in the British American colonies since the famous case of Anne Hutchinson in 1630s Massachusetts) was an idea (considered heretical) that threatened all religious establishments. According to an antinomian viewpoint, once converted, an individual became sanctified in a manner that fully replaced their former self (one capable of sin) with a new self (one impermeable to sin). Such an idea was potentially quite dangerous to the maintenance of social, religious, and political order, especially in a yet sparsely populated colony like Nova Scotia. During the years of Alline’s ministry, a British Methodist named William Black made some observations about antinomianism in the Maritimes. Black was critical of Alline’s unbridled enthusiasm and its impact on the local people. In November 1782, Black wrote that when travelling through the Tantramar district that connected Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, he was “sorely grieved to find Mysticism and the foulest Antinomianism, spreading like fire; and its deadly fruits already growing up on every side. … Mr. Alline himself told several persons one day that a believer is like a nut, thrown into the mud, which may dirty the shell, but not the kernel. That is, we may get drunk, or commit adultery, without the smallest defilement, etc. etc.”[11] This parable of Alline’s became well-known in the Maritimes and fuelled antinomian sentiment. Many of the Maritime New Lights of the 1790s embraced the antinomian conceit that after a personal sanctification by divine grace, a person could no longer commit sin or error. This was a pervasive and subversive ideology in the revolutionary world of the North Atlantic. In her study of religious and sexual politics in eighteenth-century New England, Susan Juster states that “once reborn into a state of grace, evangelical men and women considered themselves no longer bound by the norms of profane society, including those of civility.”[12] Such an attitude could lead the reborn to claim – as did Sarah Bancroft – a new kind of spiritual authority, considering themselves fully immune to sin. And, as with the Babcock case of Shediac, such attitudes could, and did at times, tragically lead to murder.

With the turn of the nineteenth century, such heated antinomianism began to fizzle out in the Maritimes. There also came a marked shift away from female authority among evangelicals. The bureaucratic and administrative development of many evangelical churches in the early nineteenth century advanced the “resubordination” of women who had (erroneously) become accustomed to preaching in the 1780s and 1790s. In Bell’s final estimation, “a key aspect of reining in Newlight [sic] disorder was reining in assertive women.”[13] To establishmentarian critics of enthusiasm such as Inglis, vocal, prophetic women like Bancroft were either bad preachers or bad women, and they were most likely a combination of both. While enthusiastic female exhorters and preachers had emerged in the uncertain tumult of revolution and migration of the final decades of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century saw evangelical groups become more hierarchically organized in efforts to appear respectable and thereby benefit from being recognized (by society and the state) as constituting “good religion.” In this process, women were resubordinated, and prophetesses had fewer outlets or opportunities for their messages to break into the historical record, as with Inglis’s all-too-brief comments about Sarah Bancroft.

[1] George Rawlyk, The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775–1812 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 126.

[2] Correspondence and Journals of Bishop Charles Inglis, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1775–1814, Nova Scotia Archives (NSA), MG-1, vol. 479, no. 4, pp. 10–11.

[3] See William Arthur Calnek and Alfred William Savary, History of the County of Annapolis, including Old Port Royal and Acadia (Toronto: William Briggs, 1897), 220 and 393.

[4] Calnek and Savary, History of the County of Annapolis, 600–601.

[5] Calnek and Savary, History of the County of Annapolis, 471. See also, Family Record of Dea. Samuel Bancroft, 1715–1782, of Reading, Mass. (Vineland, NJ: 1922), 1.

[6] D.G. Bell, “Allowed Irregularities: Women Preachers in the Early 19th-Century Maritimes,” Acadiensis 30, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 3–39. For the broader context of early America, see Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Susan Juster, "Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding: Visionary Experience in Early Modern Britain and America," The William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (April 2000): 249–288; Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

[7] Rawlyk discusses the examples of Lydia Randall (also occurring in 1791) in the upper Annapolis Valley, and Sarah Babcock (occurring in 1805) in Shediac, New Brunswick. See Rawlyk, The Canada Fire, 65–66 and 124–125.

[8] On Lee and the Shakers, see Stephen Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 2–38, especially 16. On feminist interpretations of Ann Lee, see Tisa Wenger, “Female Christ and Feminist Foremother: The Many Lives of Ann Lee,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 5–32; and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 243–248.  

[9] Bell, “Allowed Irregularities,” 22.

[10] Bell, “Allowed Irregularities,” 9.

[11] “Account of Mr. Black,” Arminian Magazine (London, 1791), quoted in Rawlyk, The Canada Fire, 127–128.

[12] Juster, Disorderly Women, 83. Also, Bell, “Allowed Irregularities,” 11.

[13] Bell, “Allowed Irregularities,” 23.