
The vibrant colors of the New England autumn were coming into full display as two young boys traveled north with their father from Boston on Monday, September 24, 1860. Though we do not know if this trio—Albert and Lorenzo Randolph, with their father Paschal Beverly Randolph—traveled by railroad or horse-drawn coach or walked on foot, we know their destination was the Shaker village in Canterbury.
The Shakers were busy in the annual season of harvest. As they worked picking apples from sun-dappled orchard trees, they may have chatted about the visit of Charles Stratton, who had attended the community’s public service the day before. Stratton was better known by P. T. Barnum’s name for him, General Tom Thumb. “In the P.M.,” the Shakers noted, Stratton “was taken into the family dwelling to be seen by the Brethren and Sisters. He was 22 yrs old and weighs 33 lbs.”


That’s what their father told the Trustees. “Randolph is an Indian, a spiritualist and a doctor,” according to the Village’s record.
But Paschal Beverly Randolph told many tales about himself. He was a descendant of the famed Randolph family of Virginia and of Madagascan royalty, he said, when in truth he was born in poverty in the infamous Five Points slum of New York City and spent time as a child in the city’s almshouse. In 1860, Paschal Beverly Randolph told Federal Census takers in Boston that he was a “liberal clergyman.” Ten years earlier, he was a barber in Albion, Michigan, and before that, a cabin boy on various ships. In between he was a provisioner of “Indian” remedies, “clairvoyant physician and psycho-phrenologist,” abolitionist, trance medium, Spiritualist, orator, and writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His was an emancipatory vision. He would go on to recruit African American soldiers for the Union Army during the Civil War, found a Freedman’s School in New Orleans after the war ended, and appear on stages with white and African American leaders to argue for racial and gender equality. He would best be known in his later life, though, as an occultist.
In other words, Paschal Beverly Randolph sought utopia. American law defined and delimited race. The light-skinned Randolph was mulatto in the 1850 Census, Indian (Native American) in the 1860 Census, and Black when he wrote to United States Congressmen, published in abolitionist newspapers, and fought for racial and gender equality. In his writings he imagined a perfect world not only on earth but also in other realms.
Why, on that September day, he brought his two sons to Canterbury is a question we cannot yet answer. It is not a leap to assume that Randolph saw in the Shakers a safe haven for his sons—and that he wished to see for himself a Shaker community. (For a time, Randolph praised the Shakers for their egalitarianism, but in time he rejected their commitment to celibacy.) It appears his marriage was at its end; his wife Mary Jane (who was also listed as both mulatto and Indian in various censuses) would relocate in 1861 to Utica, New York. There she made and published booklets of Native American remedies. Albert and Lorenzo would live with or near the mother for many years, Albert as a laborer and later as a hostler, listing his race as “Indian” in the 1900 Federal Census and “white” in the 1910 Census. Lorenzo worked in a woolen mill until he, defining himself as “Indian” and, like his father, went to sea by joining the United States Navy in 1873.
The Randolph brothers did not stay long with the Canterbury Shakers. On March 28, 1861, eleven-year-old Albert “caught his hand in the machinery at the wood mill and cut off two fingers.” Their father was summoned and “became very much excited and talked without reason.”

When Paschal Beverly Randolph worked on ships between New England, Cuba, and Europe, he lost the forefinger on his left hand.
Paschal Beverly Randolph left Canterbury on April 2, taking Albert and Lorenzo with him. The trees they passed on their way back to Boston wouldn’t have yet leafed.
Americans’ historical and continuing quest for utopia cannot be separated from social strictures and personal identity and affiliation. For Paschal Beverly Randolph, perhaps, taking his sons to be raised by the Shakers was an opportunity for them to experience the equality and opportunity he imagined and for which he was fighting.
The Shakers, so few in number, live large in Americans’ imaginations, then and now. In the nineteenth century, their radical progressivism challenged American society’s norms and attracted a broad array of individuals seeking to find—or just think about—a better society for themselves and their children. Investigating Canterbury Shaker Village’s visitors is much more than documenting curiosity about the sect who sought to be “in union.” Such a study reveals much about the Shakers’ impact on the way Americans thought about themselves and the “more perfect union” in which—and for which—so many struggled.