American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford and the American Colony in Jerusalem - Hardcover

JANE FLETCHER GENIESSE, a former reporter for the New York Times, researched American Priestess for seven years. Her biography of Freya Stark, Passionate Nomad, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She lives in Florida and Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER ONE
A Beginning


The world to an end shall come
In eighteen hundred and eighty-one.
—Prophecy by an anonymous author, 1488
On a windy September day in 1881, the captain ordered the anchor dropped while the ship was still far offshore. This was routine procedure, as the port of Jaffa in Palestine was notoriously unsafe. Until that moment, however, not one of the eighteen pilgrims assembled on deck had been aware of just how difficult disembarkation might be. In their haste to leave Chicago, none had thought to pack a guidebook, and they now strained to make out details of the scene before them. The town of Jaffa seemed pretty in the morning sunlight. A mosque crowned a picturesque riot of domed houses tumbling down to the sea. There was an inviting waterfront, lined with handsome brick and stone warehouses, and orange trees abounded in the countryside around the town. But the foaming waves that crashed against a circular belt of sunken boulders between them and the shore were distinctly intimidating.(1)

Neither their own steamer nor any of the other large ships anchored nearby could get close to shore. This had been so since 1345, when the Egyptian Mamluks had destroyed Jaffa's venerable harbor, determined that no infidel crusaders would ever again invade the Eastern lands after Sultan Baybars had expelled the last Western knights in 1271. Tradition had it that Andromeda was chained to one of these jagged rocks, and it was from Jaffa—or ancient Joppa--that Jonah had fled to escape being sent to Nineveh, and then was swallowed by a whale. Hiram of Tyre sent his Lebanese cedars on floats to this port for Solomon to build his great temple in Jerusalem, and in the town itself Simon the tanner had been host to Saint Peter.

The pilgrims knew these stories. Though they lacked a guidebook, they each carried a Bible, and biblical names and characters were as familiar to them as those of their families. They were both weary and excited. They had been voyaging since August 17, when they left Chicago abruptly, after nightfall. If some had not been completely ready, none could have hesitated. The glorious message for which they had been waiting had come at last. Eagerly, they obeyed the summons. The Resurrection was at hand and they were prepared to meet the Messiah.

Thus, via Quebec by train, then by steamer to London, six women, four men, a nineteen-year-old youth, two young girls, and three babies had sailed by the northern route to Liverpool. With the addition of a retired British army captain and his wife who had asked to join them in London, the little band was now close to their hearts' desire. Soon they would be in Jerusalem to greet their Savior personally when He alighted on the Mount of Olives.

Within moments, a motley fleet of rowboats and little barges surging through the rock barrier threw their lines over the ship's side and were bobbing against its hull. A rabble of barefooted Arabs, hoisting themselves up with ropes and chains, clambered swiftly aboard, shouting incomprehensibly. Many had daggers thrust into their wide red sashes, and all seemed enormous and frightening to the startled passengers whom the captain had only recently warned of Jaffa's famously unceremonious custom of disembarkation. Clad in baggy trousers and wearing red fezzes, the boatmen fell upon passengers and baggage like a swarm of hornets, scooping men, women, children, trunks, valises, and hatboxes up in a viselike grip, and half-tossed, half-handed them over to their waiting comrades below. Finding themselves breathless and disarranged but at least safe in the heaving tenders, the ladies patted their bonnets and skirts back into order while the gentlemen offered a steadying hand. Once past the rock barrier, they were again seized by the Arab longshoremen, who carried them through the surf and up the beach, and finally set them down on Canaan's sacred soil.

Little did the pilgrims guess, as they waited for their ride over the sultan's new carriage road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, that filth, illness, and sorrow awaited them. Nor could they know of the singular friendships and rapturous moments that also lay ahead. In Chicago, the newspapers had called them the "Overcomers." Their doctrines were strange. They had been rebuffed and ridiculed for their beliefs, and for their unwavering faith in their spiritual leaders, Horatio Spafford and his blue-eyed wife, Anna. Yet educated, attractive, mostly well-to-do, and some socially prominent, these pilgrims were moved by the absolute conviction that they had been called to their journey.
The second half of the nineteenth century, often called America's Gilded Age, was known as "Bible drenched," and for good reason. After the recent and bloodily divisive Civil War, America had become rich, but the new wealth, resulting from an agrarian way of life giving way to an industrialized society, brought stress to many. A grand network of railroads and the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, had fueled a westward migration. Travel and the creation of new businesses had become easier, but massive dislocations followed. Suddenly there were crowded cities and an urban poor. Moreover, vast numbers of immigrants seeking work and a better life continued to arrive, bringing with them new ideas that disturbed rural America. By the middle of the tumultuous century that gave birth to the Overcomers, many made anxious by the secularism and Enlightenment thinking of the old Continent had turned to religion for reassurance and certitude.

This impulse was hardly new to America, which had already enjoyed two waves of religious "awakenings" in the past. The first had occurred four decades before the American Revolution, the second began at the start of the nineteenth century and lasted into the 1830s. Although the founding fathers, valuing freedom of conscience, had separated church from state, the country was overwhelmingly Protestant. Central to Protestantism was the belief that man needed no interceding church hierarchy to save his soul: justification was by faith, and salvation thus the responsibility of the individual alone. This liberating notion had given rise over the years to schismatic groups breaking off from mainstream churches to found their own denominations, develop their own creeds, and evangelize those in need of being "saved."

Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the country in 1831, had observed that "the prevailing passion" seemed to be "acquiring the good things of the world," but he had also been fascinated by a second powerful theme. "In the midst of American society you meet with men full of fanatical and almost wild spiritualism...From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to external happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States."
As the firewall between church and state prevented the creation of a state-supported church of the kind that existed in many European countries, individual preachers in America had to create and sustain their own congregations and develop techniques to bind them close. Conditions, therefore, were ripe for preacher-prophets to roam the land, look for converts, and win them away to their own special visions. Nothing, it seems, served as well as a revival to satisfy the Protestant's desire to embrace the Lord and lay down his burdens of sin and guilt. The country had long seen multitudes of eager seekers traveling long distances to gather in tents to be exhorted, to shout "Amen!" and to be born again. Longing to "feel" God's presence in their bodies as well as in their hearts and minds, many Protestants yearned for a dramatic baptism in the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, flourishing pentecostal movements had long been part of the American scene where overwrought believers engaged in strange, even shocking behaviors. (*)

In August 1801, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, twenty-five thousand farmers and their families converged from their lonely mountain farms in search of religious communion. At a gathering larger than most cities of the period, and held under the auspices of Presbyterians but drawing masses from the faster-growing Methodist and Baptist denominations, men, women, and children laughed, sang, twirled, and barked like dogs until they collapsed unconscious on the ground in a trance. "These were rough people, profane, heavy drinkers, violent, who had never before attended night camp meetings. Conversion and love-making intermingled in an orgy of Pentecostal enthusiasm." (2) Reports of the bacchanal ignited a flurry of similar revivals elsewhere in the country among people equally lonely, ignorant, devoid of other entertainments, and above all bewildered by the social and economic upheavals marking the times.

The fervor famously scorched upper New York state, aptly named "the Burned-Over District" for its consecutive religious enthusiasms. Horatio Spafford was born and raised in Troy, New York, and had seen the impact of thousands of foreign immigrants converging to dig the 363-mile-long Erie Canal and rub their strange habits against staid old ways. Suddenly mills and factories stood where farms had been, and shantytowns sprawled with noisy pubs, drinking, and crime. Itinerant preachers arrived to offer consolation and their personal interpretations of Protestantism—if in fact these could be called Protestant at all—and the more sensational they were, the greater the number of adherents gathering to be consoled. Multitudes of sects arose. Perhaps among the best known were the celibate dancing Shakers who followed "Mother" Ann Lee in 1776, then, in 1830, Joseph Smith's polygamous Mormons, and, finally, the Oneida Perfectionists who practiced "free love" as preached by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Like most other sects, these products of the Burned-Over District revolved around a charismatic leader who drastically reordered traditional family relationships.
As nineteenth-cen...