small caliber--a sectional sectarian who looked upon these
southwestern communes as narrowminded Easterners have often re-
garded frontier regions." She relates that first Freegift
accused McNemar of "feeling above taking orders," making much of
the fact that McNemar had, for some time, done very little work
with his hands. However, for one of Freegift 's work habits, this
would seem contrary to Mother Ann's admonition of "Hands to work,
hearts to God." As Freegift wrote later, It was proved beyond a
doubt that a dlilgent person had more power to resist temptation
than oneif. who slack inhand labor... Mother said an idle soul
tempted the Devil..., that she wanted her children to WEAR out,
not RUST out. "
Then he discovered that McNemar had not signed the last Covenant-
-the one he had worked so hard to have adopted. These things
Freegift brought before the membership who remained, Melcher
says, "stubbornly loyal to McNemar." She claims Freegift used
forged letters to try to discredit McNemar, but doesn't explain
that. Then her words are "he decided to pull a few spiritual
wires" implying that he was involved in 1837 in a young medium
named Margaret 0'Brian testifying through her contact with the
spirit world that McNemar was "wholly puffed up in his own
conceit and guilty of insubordination to his superiors." When
even this revelation failed to swerve the Believers from their
loyalty to McNemar, she had another more circumstantial vision to
clinch the matter. I don't know what Melcher's evidence is that
leads her to assume that Freegift was dictating the medium's
spirit messages. Hazel Spencer Phillips of Ohio, who wrote a
biography of .Richard McNemar, according to the bibliography of
Shaker material, accuses Freegift of "an invidious effort to
drive McNemar from the Shakers."
However, sorrowfully McNemar's old friends voted in the spring of
1839 to expel him from the Society he himself had made. Freegift
gave orders that he should be set down in the streets of
Lebanon, Ohio with only his clothes and his printing press with
which to earn his living. McNemar was then 69 years old and had
spent 34 years in the Shakers. With his press in a wheelbarrow,
he went to the home of a friend, Judge Dunlevy, who advised him
to report to the New Lebanon Ministry. So McNemar made the trip
there in June. The Central Ministry upheld him, cross-questioned
and discredited the medium, and ruled that henceforth all revela-
tions must be passed upon by them before acceptance. McNemar
returned "in triumph" and was reinstated. But the journey and
the shock of his treatment had been too much for him and he died
in September of 1839.
Freegift continued on in Ohio and their journals record his chair-
making there as does the journal of Elder James Prescott of Union
Village. He also made drawers and beds, turned pegs and chisel
handles; made planes, a broom machine ^etc. At last in 1843 he
resigned and returned to Watervliet. He found there that his
nephew, Thomas, his apprentice, had left the Shakers in 1840 when
he was 22 years old, taking his joiner's tools with him.