Hannah Jenkins Barnard

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Hannah Jenkins Barnard (1754 – 27 November 1825) was a Quaker (Society of Friends) minister from Dutchess County, New York. Early in her career, she was active throughout New York and then New England. She was considered an "eloquent speaker" and was esteemed among fellow Quakers. She became interested in traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to speak at meetings in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Because she was a woman, it took two years before she received approval for the trip.

Barnard was a proponent of the Inward light doctrine that claims it is more important to rely on one's own beliefs than to strictly follow biblical passages. The group of people with this belief was called the New Lights.^[1] These doctrines were in opposition to the beliefs of the evangelical branch of the Quakers.

Fellow Quaker minister Elizabeth Coggeshall traveled with Barnard in 1798 to England, Scotland, and Ireland where they visited Friends Meetings. By 1800, Barnard was charged with heresy at the Yearly Meeting in London.^[2] She was subject to fourteen months of proceedings before she returned to the United States with Coggeshall.

In 1801, she published "An Appeal to Ethics Society of Friends, on the Primitive Simplicity of the Christian Principle and Discipline".^[2] One year later, she was disowned (Quaker term for excommunicated) by the Hudson Meeting. In 1804, a document attributed to Thomas Foster, "A Narrative of the Proceedings in America, of the Society called Quakers in the Case of Hannah Barnard" was published about Barnard's liberal viewpoints that were preached to Quakers.^[2]

She was described by Quaker historian Rufus M. Jones as the "leading champion in the first years of the nineteenth century of a freer type of thought in the Society."^[3]

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