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. 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. 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". 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.
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."
Personal life
Hannah Jenkins was born in 1754 and was said to be born in Dutchess County, New York in the Hudson River Valley to Valentine Jenkins and his wife. Her father was a farmer and her parents raised her as a Baptist. It is believed that Valentine moved his family to the Oblong Patent (Oblong Friends Meeting House in Quaker Hill, New York) around 1764 and joined the local Meeting. She did not receive any schooling, and remained illiterate until adolescence due to her family's poverty but she possessed "considerable native intelligence". Hannah Jenkins joined the Quakers in 1773, around the age of 18, at Oblong Friends Meeting House.
Hannah Jenkins married Peter Barnard, a widower with three children, at the Oblong Friends Meeting House in Quaker Hill, New York on October 20, 1779. Peter was born to Quaker parents in Nantucket, Massachusetts, a community that suffered economically during the Revolutionary War. Many families moved west to New York, many settling in Hudson, New York. Peter was described as a congenial, kind, and happy man.
The Barnards were of modest means, living in a frame house built by Peter in 1780, in which they established themselves, as a carter and a minister respectively. In July 1784, they received approval to remove for to Hudson, New York. At that time they had three children and a young woman apprentice who moved with the family. At the time of her trip to the British Isles (1798–1801), Coggeshall had two daughters.
Early ministry
By 1786, Barnard was a representative of the Friends eight times at the New York Quarterly Meeting. She also became one of the representatives of the Nine Partners Quarterly Meeting, which spanned the areas of the Hudson River, north of Millbrook. She went on to become a representative for the New York Yearly Meeting in 1793, 1794, and 1796.
She became an accredited minister in the early 1790s. During the same period as her first year representing the New York Yearly Meeting, she was authorized to travel through New England, simultaneously serving on the Nine Partners School Board from 1795-1796. Barnard was highly regarded by the Friends during this period, and she was noted as an "eloquent speaker". Barnard was also known for her powerful ministry work throughout the Friends community, particularly in her home base in Hudson. In the same meetings that would later condemn her, Barnard was certified or endorsed in late 1797 for the trip. The Hudson Meeting, including her husband Peter, attested that she was "sound and edifying, attended with a comfortable evidence of her call there unto."