Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Perhaps no group better reflected the once-tolerant spirit of the Western states as the Shakers, a sect of charismatic Christians who counted thousands of members from New England to the Ohio River Valley during the mid-19th century. And perhaps no people suffered the West’s uncivil war more than the Shakers of Kentucky.

The utopian faith, formally known as the United Believers in the Second Appearing of Christ, referred to themselves as Believers. But neighbors called the curious group “Shaking Quakers” after their ecstatic worship services. Their tenets included communal property, strict celibacy and full racial and gender equality. They took in orphans and practiced nighttime group dancing and singing. The sect originated in England and soon established communities in New York and other Eastern states, but by the early 19th century had established staid Western enclaves that stretched southwestward from Ohio’s Western Reserve into southern Ohio and Indiana, and central and southern Kentucky.

There were two main Shaker communities in mid-19th-century Kentucky: South Union, with 223 inhabitants, located on a Logan County prairie where the state’s southern tier gave way to flat floodplain, and Pleasant Hill, a village of 347 people in the Bluegrass’s Mercer County on a meadowed plateau above the looping Kentucky River’s steep palisades.

Their new neighbors found their customs strange and even threatening and occasionally resorted to arson to scare them off. But as they had done in their Eastern communities, the Shakers largely overcame the reproach and hostility by quietly going about their business, embodying the Christian doctrine of rebirth and putting their hands to work and pledging their hearts to God. Their gardens, orchards and fields, surrounded by neat limestone fences, were pictures of order in the western landscape. By the 1850s a modus vivendi had emerged between the western Shakers and their “worldly” neighbors.

All of that was thrown into crisis by the Civil War. Moderation was as difficult to balance as worldliness, especially in Kentucky.

The Shakers understood from the beginning what the war was really about. “The whole country is at present greatly agitated from one end to the other, on the question of negro slavery,” wrote a Pleasant Hill deaconess in her journal. “Under the plea of their cherished institution of slavery being endangered,” the South “thereby, revolted.” But she and her brothers and sisters wisely refrained from sharing their mildly antislavery beliefs, especially with fellow Kentuckians, and practiced an un-neutral neutrality.

But that wasn’t enough. Because both Pleasant Hill and South Union were prominent and well-known locations on well-traveled Kentucky thoroughfares, the war quickly forced itself into their business endeavors and into their community streets. “Shakertown,” as neighbors called both communities, was used as mustering sites of both Union and secessionist home guards.

Like Quakers, Amish and Mennonites, Shakers were conscientious objectors to war generally, quietly forbidding their men to enlist on either side. “My kingdom is not of this world,” wrote a Pleasant Hill eldress, “therefore my servants do not fight.” Yet several of their young brethren slipped off to join the war, mostly for the Union, forcing elders to go to nearby camps to retrieve them. At the same time, secessionists harassed their Shaker neighbors for their pacifism.

While Pleasant Hill Shakers were merely the targets of recruitment efforts, South Union

suffered “the ravages of War” head on, as an eldress wrote in her family’s journal. When the Confederates occupied the Bowling Green area in late 1861, the nearby Shakers quickly became targets of rebel harassment.

Library of Congress

Cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest, who “very civilly” paid for corn and oats after the Shakers fed their men well, did not fully prepare them for the rebel occupation to follow. Horses and wagons soon disappeared, pointed out by local secessionists who knew well the lay of the sect’s 6,000-acre property. Knowing the Shakers were unlikely to fight back, the rebels set on them with zeal. Thousands of Confederates camped on the Shaker families’ grounds for various lengths of time, demanding grain, flour, beef and milk. Blessed with a good harvest, Shakers nonetheless soon found their stores depleted.

The Shakers did what they could in response. Under the cover of night, they dismantled their remaining wagons and hid their parts deep in woods and sinkholes, far from outbuildings and the main road. When search parties came for horses, they rode only old and lame ones and hid their best until moving them to safety.

Then, in December 1861, Confederate recruiters blanketed the region, fueling rumors of an imminent draft by the rebel government to force young Kentucky men “to take up arms against the Government of the United States.” Like many Unionists in the area, several South Union men fled northward, assisted by other Shaker communities who sent money, horses and even guides through Confederate lines to safety.

The war hardened their secessionist neighbors’ once-genial feelings toward the Shakers. No longer were they “religious, orderly people,” as one described them. Now they were “Lincolnites” and “abolitionists.” One forager cursed the pacifists, sneering about how Union soldiers “had to fight [the Shakers’] battles.”

The Confederates left South Union in February 1862, and when a squad of federal cavalry arrived a few days later, the Shakers welcomed them as liberators. But they found themselves again hosting a military force on their property, with vital buildings commandeered for convalescent troops and their railroad depot for government transportation. The federal soldiers burned their bridges and culverts to prevent a Confederate counter-advance. Over the spring and summer, more troops passed daily through their property on both the state road and the nearby railroad, calling at all hours for bread, well water, vegetables and wood. Meanwhile, the South Union Shakers were forced to apply for passes when they traveled to conduct business.

At first, it seemed like Pleasant Hill’s Shakers had escaped the worst of it. Other than the “hard times” that slowed business, in the spring of 1862 the war seemed far away. But a hot summer soon turned into the worst drought in memory, plaguing the entire border region from the Appalachians to the Great Plains. Then, in late summer, rumors floated of a full-scale Confederate invasion of Kentucky. Confederate armies soon entered east and central Kentucky, trailed by a larger federal army, all converging on the central Bluegrass. John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry, after driving out the small federal garrisons in nearby towns, passed through Pleasant Hill, offering brief but tense glimpses of South Union’s agony. Pleasant Hill’s Shakers also had to hide their horses, livestock and other valuables in wooded valleys and shallow caves.

As the invasion wore on, Confederate horsemen, some of them former neighbors, passed through Pleasant Hill’s main street demanding food, water and horses, paying in “worthless hash”—Confederate scrip. “This is Southern rights, liberty and freedom from oppression and bondage is it?,” sneered an elder. “Well that is enough of such deliverance!”

On Oct. 6, 1862, a Confederate infantry brigade and supply train camped on a lot in Pleasant Hill, along the river. Seemingly endless lines of starving, thirsty troops—“ragged, greasy and dirty, and some barefoot, looking more like the bipeds of pandemonium,” wrote one local, than “the angels of deliverance from Lincoln bondage”— descended on the town. As one elder related:

Large crowds marched into our yards and surrounded our wells like the locusts of Egypt, and struggled with each other for the water as if perishing with thirst; and they thronged our kitchen doors and windows, begging for bread like hungry wolves. We nearly emptied our kitchens of their contents, and they tore the loaves and pies into fragments, and devoured them as eagerly as if they were starving. Some even threatened to shoot others if they did not divide with them.

It was about to get worse. At dawn on Oct. 8, exacerbated by “weary nights of watching, fatigue and anxiety,” the roar of more than 200 cannon awoke the brothers and sisters from what fitful sleep they had gotten. Troops hurrying along their dusty street informed them that a full battle between thirsty armies numbering more than 72,000 raged along the shallow Chaplin River near Perryville, just 17 miles to the south.

Library of Congress

Refugees soon streamed through, hurrying toward safety in Lexington. After the guns had “belch[ed] forth death and destruction” all day, the Shakers watched helplessly as Confederate wagon trains creaked through the village and camped in their north pasture, their teamsters turning the horses and mules out into their cornfield to forage. “As far as the eye could see on both ends of the road,” retreating Confederates streamed from every direction, accompanied by even closer artillery fire.

On the Sabbath morning of Oct. 12, exhausted from days of baking and feeding soldiers and now stragglers, Pleasant Hill’s brothers and sisters were preparing for worship when a regiment of Southern cavalry formed into line at the north end of the village and put out pickets in the streets. Cannon fire opened immediately west and southwest of the community. Some 30,000 federals were approaching, and Pleasant Hill appeared set to become a battleground. “How awful to think of a wicked and bloody battle occurring in the midst of Zion on earth!,” a shaken elder exclaimed.

Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »

But then, mercy: after several tense hours, the rebel commander himself gave the order to withdraw across the river toward Lexington in order not to “disturb the tranquility of our people any longer.”

And yet the war was not finished with Kentucky’s Shakers. Nearly empty storerooms, with winter provisions largely gone and little to refill them, and the hundreds of wounded rebels left in surrounding towns were only prelude to an even greater scourge: night riding guerrillas and. Confederate raiding parties from Tennessee that would make painful stabs into Kentucky for months to come. They came for supplies, but also to seek vengeance against both unionists and African Americans. As one South Union Shaker wrote in the aftermath of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, “the negroes are often hunted by these soldiers, like wild beasts,” often hanging rather than capturing them.

For these Shakers, Zion on earth had become a casualty of hell’s full fury.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

Christopher Phillips is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of six books on the Civil War era, including “Damned Yankee: The Life of Nathaniel Lyon” and the forthcoming “The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism.”