A topless woman is taken from behind, steadying herself against a hay wagon, as if the couple had paused mid-task. Her late-19th-century garb is half undone, but her sun hat unperturbed. This scene — from Death by Lightning, Netflix‘s new narrative series chronicling the presidency of James Garfield (Michael Shannon) and Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), the assassin who ended it in 1881 — imagines daily life among the Oneida Bible Communists. Guiteau was involved with the religious sect and intentional community off and on from 1860 to 1866.
As a character in the Netflix series notes, the Oneidans, active in Vermont and New York between 1841 and 1880 and numbering 300 at their height, were considered a “free love” movement. But Guiteau didn’t participate much in that aspect of the group because the women didn’t want him. Death by Lightning creator Mike Makowsky accurately depicts Guiteau: He was egotistical, tried to shirk his labor contributions, sucked up to the group’s leader, John Humphrey Noyes, and wasn’t missed after departing. But the sex scenes are a bit of poetic and comical license. For example, another scene in the series depicts several couples conjugating simultaneously in a common room full of bunk beds, which definitely never happened.
In reality, “it was very private,” explains historian Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table and a descendant of the community. She adds that our modern understanding of free love “is sort of a hangover from the 1960s, where it took on connotations of orgiastic sex; but in the Oneida community, it was anything but free.” Their actual mission and the rules surrounding it were even wilder: a strict, hierarchical system for copulation; the notion of incest as a path to immortality; and the inadvertent spawning of one of the most successful housewares companies in American history.
How the Oneidans Became Immortal
While attending Yale Theological Seminary in the 1830s, John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermont native, determined Jesus had already returned. He started to spread the word and was promptly kicked out of school. Following a couple of nervous breakdowns, he married, procreated, developed alternative philosophies about marriage, and began collecting a flock.
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“All experience testifies . . . that sexual love is not naturally restricted to pairs,” he later wrote in a publication of the Oneida Association. Monogamy was a form of slavery for women, he argued, and also the source of all carnal deviancy. If people could simply sleep with whomever they like, then masturbation, prostitution, and adultery would cease to exist. In short, they could grow closer to God and, eventually, perfection.
Noyes believed he was literally perfect, which to him meant free of sin. He argued that anyone could achieve the same simply by accepting Christ’s grace. He didn’t invent the idea. It was part of a strain of theology bubbling at the time, aptly titled perfectionism, which was itself part of the larger reform movement of the second half of the 19th century, including abolition, vegetarianism, temperance, and anti-poverty crusades. Some reformers literally thought their work could jumpstart the return of Christ.
Noyes added his own hot take: If it’s true that we now have the capacity for such purity, then the second coming of Christ must have already occurred. Now, he claimed, heaven was simply waiting for them. Noyes and his followers aimed to create New Jerusalem in their little community in Putney, Vermont — in part through free love. In May 1846, Noyes and his wife and another couple began to share spouses sexually. The community practice of “complex marriage” was born.
“The Oneidans had this wacky idea that they were moving towards the resurrection state,” says Wayland-Smith, “if they got themselves in order, and their bodies and minds working as one big organic energy circuit, which is how they pictured heaven.”
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Noyes likened Jesus’ healing energy to a kind of electricity, a newly harnessed life force being explored by scientists and thinkers at the time. Noyes figured Jesus had electricity and passed it to humans when they opened themselves to it. Humans could also pass this energy to one another, he reasoned, and at no time more potently than during sex. Charging oneself with Jesus juice, the theory went, could also stave off death. In 1847 he told the rest of his followers that they’d become immortal, of which he was certain since no one in their community had died.
He confided in a local non-community friend that he and a few other couples were sharing spouses. On Oct. 26, 1847, the Vermont State’s Attorney’s Office sent a sheriff to arrest him. Within a year, the group had been run out of town. But they quickly resettled in Oneida Creek, New York, where they soon numbered 84 and built a big mansion in which they could live, work, and fornicate.
The Ins and Outs of Oneidan Sex
Although Noyes did at one point suggest that a couple have sex onstage, it never seems to have happened. Generally, their sex lives were “very discreet,” Wayland-Smith explains. If you fancied someone and wanted to connect your battery to theirs, you filed an official request through a matchmaker. The practice followed a strict hierarchy, particularly around the introduction of young members into the “social life,” the group’s unique sex culture. Boys were paired with older women and girls with older men until each had been appropriately educated. Since John Humphrey Noyes was at the tip top, he figured he should personally initiate all girls. Young members passed this milestone at puberty, and the average age of puberty onset in the community seems to have been 13.
Noyes had other outré sexual goals, including what would amount to incest. His brother once quoted him as arguing that “the fellowship of brothers and sisters is fundamental and eternal” because it concentrates the perfection of God’s people. He argued God had started the practice of incest by inbreeding the ancient Jews into a perfect race — Abraham married his half sister and then fathered a nation. Noyes believed something similarly exceptional could occur between him and his sisters, since they shared in his chosen status.
“He had a eugenic theory about why he was spiritually superior to other people,” explains Wayland-Smith. “There was a genetic component to it.” The more his family’s genes were concentrated, the closer they could get to God.
Still, we can’t know if they crossed that sibling taboo — nor can we know whether or not Noyes made good on his stated desire to impregnate his daughter, Constance — because records from the Oneida Community bear no mention of such copulations. On one hand, the records that remain are voluminous, and diaries and letters declare all manner of other nontraditional behavior. On the other hand, in 1947, officers of the Oneida Limited Company — by then a $3.5 million silverware corporation and respected national brand trying to bury its cultish origins — secretly filled a truck with the community’s collected archives and burned them at the dump.
The Oneidans’ Silverware Legacy
From the beginning, the Oneida Community was flush with desire, not cash. Their first go at sustenance had been orchards, but they didn’t have the climate for it. They also explored manufacturing and sewing work but didn’t achieve financial comfort until making and selling animal traps in 1855. Finally able to sustain themselves, they embraced capitalism and diversified, opening a silk factory in 1866, and getting into the silverware business in 1877.
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When the group fell apart — prominent anti-obscenity crusaders finally closed in and Noyes fled to Canada — the community adopted traditional marriage customs and created a joint-stock company, Oneida Community Ltd. This Ltd later became synonymous with the silver company, which after some initial fits and starts skyrocketed to success, and enjoyed decades of stability and profits. According to the company’s archives, by 1983, more than half of all flatware bought in the United States was Oneida. This is the closest Noyes got to immortality.
But his memory surfaces from time to time, including in Death by Lightning. He’s portrayed by Daniel Betts, who doesn’t physically resemble the actual Noyes. That’s probably a good thing. As Wayland-Smith writes, the last generation of young women in the Oneida community “found the memory of John Humphrey Noyes nothing short of loathsome.”
