My Grandfather Issachar’s War
"Part III: His Last Word " We continue reading of the Shaker Museum Library’s pamphlet excerpt of the “Sketch of the Life and Experience of Issachar Bates,” published in 1960. What follows is the final of three posts in Issachar’s own words. The misspellings and grammatical errors are from the original text. He might have used more care had he imagined, 200 years ago, that he would now be blogging on Substack, Medium, Patreon and Blogger. All of us were expecting to be relieved in 24 hours. No victuals came that day—Saturday the same—no relief—no victuals—and on Sabbath morning 8 British ships hoisted sail and came on, five up the east and three up the north river. Each gave us a broadside as they passed the Bowery guard where we were. We gave them back the best we had 2-18 pounders which were played well—In about 2 hours the earth shook violently, and whether it was thunder or an earthquake I could not for awhile decide—But now the mystery began to open why we had n...
