My Grandfather Issachar’s War
Each furnished with his staff and knapsack,
And some provisions for the war
We ventured on without conceiving,
What trials lay yet before”
— Issachar Bates, “A Winter’s Journey to Busroe” (1811)
History is all iteration, wrote Melville. While going through an old file cabinet looking for the rain-stained pencil and ballpoint journal from the summer I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I found a selfie from 1972. Judging by the small stream running behind me where the trail used to be, I’m guessing this was taken in the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania right after Hurricane Agnes. The Blues run about 150 miles from the Delaware Water Gap to Big Gap. At their southern extent, the western flank slopes down into the Cumberland Valley, which extends off into Kentucky and Ohio.
I was 25 then, but I didn’t learn until I was 70 that my ancestor, Shaker poet-singer-songwriter Issachar Bates, had walked that way nearly two centuries earlier, perhaps even on the same trail where the picture was taken. At the start of the 19th century, he and two other missionaries left New Lebanon, New York, for an extended recruitment mission to the American West. The frontier was full of festive camp-meeting revivals, and Issachar performed at a Shaker rave at Turtle Creek, Ohio, on May 23, 1805. If you abstained from applejack spirits, then Shaker dances, falling down trances, and snake-handling were the best one could do before the arrival of psychedelics.
Issachar Bates was born to William and Mercy Bates in Hingham, Massachusetts, part of the Plymouth Colony, on January 29, 1758, one of eleven children. In 1623, my 8th great-uncle, 24-year-old John Isaac Bates, departed the Romney Marsh sheep-farming village of Lydd in the Cinque Ports region of Southeast England, under the indenture of Abraham Piersey, a wealthy slaver and plantation owner, and boarded the ship Southampton for the Virginia Colony at Jamestown. John grew for his master the first crop of tobacco to be exported to England and, after seven years of that kind of toil in Kent County, became a free man.
In 1635, at age 41, my 8th great-grandfather, Clement Bates, also of Lydd, who was 17 when the King James Version of the Bible was published, gave up his class position, sold his estate and possessions, packed his wife Anna and son Joseph aboard the three-masted, square-rigged Elizabeth, and sailed for Plymouth Colony. Why this second Bates, like his brother before him, decided to leave a place where the Bates family had been born and died for more than 400 years is a complicated story, involving popes and kings, religious tribal feuds, apostates and evangelists, but suffice it to say he thought a better life awaited in the New World.
Issachar, born in 1758, was the great-grandson of Joseph Bates. As a teenager, he taught himself to play the fife and joined the local militia. He served in the American Revolutionary War, seeing action at Bunker Hill, the Siege of Boston, the New York and New Jersey campaigns with Washington, and the British surrender at Saratoga. After the war, he was a married man with children when he met Mother Ann Lee at David Hammond’s home in Massachusetts. The experience unsettled him, and through the 1790s, although he was a popular, jolly member of his church and served as choirmaster, he endured spiritual turmoil inwardly.
At age 43, he visited the Shaker Colony in New Lebanon, formally confessed his sins and joined the Shaker order.
The Shakers immediately recognized his charisma and admired his gifts for poetry and music. They paired him with other orators and sent him out as a missionary. After founding another Shaker colony at West Union (Busro), Indiana, my great-great-great-great-grandfather was nearly castrated and lynched, but was saved by his gifted tongue and sense of humor that disarmed the angry mob. From 1806 to 1811, Issachar, by his own account, was constantly on the move, traveling about 38,000 miles on foot or horseback.
“All nature calls for busy hands,
For this is heav’n’s decree;
The beast, the bird, the insect stands
A monitor to me;
The little busy artful bee
Works ev’ry shining hour,
And her industry I can see,
In ev’ry opening flower.”
— Issachar Bates, “Industry”
Rediscovery
Fortunately for me, he joined the celibate Shaker order only after fathering my great-great-great- grandfather, Artemas Bates. In July, 1950, the estate of historian John S. Williams, of Old Chatham, New York, donated a collection of Shaker books to the Shaker Museum. Among them was a ten-page pamphlet excerpt Williams had printed. Here is how it begins:
One of the most readable manuscripts in the Museum Library is that entitled a “Sketch of the Life and Experience of Issachar Bates”: an autobiography of the author. Bates, who was born in Hingham, Mass., in 1758, set down the memoirs of his extraordinary full life in 1833 at the age of seventy-five. His memory seems accurate and it is probable that he worked from some personal diaries. Some of the highlights in his life were his enlistments and action in the Revolution, his marriage and the production of a family of eleven children, his embracing the Shaker faith in 1801, and his extraordinary journey to Kentucky in the company of John Meacham and Benjamin S. Youngs. This stalwart trio left Mt. Lebanon on New Year’s Day, 1805, and in the face of one of the severest winters on record completed a fast journey through snow, ice, sleet, hail, rain and mud, to the neighborhood of Lexington, Ky. Distance 1233 miles. Elapsed time, two and one half months. After resting himself by covering most of northern Kentucky and southern Ohio also on foot, Issachar in the fall of the year walked alone from Ohio to Mt. Lebanon, 776 miles in 21 days, turned around and made the return trip to Turtle Creek in 23 days.
This most inexhaustible man estimated that in preaching and spreading the Shaker faith he covered 38,000 miles, mainly on foot. His services in the Revolution apparently gave him good training for what was to come. That part of the manuscript dealing with this period in his life follows. The original spelling and punctuation has been diligently followed.
What follows, in this and in two coming posts, is that story in Issachar’s own words. The misspellings and grammatical errors are from the original text.
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The Revolutionary War
About the first of May 1774 General Gage landed his army at Boston. Now War was all the topic of conversation; every man that was able to lift an old rusty gun, & every boy who was big enough to carry a little wooden gun were all learning war! Perhaps one fourth of the time was spent in learning the Norfolk martial exercise. For my part I got me a fife, and learned to play well. Minute men turned out to be in readiness—I turned out to fife for them—Every preparation was made for War!—
Here I shall mention two more signs that appeared. A few days before the alarm a number of us were on a hill called Mt. Ararat—We saw two black clouds arise one from the North the other from the South-They met in the West within a short distance of each other, and there stood like two armies, and fired at each other as regular as in any pitched battle—At the same time thunder and lightning the most dreadful, for about 20 minutts and then vanished out of sight--Next I will mention about the strange flock of birds
The day of the battle of Lexington, a wonderful flock of birds flew over us—they were not to be numbered—No one to my knowledge has ever pretended they ever saw the kind of bird before or since. They were seen by thousands and flew in open sight about two miles, on a strait course to Lexington where they disappeared. They flew in as good order as any band of soldiers ever marched & in perfect silence. They resembled a kind of Hawk the most of any bird.
They all stopped at Templeton Pond, (a small lake about 60 miles west by north from Boston) and drank and went on— The next day the alarm came of the Battle of Lexington; and the men appeared about as numerous in the roads as the birds were in the air—
Now I shall digress a little, and leave the track I’ve been pursuing and show the reason I have been so particular in describing these signs and wonders which I have seen before I enter onto my journey into the revolutionary war.
Next week: Issachar recounts Bunker Hill and the siege of New York; the burning of Charleston; the sacking of Boston; and Washington’s retreat to Valley Forge.
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