-
4. “A testimony as hot as flames”: Shaker Conversion and Early Travels
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
{ 61 chapter 4 “A testimony as hot as flames” shaker conversion and early travels In this flood, I must either sink or swim . . . Salvation was mine and I would have it.—Issachar Bates Issachar Bates’s solution to the restlessness, personal uncertainty, and spiritual despondency that had plagued him his entire adult life was to do the unthinkable—to turn to a marginal sect that was so deeply repudiated by mainstream Christians throughout the region that its very name conjured horrifying images of practices that no reasonable person would sanction. Accounts then in circulation portrayed Shaker worship as a hellish frenzy, with drunken men and women dancing naked together.1 Shakers were alleged to kidnap and enslave people, and their reverence for Ann Lee—who had died in 1784—was portrayed as the most shocking blasphemy. Yet Issachar set himself on this path. In 1801, “becoming” a Shaker was an ambiguous process . It was necessary to make a complete verbal confession of one’s lifetime of sin, to reject further sin by certain practices of self-denial—forswearing oaths, arms, fashionable clothing, sophisticated speech—and most of all, to renounce all sexuality and lust. Shakers preached that people should live as Christ had lived. This would come to mean communal living concentrated in one of some twenty economically independent villages, spread across a thousand miles, under legally binding covenants and presided over by hierarchical Shaker authorities. But this “gospel order” was not yet established when Issachar Bates turned to the Shakers. The movement was still small and fluid, confined to a portion of the Northeast. After riding some seventy miles to New Lebanon and confessing his sins, Issachar simply returned home and began to work out what this decision would mean for himself and his family. He could not know that his short journey to New Lebanon was actually the start of a very long journey that would take him from both his home region and his wife and children . Issachar was about to be enlisted in yet another campaign, a campaign to preach the Shaker gospel to an unbelieving world. It was a campaign that would bring him into union with new friends and comrades and take him to new places, first deeper into the margins of New England and later into the far western frontier along the already celebrated Wilderness Road. 62 } issachar bates DMy greatest trouble was at home, with those of mine own household. But soon a committee was sent from the Baptist Church to labour with me. O the flood that they poured out of their mouths against the Shakers. And I told them that I knew the greatest part of them reports to be lies eighteen years ago . . . So they went away and gained nothing of me . . . Then I got on my horse and went to New Lebanon and confessed my sins. August 1801. And then I was ready to meet any of them and have been ready ever since to meet any flesh bug on this earth. But when I returned home none but a well tried believer can sense what I had to endure. Not one in my family nor in the neighborhood nor within 70 miles but what was opposed to me, and the children in the streets that used to reverence me when I was a preacher now mocked me.2 Joining the Shakers was a decision that cost Issachar Bates dearly. His family and church community were appalled, and he was hurt by their scorn and rejection. Undeterred, he stood by his choice. Indeed, he drew energy from the resistance he experienced in his neighborhood. Having already preached as a Baptist for some years, he developed a remarkable zeal that was virtually unmatched even among the Shaker preachers and that intimidated his detractors: “[I]n a few months they were willing to keep out of my way, for I had a testimony as hot as flames and I stood in the power of God. And they did not much like that. I was soon after sent by the Church to preach to the world in company with Benjamin S. Youngs, who was a loving companion and a blessed little strong man of God. He went with me first to my family in Hartford and gained their feelings and respect which they have retained unto this day. Then we went to Pittsford, Vermont.”3 So began Issachar’s long career of preaching “to the world” on behalf of the Shakers...