Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Journey

Introduction: “Now here's my faith I’ll speak it plain”

{ xiii Introduction “Now here’s my faith I’ll speak it plain ” The life of Issachar Bates is an extraordinary American story. It opens a window onto the dynamic richness of a young and growing America, from its late colonial “signs and wonders” and the upheaval of Revolution to the religious turmoil of the Second Great Awakening and the expansion of the western frontier.1 Issachar Bates both witnessed and participated in this rich drama. One critical factor brings his life journey into focus: Issachar Bates was a Shaker. But he was not just one face among the thousands to pass through the movement. Rather, he was an early Shaker convert who happened to be utterly pivotal to the movement’s successful expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1800s. And Issachar Bates was a conundrum. He was both a patriot and a pacifist; he fathered nine children and embraced celibacy; he pioneered and preached, built new communities even as he sought the solitude of the woods, helped establish a separate Shaker “Zion” yet kept to the road whenever he could. In short, Issachar’s life was as filled with tumult and contradictions as America itself. Tracing his life’s journey illuminates the Early Republic from which the Shaker movement was launched, follows the Shaker story to the “western” United States, exhibits the growth of the Shaker “West,” and reveals the ways in which the Shaker movement remained coherent across vast distances. It also exposes an irony that Shaker scholars have begun to observe: within this religious order where individual identity was subsumed within collective “union,” individual gifts, character, talents, and achievement still mattered enormously. As a believer who played a key role through a long and formative period of Shaker history, Issachar Bates left his mark on the movement—as a preacher, evangelist, poet, songwriter, dancer, and community leader. Given the influence of Shakerism on American culture , it is not too much of a stretch to say that Issachar also left his mark on America. This is his story. n The Shaker movement was already decades old in America when Issachar Bates converted in the summer of 1801. For Issachar, formal Shaker conversion involved making a personal confession of sin to a Shaker elder. To do xiv } introduction this, Issachar rode away from his home in Hartford, New York, on the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains and headed south to New Lebanon, the center of the growing Shaker movement in the Berkshire Hills on the New York–Massachusetts border. It was not an action he undertook lightly. At the age of forty-three, Issachar was the sole provider for a large family. He had been married to Lovina Maynard for twenty-three years, more than half of his life, and most of their nine living children remained in the household. Never noted for work in any particular trade, Issachar made a somewhat meager living as a woodsman and farmer. But he was a popular figure in the community and an active member of the local Baptist church, where he had been the choirmaster for about a dozen years. Through a dramatic religious experience around 1795, Issachar had discovered that he had a gift for preaching, and by the late 1790s he often accepted preaching appointments in the surrounding area. One of eleven siblings, Issachar maintained loving relationships with several brothers and sisters, and he remained concerned for the welfare of his aging and widowed father, who lived in western Massachusetts. Issachar Bates lived an exceptional life by any standard. With late colonial Massachusetts as the backdrop of his childhood, he was profoundly affected by the climate of his times and eager to join in the fight for American independence . Enlisting as a teenage fifer, one of his earliest experiences was the Battle of Bunker Hill, and before the war ended, he participated in many other engagements, from Vermont to New Jersey. After the war, he was drawn to the frontier, first to the wilds of Maine and later to wooded mountains near Saratoga, New York. Becoming a Shaker continued his frontier life, when in 1805 he was chosen to be one of the movement’s first missionaries to carry the Shaker message beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The next thirty years found him moving throughout the Ohio Valley, intersecting with some of that region’s most spectacular people and events, from Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison to the cataclysmic New Madrid earthquake. His journeys trace the evolution of...