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{ 1 chapter 1 “Signs and Wonders” early life, spiritual preparation, and the coming of the shakers I was afraid that God would come up on me some day in Judgment because I was not good. This caused me to watch the heavens above and the earth beneath for signs and wonders.—Issachar Bates As Issachar Bates looked back on a childhood filled with memorable events and experiences, he interpreted many of his youthful circumstancesaspreparationforhislaterlifeasaShaker .Hisfamilylifewasunsettled, forcing him to develop personal qualities of adaptability. He lived entirely in unsettled regions, barely removed from wilderness conditions. He witnessed great social transformation. Unbeknownst to Issachar as he was growing up in rural Massachusetts, the people who would soon turn his life and the lives of multitudes in New England upside-down were developing their radical ideas in an industrial town in far-off England. About the time that Issachar was leaving behind his own childhood, these “Shakers” left the place of their nativity to migrate to America, where their remarkable behavior would soon be interpreted by many as some of the “signs and wonders” that had gripped New England for years. The young Issachar Bates was deeply affected by many of these “signs and wonders,” various natural phenomena widely interpreted as divine portents of grave future occurrences. These experiences made him vigilant during his childhood and beyond, and prepared him for the singular life that would follow. DI was born in the town of Hingham County of Suffolk State of Massachusetts 14 miles south east of the city of Boston on the Atlantic shore the twenty ninth of January in the year of our Lord 1758.1 The town of Hingham marked the southeastern reach of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when the ancestors of Issachar Bates arrived there in 1635. Clement Bates hailed from Norfolk, England, near the English town of Hingham, andheemigratedwithalargegroupthatincludedthefirstAmericanancestors of at least two other important nineteenth-century figures, Abraham Lincoln 2 } issachar bates and poet Katherine Lee Bates. Clement Bates was granted an acre of land and named to a town office; he also became a fish merchant. In the late 1670s, his grandsons migrated some four miles to the east and helped establish Cohasset , a second enclave or “precinct” within Hingham.2 David Bates, the great-grandson of Clement Bates, was Issachar Bates’s grandfather and a substantial and ambitious citizen of Cohasset in the first half of the eighteenth century. Known locally as “King David,” David Bates had his hand in a range of enterprises. He farmed and raised sheep on a thirtyacre parcel that lay on King Street, Cohasset’s first thoroughfare, plotted by surveyors in 1670. He also owned a small fishing vessel, probably used to fish for mackerel in the local waters outside Cohasset Bay.3 He was a mason and among the chief builders of Cohasset’s first meeting house in 1747. He also served as the town constable. David Bates married Patience Farrow, and the couple had twelve children. When Patience died, David remarried a widow with many children of her own. In 1752, David Bates and other Cohasset householders voted for formal separation from the town of Hingham. The few miles between Cohasset and Hingham could be traversed only by rough paths, arduous for going to market and grueling for school children. The journey by sea from Cohasset Bay around Nantasket Peninsula and into Hingham Harbor was longer and more difficult than sailing to Boston. Moreover, Cohasset families were large and interrelated, and they formed an autonomous community distinct from Hingham.4 However, by the time of Issachar Bates’s grandfather David, the expansive Bates kin network had spread through the twin communities, and Bates had become a common family name in both townships. The father of the Shaker Issachar Bates was William Bates, born in 1725 as the third son of David Bates and his first wife, Patience Farrow. Another son was born to David and Patience in 1734, and they named him Issachar, but this child died within a few months. At the end of 1735 a further son was born to the couple, and again named Issachar. This was William Bates’s closest sibling, a younger brother Issachar Bates, whose name William would later give to his own son. William’s interests were less eclectic than his father’s, and his trade is simply identified as “bricklayer.” In 1748 he married Mercy Joy, daughter of Prince Joy, another important Cohasset citizen and farmer, who often held school in...

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