Meet Your Revolutionary Neighbors
Jemima Condict
1754-1779
I wrote an interesting diary of the events leading up to and during the Revolution.
I was born in 1754, the daughter of Daniel Condict, a farmer from Pleasantdale, in Essex County. In 1772, when I was 17, I started a diary about religious matters, sicknesses and deaths, but also about the growing anger against Great Britain. On October 1, 1774, I wrote that, “if seams we have troublesome times a Coming for there is great Disturbance a Broad in the earth and they say it is tea that caused it.”
One day in early 1775, I rode with my father to see our militiamen training, and it worried me to hear people saying, “All hopes of Conciliation Between Briten and her Colonies are at an end.” Sure enough, on April 23, we heard about the fighting and Lexington and Concord. After the British landed on Staten Island in July 1776, our militia, including my future husband Aaron Harrison, was out on active duty almost constantly. By November, our army was in retreat, with Aaron among them, and I wrote, “Wat a time is this! A Sicly time & a very Dicing time & the People fleeing before there enemies.”
In 1777 and 1778, we continued to have problems with British soldiers called the Green Coats. That’s about as far as my diary goes, as I stopped writing not long before I married Aaron, in 1779. Tragically, I died while giving birth to my son, on November 14, 1779. After my death, Aaron continued his militia service.
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