Jemima Condict was born in a rural setting in the mountains of northwestern New Jersey on 24 August 1754. She spent her entire short life in the vicinity of Pleasantdale (now in West Orange), New Jersey, dying on 14 November 1779 at the age of twenty-five. Nonetheless, she managed to obtain sufficient education to be able to write with some facility, and obviously felt driven to do so. At the age of seventeen, in the spring of 1772, she began a diary, and made sporadic entries into it for the rest of her life.
Condict provided a title for her diary: "J2M3M1 C59D3CT H2R B44K 19D P29". This seems rather puzzling, but one can quickly determine that this is a simple substitution code which a teenager might find appropriate to hide one’s “true identity”. A number of lines of verse using the same code make it clear that she has used the numbers 1-9 to replace the letters a, e, i, o, u, y, t, s, and n, in that order. Thus, the title reads: "JEMIMA CUNDICT HER BOOK AND PEN".[1] Jemima Condict variously spelled the family's name in her writings as "Cundict", "Condict", and "Condit".[2]
The only published full text of the diary is titled "Her Book, Being a transcript of the diary of an Essex County maid during the Revolutionary War".[3] This beautiful but rare volume was published in a collectors' edition of only 200 copies by the typographer Frederic Goudy and his wife Bertha Goudy. Two other books, one by Elizabeth Evans[4] and the other by June Sprigg,[5] contain many of Jemima Condict's more interesting entries.
Jemima Condict was clearly devoted to her religious beliefs, and the majority of the diary is devoted to listings of religious teachings that she has heard, and sometimes comments about them. Occasionally, though, this fairly dull recital is broken by words of greater historical interest. Not only did she provide a clear window into the intimate doings of her family and of her small community, but the Revolutionary War swept around her, with soldiers and battles in her near vicinity. Happenings great and small were all fodder for her pen.
News of the Boston Tea Party had clearly reached rural New Jersey, as Jemima Condict writes some ten months after that event.
Condict's brief mention of the inoculation of her cousins, presumably against smallpox using a weak strain of the disease, long before Edward Jenner developed cowpox-based vaccination, is of some scientific interest.
In about March, 1775, Jemima Condict tells of a local party for some newly-weds. Note that horse neck kites are natives of Horseneck NJ.
She notes the beginnings of the Revolutionary War in her entry for April 23, 1775, in which she is relating events of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, or at least their immediate aftermath. The Regulors or regulers are “regular” British soldiers.
A local violent death catches her attention in 1775.
Jemima Condit's attention was momentarily directed at local Revolutionary War fighting during the "Battle of Elizabethtown", in what is now Elizabeth, New Jersey.
It may be especially informative to take note of the entries one would expect to find in the diary but which are lacking. Notable, for example, is the absence of any notice of July 4, 1776, or of the new, independent nation being formed. It could be argued that Jemima Condict was not interested in such worldly issues, but, in truth, she had a lively interest in anything and everything. Even more perplexing, no mention can be found of her marriage or of the birth of her son!
The manuscript diary, itself, is in the collections of the New Jersey Historical Society, "Manuscript Group 123".[12]