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KING PHILIP'S WAR & PRAYING TOWNS

Praying Town Links

WWW www.erroluys.com

The war was the deadliest and costliest, proportionately, in American history, worse than the Civil War or Vietnam in terms of lives lost, communities destroyed and economic dislocation. It had no winners, only losers. Named for the unregal chief of the Pokanokets, a Plymouth Colony tribe, the conflagration engulfed all of New England between 1675 and 1678, when it burned itself out in Maine. Before the war was over, it claimed 9,000 victims (two thirds Indian) and destroyed most or nearly all of 50 English towns. Homelessness, starvation, crushing taxation and our earliest veteran problem preyed on NE for years afterward.
-The Red King's Rebellion: Russell Bourne NY Athenaeum:

An unbeatable cast of characters:
Benjamin Church, the most effective and most principled Indian fighter in the colonies
1242. Capt. Benjamin Church. Born ca 1640 in Plymouth, MA.13 Benjamin died on 17 Jan 1717/8 in Little Compton, RI.93 Occupation: carpenter.

Benjamin was the first 'Englishman' to settle at Little Compton in 1675. He was a hero in King's Philip's War. He was involved early on in the war at Pease Field Fight in Jun 1675, later in the massacre at the Great Swamp in Dec 1675, and he lead the expedition that resulted in King Philip's capture in Aug 1676. For a popular introduction to King Phillip's War including Benjamin's involvement and excerpts from his diary, see King Philip's War: the history and legacy of America's forgotten conflict, by Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT, 1999.

Benjamin dictated to his son Thomas his story published in 1716 as Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War. Various editions have been published including The History of Philip's War, Commonly Called the Great Indian War of 1675 and 1676, edited by Samuel Drake in 1829 and reprinted in 1989 by Heritage Book, Bowie, MD. See also the Diary of King Philip's War, 1675-76, with an introduction by Alan Simpson and Mary Simpson, Lockwood, Tiverton, RI, 1975.

Benjamin Church - Background & Notes
Benjamin Church is most famous for his actions during "King Philip's War&. He has been painted as a true Indian Fighting Hero by most and as a cold blooded killer by some. He was a devout man of God and loyal to his King. Like any human being, he had his good days and his bad ones. Many of his tactics appear cruel, especially from the perspective of his enemies. Native Americans generally have a very dim view of him. He did accept that Indians were human beings - as long as they were Christian - and treated his Indian soldiers better than most. He generally recruited Indians to fight against Indians. Most of his actions seem to have come from the belief that war was bad and everything conceivable (and deceivable) should be done to end it quickly. Many Indians surrendered to him during Philip's War under his promise that they would be treated kindly. This was a promise that was not in his power to keep. The Government sold most of Church's Indian captives into slavery to help defray the costs of the war, except the warriors, who were hung. Church did express his distaste for this policy. If he had not been the hero of Philip's War, he might have been hung as a traitor or banished from Plymouth for questioning Government policy.

Major Benjamin Church's orders of Sept. 1689 specified that his soldiers should have "the benefit of the captives, and all lawful plunder, and the reward of eight pounds per head, for every fighting Indian man slain by them, over and above their wages..." They landed at Casco Bay just in time to assist Falmouth defend itself from a attack of several hundred warriors. After which, they scouted throughout the area, found nothing of interest, and returned to Boston.

Major Church received a new commission on 2-Sep-1690. Church raised his army of old friends and Indians from his "Phillip's War" days. They sailed to Piscataqua [Portsmouth] where additional men were added. He had between 300 and 350 men which may or may not have included the Indian soldiers who probably numbered about 100. (Indian soldiers were not always counted as men!) His Indian soldiers were mostly from southern New England (Church refers to them as Seconet and Cape Indians). When Church returned home after this expedition he found that a day of humiliation had been ordered "because of the frown of God upon those forces sent under my command, and the ill success we had, for want of good conduct." Apparently some of Church's Plymouth Captains, who had returned ahead of him, spread some rumors. Church was accused of taking cattle and other items from the eastern settlers and shipping it home for personal profit. This appears to be unfounded, for in June of 1691, the gentlemen of Portsmouth requested Major Church's return ASAP to finish the job he started.

They surely would not have requested him if he had usurped his powers against them the year before. However, part of this 'disgrace' may have occurred because of the murder of Indian women and children on the Androscoggin. Who was killed and in what number, we will never be certain. But, if he killed women, we expect he killed children. (Children were generally be present whenever women were - but are almost never counted or mentioned in documents.) The killing of any and all Indians were within the limits of his orders. Did he give the order or was it a vote of the officers? His orders specified that he should consult his officers whenever possible and that a majority should rule. Why were they killed? Another question that will never get answered. We suspect the army was concerned about being slowed down. They were interested in getting to Wells before any attack. Of course, Abenaki women and children would be able to travel circles around a large army. Another possibility is given by an unknown writer who suggests that the captives were given to the Indian soldiers, "as was customary", to do with as they saw fit. We have not found anything to prove or disprove this theory. We do not know if they were scalped or if a bounty was to be paid for scalps. A bounty was clearly stated in his 1689 commission, but not mentioned in his 1690 commission. The Indians killed at Laurel Hill were buried. It is possible that the burials found in the Laurel Hill area are not traditional Native Burials, but the bodies of those killed in 1690.

Major Church returned to the east in 1692, as second in command under Governor Phips, who led the expedition in person. During the 1692 expedition, they put in at Casco, buried the bones of the English dead there, and took the great guns of the fort with them to Pemaquid. Phips and Church split up. Phips' orders to Church allowed him to command without a vote among his officers. This may support the idea that problems on his previous expedition were related to his officers. Church's own men (the English and Indians recruited by him personally) were very loyal to him, but there may have been problems with those recruited by others. Phips' orders also specified that captives were to be taken and their safety insured. This order may have been issued as a result of the 1690 incident on the Androscoggin. Church returned to the East again in 1696 and 1704, but most of his action was in the Penobscot region and further east.
On his 1689 expedition, most of the lead shot sent with them was too large for their guns. The lead had to be melted and recast before it could be used. This almost cost them their lives at Falmouth. Church wanted to make sure this never occurred again. Before agreeing to lead the 1704 expedition, he compiled a very detailed list of requirements for fitting out the expedition and recruiting men. This list shows that he was a very capably military leader and was concerned for the safety of his men.

Now in his 60's and very overweight, he continued to lead men against the enemy in the east. But, the compassion of earlier years towards captives was diminishing rapidly. News of the raid on Deerfield affected Church - he wrote of it several times. Perhaps he was tired of war, his age was catching up to him, or he personally knew too many that suffered at Deerfield. His tactic with captives at this time was very cruel but very effective. He allowed them to believe that he was giving them to his Indians, who would like to roast them. The Indians would gather nearby and begin to prepare a large fire. Church would than indicate (after the captive had sufficient time to contemplate the situation) that his life might be spared if he cooperated and truthfully told all he knew. It worked well with two young French brothers. We do not know if it always worked or what happened if it didn't.

On this last expedition, when a family would not come out of their wigwam, he writes "I hastily bid them [his soldiers] pull it down, and knock them on the head, never asking whether they were French or Indians; they being all enemies alike to me." Towards the end of this same letter he wrote, "But I ever looked on it, a good providence of Almighty God, that some few of our cruel and bloody enemies were made sensible of their bloody cruelties, perpetrated on my dear and loving friends and countrymen; as they had been guilty of, in a barbarous manner at Deerfield ..." At another time, a French woman ran from her house into the woods. His men wanted to catch her, but Church said no, "he would rather have her run and suffer, that she be made sensible, what hardships our poor people had suffered by them..." In these last incidents, he expected attack from a large body of Indians at any moment. So we learn that under stress he was capable of ordering the murder of noncombatants!

Benjamin Church died the 17th of January in 1718, at the age of 78.
We leave it to the reader to decide if Benjamin Church was a war hero, a murderer, or a human being with character flaws - like the rest of us!

Mary Rowlandson, the minister's wife, who captured by One-Eyed John (Monoco) sewed her way to freedom
Weetamoo, the mercurial and much married "queen" of the Pocassets
Stonewall John, the Indian mason who built impressive walls around the Narraganett swamp fort
Thomas Gardiner, arrested for treason for suggesting that Massachusetts caused the Eastern war by disarming the Abenakis
Mugg Hegone, the Abnaki war captain, who planned to capture a navy of English fishing boats and attack Boston.

(Critique of Bourne book = "his discredited references to New England's "theocracy" (The Puritans practiced strict separation of church and state) , Indian braves (only on the 19th century plains), French and Indian Wars (not from French or Indian viewpoints), and particularly the racial nature of the conflict between red and white. The meeting of native Americans and the English was a cultural encounter in which boundaries were permeable and values transferable; race played NO part until after 1689.)

Boston Globe March 1, 1998: (rev The Name of War by Jill Leopre) "King Phillip's War...its fate has been not even to be forgotten but to go unrecognized for what it was: one of America's first civil wars. To acknowledge it as such would be to acknowledge that Indians are members of the complicated family of Americans."

BIBL - NE Quarterly March 1988 - Another Look at the Causes of King Phillip's War, Philip Ranlet.

Bibl The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion: Rev John Williams - narrative

BIBL: Behind the Frontier: Indians in 18th Century Eastern Massachusetts by Daniel Mandell
History Dept; Mahar Hall, State University of New York, Oswego, NY 13126

BIBL What cheer, Netop Selections from a Key into the Language of America Translated and edited by Hadassah Davis, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown U, Bristol RI--"the museum stands on the historic summer campgrounds of the Wampanoag Indians, a place that served as the HQ of Metacomet. According to legend Phillip held tribal councils at a seat or concavity in a large outcropping of rock near the museum, known as King Philip's Chair. In 1676 he was killed only a short distance away.

BS R Heath: King Phillip's war club bought on yard sale for $125 - stolen from Fruitlands Museum in 1970/Globe June 7, 1995 - 104 purple and white beads - are said to represent the number of victims Metacomet personally dispatched, native and English alike, with a weapon the French called the "head-breaker" Club weighs slightly less than two pounds and is carved of maple wood.

BIBL: King Phillip's War - George W. Ellis and John E. Morris Grafton Press NY 1906
Sachems were distinguished by heavy belts and caps of wampum/ long ,mantles of multi-colored feathers.
"Before 1660 fur trade had declined between English and Indians. Fish the great article of export. Wampum no longer the currency. Silver from the Indies and Europe in exchange for fish, lumber etc. had come into the colonies between 1662 and 1670
Indian ceased being either a producer of food or supplier of furs. The old economic ties broke. Indians became an encumbrance to the English.

BIBL: NE Magazine Vol 3 1832 Story of Bran, Eliot's convert at Natick and love for settler's daughter, Lydia...Attack on Medfield?

In 1662 Massasoit died at age 82. Son Wamsutta (Alexander) succeeded him. He died in a year. Metacom, age 23, took power.
Governor John Leverett, arrive Boston Sept 4, 1633, age 17
Elected governor, May 1673, died March 16, 1679.

"Spread of War from one end of the settlements to the other, destruction and death brought to the war a religious and racial character, Suspicion and hatred of all Indians intense throughout Mass. Settlers knew not which Indians to trust. Innocent and guilty both condemned. Wigwams plundered and women and children murdered in Indian towns."

"King Phillips War...the cataclysm that broke the back of Indian resistance in New England and symbolized as well the decline of Puritan vitality"

June 24 1675 to August 12, 1676
A war of extermination against the English

Greatest catastrophe from the time of settlement to the struggle for independence.

1/15 colonists capable of bearing arms was killed
crops destroyed
villages leveled
immigration stemmed for a generation

A war that signaled the virtual annihilation of New England Indians
When Phillip was killed, hundreds surrendered on promise of amnesty. Summarily executed and thrown into slavery
Others fled west or north to the Abenaki

Gookin: "A wrathful Lord had made a rod of the barbarian heathen to destroy colony."
1674 Per Gookin Five nations: 1) Pequots, including the Mohicans (eastern CT) 2) Narragansett of Rhode Island 3) Pawkunnawkuts or Wampanoag of Plymouth County 4) Massachusetts in the Bay 5) Pawtuckets North and East of MA, including the Penacook's of NH and probably all the NE tribes as far as the Abenaki or Tarratines plus Nipmucs east and north of the Mohican and west of the Massachusetts
Tarrantine, not a tribe but a name applied to raiding parties of the Abenaki or Wabanaki, living east of the Kennebec or at its mouth...planted nothing because they preferred to raid their neighbors' corn.

Nipmuc (Freshwater) Indians contacts with outside world usually non-existent until the middle of the 17th century. They were not members of the Massachusetts Federation under Nanepashemet . Industrious and peaceable people relatively free from constant wars of others. Explorers impressed not only by their beauty of natives but their industry and bravery.

Hutchinson owned a farm in Nipmuc territory.
Captain Wheeler (Brookfield and Muttawump) + brave son + Nipmucs

English gratitude toward three Naticks who saved English troopers: treated so harshly by the troopers whose lives they saved that they ran off to join Philip.

Hubbard: Satan instigated the Indians out of fear that the power of the Lord was filling the whole earth in the New World

BUT Increase Mather suggested in his history of the war that the meager effort to covert Indians to Christianity might have been a contributing cause ." + "private traders who sell rum and guns to Indians, thus hardening their barbaric passions."

What was in Indian mind re the "sale of land"? Many believed they were only granting hunting and fishing privileges
Total of $12500 for entire state?
Greed of settlers
Pride of younger, dispossessed Indians

1645 Narragansett humbled. Staggering fines. Two and a half miles of wampum. Twenty years of machinations capped by the murder of a great sachem.
1662 : One nation alone remained - Wampanoag

"Prince Philip coming to Boston had a coat on and buskins set thick with these beads in little pleasant wild works and a belt of the same. His accouterments worth $20."

Murder of Sassamon, an English spy. - Three men tried, two executed, one killed by vigilantes

Metacomet's capital: South Kingston, RI. Five acre island in the midst of a great swamp with 500 houses reached by a single bridge. Renegade colonists accused of supervising fort caught and executed = Joshua Tift. - Surprise attack in a December snowstorm, set mat and rush covered wigwams afire.

"Thus began King Philip's war by the invasion of Wampanoag territory by armed men, and the capture of the King of the Country at the point of a loaded pistol, yet there are men even now who tell us that King Philip started the trouble."

Philip had 1300 to 1500 warriors

Uncas sent 50 of his best warriors to Boston to offer support. Oneko, his oldest son x Mohican hatred of Wampanoag
Three Christian Indians and small cavalry company + Mohicans attacked Wampanoag rearguard under Nimrod and killed 13.

Many of the colonial military leaders were veterans of Cromwell's army but their experience was only partially useful in the dense shrub-choked forest of New England

Companies mustered each year on Boston Common where they entertained huge crowds.
Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company - oldest military organization in North America
(1673) 500 flintlock muskets from England
(1675) 75 well-organized and disciplined companies in MA.
Foot companies = 70 privates and officers - increased to 90 each foot company = pike men until latter became useless in forests. Replaced by long knives attached to muskets = bayonets, for close combat against tomahawks.

Quaker anti-war party.

Two yards of trucking cloth for every hostile Indian scalp
2 coats for every live Indian
20 coats for Philip's head
40 coats for Philip alive

In July shortly after Dartmouth was attacked, a band of 166 Indians went to Plymouth to assure the authorities they had not taken part in the attack; saying they intended to remain neutral throughout the war: In spite of this promise all but six were taken prisoner and sold to the West Indies as slaves.

Execution of the Niantic envoy despite safe conduct pass to Boston

BIBL: Justification for Taking up Arms

Winter 1675: 36 inches of snow in November
1675 Dec 9: Great swamp massacre
MA and Plymouth forces "in a blinding snowstorm"
Fortress "a blockhouse"
Fire the wigwams!
600-700 killed, mostly women and children
English lost 93 and 150 wounded
"And that one Joseph Tift an Englishman is their encouragement and conductor"
(? Explains fort and blockhouse")
Tift was captured and executed - said he was made Canonchet's slave and forced to work on fort
Tift married a Wampanoag girl - At his trial his apostasy was introduced in evidence against him and he was found guilty of treason and shot. His body was quartered and left unburied.

BS Everett; The Kingston Swamp Fight
The island in the swamp which was the fastness of the Narragansett is just west of the Stonington Railroad, in full sight of the traveler about a mile after he has passed the south Kingston station on his way to NY...The place is not physically changed much since the Narragansett held it. The swamp is still almost impassable on foot in all but the driest of weather. A bit of upland five or six acres which has not been cultivated for 100 years is the site of the fortress and the fight.

On the inner side of this natural defence they had driven rows of palisades, making a barrier nearly a rod in thickness; and the only entrance to the enclosure was over a rude bridge consisting of a felled tree, four or five feet from the ground, the bridge being protected by a blockhouse. The English breaking up their camp while it was yet dark, arrived before the place at one o'clock. Having passed without shelter a very cold night they had made a march of eighteen miles through deep snow, scarcely halting to refresh themselves with food. In this condition they immediately advanced to the attack. The MA troops were in the van of the storming, next came the two Plymouth companies, and then the Ct. (Palfrey)

Tradition is distinct as to the point on the south west where the first and most determined assault was made. At a corner of the savages fort a huge tree rested on its branches where it had fallen, so that the trunk was about five feet from he ground. A log house and a "flanker" commanded this narrow passage. But by this the English attempted to storm the enclosure. Capt Johnson, who led, was killed at once; Capt Davenport followed, to meet the same fate, and the first attack failed, the soldiers being flung back unsuccessful.
But there was no retreat possible for the invaders. They must take the fort or die. A renewed attack undertaken with more caution drove the Indians from the flanker and log house, and the coveted passage was thus secured. What followed seems to have been a desperate hand to hand fight from point to point in the enclosure. The assailants were once driven out but regained their ground, There was nothing for either party but to conquer or die, enclosed together as they were. At length the English left the ground. They set fire to the wigwams and destroyed them and the winter supply of corn.

The accounts at the time say 500 wigwams. This seems scarcely possible. But one Indians said 700 of his people were killed and 300 wounded, and estimate of the time was that 4000 men women and children were in the enclosure when it was attacked. The English lost in killed and wounded more than 200 from a force of about 1200.
Whether attack was justified or not is a question that modern times have raised. The Narraganset had been the hereditary enemies of Phillip's tribe. Where they his allies now? The United Colonies did not doubt it. They notified the NS they must give up such enemies as had fallen into their hands. Canonchet had undertaken to do this and failed. So soon as they failed the union fitted out the expedition...after the fight they found in the fort English guns that had been taken by the Nipmucks at Deerfield the year before. Still, there has been expressed the feeling that the English went out of their way to attack these people who cannot be proved to have attacked them before.
It is certain that Canonchet took and burned Providence next Spring...and local tradition is distinct that Philip was present in the swamp fight, and only retired when they day was lost.
Had the United Colonies not broken the Narragansett power by some such act, King Phillip and the Narragansett would probably have broken theirs....The civilization of NE would have been left to be on the level of Labrador...
Antiquaries, after 200 years, found a few arrowheads, a grain or two of charred corn, and some bits of unmistakable charcoal.

On December 25 Boston voted to raise 1,000 additional men. First company left Boston on January 8 and arrived in Warwick on the 18t 11 of the company froze to death.

Canonchet responsible for reign of terror in late winter and early spring of 1676 that almost succeeded in destroying the English army.

Mary Rowlandson x three children captured at Lawrence
Monoco spread story that he had married Mary and that she did not want her husband.

Evacuation of Groton

*Story of Indian women attacking two men from Marlborough to Sudbury - emasculating and beat out brains.

Captain William Turner, Baptist
Captain Pierce's company, Seekonk

Messenger sent for help - waited for service to end before interrupting
= Indian victory

Canonchet taken...The Pequots shot him, the Mohicans quartered his body, the Niantics burned all but his head which was later presented to the Council at Hartford as a" token of love and fidelity"

Sudbury disaster: 76 soldiers killed, the majority of them young boys. ? 74 dead, 5 Indians
Hatfield disaster for Indians, who were surprised by Turner - Falls Massacre = now "Turner's Falls"

Holyoke decapitated three old women with his sword

After this attack Philip committed great blunder by returning to Wampanoag territory

War was being conducted from Boston

War prisoners helped build original Castle Island Fort.

Couriers, supply trains, 100 miles to Connecticut River
Henchman, again 1400 men
Captain Benjamin Church
Pay = half the money the colony received from slave traders for every person they brought in
Bounty hunters

Philip, sitting on a felled tree, lost in thought...Surprised but fled
Philip's wife and nine year old son taken
Sending death he returned to his beloved Pokanoket
"Alderman" killed him.
"he looked like a doleful great naked dirty beast"
quartered and head sent to Plymouth where it remained on a pole for twenty years

Annawan: Philip's 85-year-old war captain and councilor
I-oo-tash! I-oo-tash! Stand and fight!
Annawan's final gifts on capture = Philip's belt - sent to England.
Symbolic handing over...The Wampanoag federation no longer existed.

Church brought Attawan? to MA & promised he would not be executed, but while Church was on business in Boston, the old war captain was shot to death

Philip's wife and son: the minister who was asked to find a solution studied the bible: kill/enslave/mercy...They were sold into slavery in West Indies.

Gookin's company of Praying Indians included 86-year-old Job Nesutan...killed the day after he arrived at the front.
Tom ? - comrades tried to execute him for being drunk...deserted...caught and shot by firing squad in the morning!

Captain Samuel Moseley, brother in law of Governor Leverett, implacable foe of Indians.
A privateer against the Spanish in West Indies. Two ships made so much profit, he bought five more ships vs. Dutch pirates.

"A large number of Indians escaped from the jail" including James Printer, educated at the Indian Charity school at Cambridge. Served Green as apprentice printer x Indian Bible
Governor Leverett ordered the jailor to surrender one Indian appease the mob - four times hoisted up on a large tree.

Patriot Indians tried to provoke incidents among them.
Wamesits/ Ponkapoag to Dorchester, Boston for questioning. Women and children attacked by vigilantes after burning of barn. Two white men set free after trial. Six old and weak people burned to death.

Leverett acts against the Praying Indians: - confined to five villages. All other Indians to be regarded as hostile and could be shot on sight by English.
John Watson, Indian hater, went to live with them...he became convinced they were a deeply religious people; "A fool of a traitor"

Gookin ordered the move to Deer Island. Within an hour, they were on their way escorted by Thomas Prentice who had volunteered to protect them.
Indians led to the waterfront where a flotilla of boats awaited them
English settled raided Natick.

Gookin was especially hated because he was Irish. Attempt to kill him and Eliot when their boat was rammed

Prior to internment, Deer Island was used to pasture sheep. Under normal conditions could sustain only a few families for an indefinite period.
500 men woman and children lived on fish and shellfish (throwback to period before white settlement?)
Old Ahattan petitioned to visit other islands for slams and fish as Indians were starving to death
1675 April 16: Jonathan ......asked possession of a certain little Indian girl who was a member of tribe on the island

English settlers concerted efforts to darken the reputation of the Praying Indians
Praying Indians + "Satan's Fifth Column"

1675, Oct 200 Natics - Deer Island. Oldest, most numerous and steadfast converts. Two hours warning. Scant supply of corn etc.
Nashoba Indians to Deer Island, then covered with forest trees and used for the grazing of sheep. A sad scene at the site of the US arsenal on Charles River then called The Pines. Natick Indians by foot, horse and cart for the sick and lame, after a comforting prayer by Eliot. By serving tide on October 30, they were shipped in there vessels to the island "patiently, humbly and piously, without murmuring or complaining against the English."

1675, December - By this month, 500 dead from dysentery, skimpy rations, inadequate shelter. - HALF the occupants died in Winter.
Captain Henchman in charge of Deer Island

Bibl Gookin's Report - "Doings and Sufferings" 1836 Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society

Colonists recruited Deer Island volunteers to penetrate Metacomet's camp and then rewarded them with a return to captivity.

1675, July: A company of 52 Praying Indians - Mount Hope - distinguished themselves under Thomas Savage. Praying Indians urged pursuit but colonists discounted advice. A military blunder of first rank. And a second time before Metacomet's escape into Nipmuc territory
Hutchinson ambushed - Brookfield. Christian Indians warned him against keeping rendezvous
Memechco (captured?) but Sampson and Joseph escaped to lead settlers to garrison at Brookfield
Two Indians abused - Sampson escaped to Philip but Joseph taken prisoner at Plymouth and sold into Jamaican slavery - Eliot eventually won his freedom.

Marlborough attack - 15 Praying Indians arrested and taken to Boston. 13 acquitted. 1 as accessory + David, a false witness. One of fleeing 13 captured and lynched. Hanged four times before killing him.

Wamesit - attack by 12 colonists " the settlers burned alive in their wigwams six or more people too old to flee. Some were executed at Boston and some were sold into slavery."

Two Christian Indians - Job Kattenait and James Quannephit from Deer Island as spies. Warned of the Lancaster attack - ignored. Indians killed twelve settlers and carried off the rest, including Mary Rowlandson
Job and James were given $5 each and sent back to Deer Island

After Medford, a group of 40 citizens planned to massacre Deer Island Indians. Fell through.

40 Deer Island Indians under Samuel Hunting and James Richardson
80 Christian Indians fought in every remaining campaign: "They stripped and painted themselves, became Indians again like the enemy, tracked them to their lairs, brought home such captives as had not been massacred." Gookin says these Red allies killed at least 400 of enemy, turning the balance to the English side.

NB: Wenepoyken = 60 year old patriot sold into slavery after the war.

Winslow: They found 60 horses' heads left behind by the Indians.
Two of the most trustworthy Indians interred at Deer Island employed as Spies:
Job Kattenawit - his wife was dead...his children, too, but for the young Wassanamessit girl who managed to keep them alive. He married her.
James Quannapowit - grandson of squaw sachem - from Revere x "James Wiser" - greeted the first settlers of Salem five pounds payment

Deer island: one of the longest and coldest winters in the history of the colony.
Petition that internees be executed or sold into slavery.
A group of Bostonians were pleading to attack and massacre the Indians.

Moseley versus Monoco in fight that lasted from noon to dusk
Monoco: What we will do, we do."

Massacre at Bloody Brook

Desertion rate high.
The Great Storm and Hobbamock - terrified Bostonians

Agawam (Springfield) child hostages.
Prisoners stomach cut open and intestines tied to horses tail...dragged off.

"Near Dedham, the regulars met up with a sort of people's army - 100 volunteers, sailor's apprentices, servants, a few paroled pirates, and a pack of hunting dogs." = DAVID HENCHMAN & Co

Captain Moseley's outfit "a mongrel regiment of servants and pardoned offenders"

Metacomet tactics: surprise (ambush) and terror (flaming arrows-brimstone-dipped rags)
Stone-pronged wooden club x natural roots of a birch.
One-eyed Monoco led attack on Medfield = 21 February/18 settlers, 50 homes razed.
Sudbury: Metacomet's last battle

Wamsutta's wife Weetamoo.., aka Tatapanum. A widow, third husband Quequequanchett, 4th Pentonowitt who became pro-English. 5th Quinapen, once of Philip's captains.
1676, Aug Weetamoo drowned. Head cut off and paraded past her followers

Three leaders - Muttawumps (?), Sagamore Sam, Monoco - capitulated. They were tried and executed at Boston.

Near the end if King Phillip's War, CT troops captures scores of Narranganset prisoners, whom they allowed their Mohegan allies to torture. The Mohegans cut around the joints of his fingers and toes and broke them off. The captive never flinched. To the taunts of his tormentors he answered "that he liked the war well, and found it as sweet as the English do their sugar."

Captain Tom hanged at Boston despite Eliot's plea
James the Printer pardoned

3,000 to 5,000 dead.
1675-6 40 Indians captured in King Phillip's War were executed on Boston Common
United Colonies sold thousands of prisoners into foreign slavery - West Indies, Bermuda, Virginia, Portugal and Spain
MA; "a young Indian could not end indenture before 21"
Four villages - all Indians ordered to live there .."passes"

600 white soldiers - 1 in 11 of military age
Scarcely a family in the colony had not lost a loved one
War destroyed last of NE fur trade
Massive land grab

Boston army under Cudworth equipped with dogs

56 separate actions to fire a musket

BIBL; Entertaining History of King Philip's War Benjamin Church

"At Providence - Wright - "disemboweled him and stuffed his Bible in his stomach"

"Perhaps as many as 9,000 people died, two-thirds of them Indian. 30 percent of the entire population of MA, PL and RI
52 Puritan towns attacked and 12 destroyed. 8ooo head of cattle lost. $100,000 loss
1/10th of New England makes died in battle.
600 military and civilians dead. Many other colonists wounded and captured, some never repatriated.

4000 Indian deaths from battle, disease and exposure
2000 voluntary exiles
1000 sold into slavery AV

Increase Mather's diary: While the war has bypassed Boston, a smallpox epidemic has not."

Boston Common: "the single most tragic episode of the war...Indians and Whites being executed side by side on Boston Common, while the plague and war rage on.
Sagamore Sam and the sick Englishman who should have been executed last week. (Goble) was hanged with him. It seems a madwoman got away with the rope that should have hanged the Englishman...whereof he was hanged with the very same rope which had hanged the Indian just before...

Famine in Boston, provisions from Virginia

"They have said they had powder from the Dutch in Albany"
Bibles burned in King Philip's War

King Philip and his warriors died to protect the cherished long season, fertile, easily worked loams of their home villages at Sowams and Mt. Hope.
Question of whether to sell Metacomet's 9 year-old-son into slavery or execute him. Slavery. (See religious debate about this)
?Eliot's letter re slavery of Indians, August 1675: Was this in response to a suggestion that his natives were to be sold?

King Philip : his hands were cut off and sent to Boston
The head of Philip preserved in a pail of rum

Church and his men paid "thirty shillings an Indian head

Phillip's English friend...John Borden

Weeks Massasoit: Phillip showed more humanity in his treatment of the whites during the war than was shown by the colonists to their enemies.
Gookin on Phillip: "he was a person of good understanding and knowledge of the best of things"
"Benevolent care" : one does not know whether to laugh in derision or to weep in pity at the utter lack of discernment of the man who sees "benevolent care" in systematic robbery and oppression coupled with wholesale degradation through the same of rum.
"Historians of Prejudice" writers like Hubbard, Mather, Schoolcraft
Parkman delineating the character of the red man after he had fallen a victim to too many of the demoralizing vices introduced by contact with the white man's civilization
Robber of his lands/ driven from his hunting grounds/deprived of his petty substance/reduced to starvation by the ruthless destruction of his race
"His savage nature rendered a thousand times more savage by the white man's rum"

"Almost everybody took rum as a form of body heating" Mixed with molasses = blackstrap + compounded with cider = lethal "stonewall"

Rowlandson: "how to admiration did the Lord preserve them for His holy ends... and the destruction of so many still among the English."

An order from the Governor's Council in August 1675 permitted any white to shoot on sight any Indian outside the boundaries of five of John Eliot's praying towns.

1678, May Natick exiles returned

(Lenapee + "so great was their defeat that they were compelled to forego the use of arms and to assume the name of "woman". When Penn made his treaty in 1682, he treated with "women, not warriors")

1690+ King Williams War 1690-91
Queen Anne's War 1702-1714
Lovewell's War 1722-25
"Now the Indians were agents of French priests acting against God's wishes in the battle between Protestantism and Catholic heresy."

1698 A church of seven men and three women, a native minister ordained by Eliot, 59 men, 51 women, 70 children.

BIBL: Experience Matthew's journal of his futile efforts among three tribes in 1713/14: Narraganset, Pequot, Mohegan
BIBL: Penhallow, S History of the Wars of New England with the Eastern Indians...1726

Praying Indians post-war: became victims of their neighbors greed and intolerance ..some fled to Maine/some anglicized their names and became families.

1770 + "of the Indians who remained at Natick, most were now destitute, sleeping in barns and begging at farmhouse doors' Only a handful of Indians still held a few, ramshackle farms) - Final entry in book of Natick proprietors in February 1787.
1790 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act - "dependent nations"
1792 One Indian family remained
1846 200th anniversary of Eliot's first service - A girl of 16 was the only known native descendent.

"Alas for them their day is o'er,
Their fires are out from shore to shore;
No more for them the wild deer bounds,
The plough is on their hunting grounds.
The pale man's axe rings through their woods,
The pale man's sail skims o'er their floods
Their pleasantest springs are dry."
Charles Sprague, 1830

1850 Schoncraft said 847 Indians in the State "not more than seven or eight full-blooded Indians"
1869 Commonwealth of Massachusetts declared tribal life at and end. The Nipmucs kept a rudimentary form going. (Grafton/Webster - Dudley)
1884 First reference to Nipmuc election day
1900 Medicine men restored to Nipmucs
1923 Algonquin Indian Council of NE - "I still live" + Grafton powwow became an annual event. Office of sachem revived. James Lemeul Cisco of the revered Arnold-Cisco clan. After his death his daughter was elected: Sarah Cisco Sullivan - "Princess Sweet Flower"
Two Nipmuc Councils - Webster-Dudley/ Chaubunagungamaul Council/Hassanamisco Council

England had offered neither troops nor funds so the colonists bore whole human and material cost.
England saw good opportunity to gain royal upper hand. Charles II sent Edward Randolph to report on conditions.
Even as King Phillips war was drawing to a close, Edward Randolph arrived in Boston to find and expose the vices of Puritan rule."

When the faith of the Puritan community began to wane in 1660s/1670s the time was right for what Richard Slotkin has called a "regeneration through violence."

"Convinced that God, not they wielded the sword, the Puritans rejoiced in victory and then denied responsibility for what happened. In their own eyes, they were still humble. But in the eyes of their countrymen in England, they were either demented or shameless. The war invited the King of England to assert his jurisdiction over his subjects in NE, who seemed to have forfeited some of their humility in the name of a distorted view of Christianity..."

Massachusetts Bay recovered from King Phillip's War but the Puritan experiment on the hill did not

During 1640s and 1650s, a generation was coming of age in MA with no memory of the struggle in England.

About mid 1650s, the colony began to be infested with Quakers and Baptists who traveled from settlement to settlement preaching their heretic doctrines.
A law was passed making it illegal for members of these sects to town horses.
Extended to Indians - also made it illegal to possesses any craft larger than a canoe.
1665 King Philip asks permission to buy a horse. Huge black stallion given to him as a gift
Rode horse 10 years later in attack on Medfield

1648 Witches first hanged in Boston - Margaret Jones and three others
1651 Fancy dress and dancing forbidden
1655 Irish immigrants arrived in Boston and were sold into bondage (? Indentures)
1656 Mary Hibbens hanged as a witch on the gallows on Boston Neck - Quakers banished

Persecution and Paranoia had been on the rise in MA since the end of Puritan rule in England in 1658.

1660, Oct 27 Mary Dyer hanged Mary's son plead for her and she left but returned June 1, 1660 Rachel Wall hanged for stealing a bonnet of 75 cents - hanged as a highway robber!

Margaret Jones = first woman doctor in America = "witch"

1646 North Battery North End
1666 South Battery Rowe's Wharf
Sea Wall: Atlantic Avenue from Captain Scarlett's Wharf to the Sconce - beginning 1673, timber and earth, half a mile long, 15 foot high and 20 foot wide
1669 Samuel Scarlett x Scarlett's Wharf at the foot of Fleet Street

1662 Halfway Covenant - Increase was one of those who refused to baptize children of the unregenerate.
1663 Earthquake + ship disasters + fire
1664: July Charles II sent four observers in two ships with 400 troops...to see that MA complied (Episcopalians, voting privileges etc.) - The first vessels of the Royal Navy to enter Boston Harbor
The Charter legitimized the purpose that impelled the first immigrants to cross the ocean and found the City Upon a Hill...commercial license...Mission made the Charter sacred. As precious as U.S. Constitution in 1789.

"A small independent church state, a purified American Israel separated from a corrupt Old World"

Move against the Charter aimed particularly at allowing King to appoint the governor himself...break tie between Church and State
"... cared not a turd for Judge Hathorne"
"liar and simple Ape, shittabed"
"cursed his mother as a Ram-beggar, Gamar Shithouse, Gamar Pisshouse"
"the rankest sow in town"

1664 "Edward Randolph "a mean-spirited spy and revenue collector" conducted an on-site inspection: "Reduce Massachusetts to obedience"

1664 John Wampas acquired a knowledge of the English language, having in his youth attended the so-called Indian College of Cambridge which was founded in 1664 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Wampas is believed to have been one of the early disciples of the Apostle Eliot, but despite the fact that he is said to have attended the school in Cambridge, he appears to have been unable to write his real name, since he affixed his mark to legal documents.

The lot in Tremont Street (St Paul's Church) he purchased for 78 pounds from Robert Wyard of Hartford. There are records that Wampas was married in 1661 to Ann Fraske, daughter of Chief Romanock. At the time his wife died, in 1676, Wampas was imprisoned for a small debt at London, England, and in order to relieve his embarrassment he was allowed to sell some of his lands. The following year it is recorded that John Wampas, alias White, Seaman, sold his lot scituate near the training field in Boston to Joshua Hughes cordwainer and others of Boston, for 20 pounds. In that year, Wampas, having been liberated from prison, returned to Boston. He again visited England and he died in 1679 in the East End of London.

Up to the time of the building of the church (1808?) the tract bounded by Tremont, Winter, West and Washington streets was open land, consisting of gardens and pastures, dotted here and there with wooden dwellings, barns, sheds shade trees and orchards, The streets already mentioned were lanes through which the early settlers drove their cows over to the Common. What is now the Tremont Street Mall was a wide shaded walk known as Colonnade Row (?), which was a favorite resort on warm days and evenings.

From the walk a view could be had across the Common to the Charles River which was beyond a stretch of marshy lands. On the southerly side of the church where the R. H. Stearns Company's building now is, was for many years the site of the old Masonic Temple, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1830. This building gave the name to Temple place, which for two centuries was known as Turnagain Alley beginning back in 1708. At the farther end a flight of five steps led down through a twelve-foot passageway into Washington Street. It was soon after 1830 that Temple place began to be built up with homes which were occupied by prominent citizens, and it remained a favorite residential area until the time of the Civil War.

1669? Massachusetts versus Mohawks ...Josias Chickataubut with 600-700

1670s Holland at war with England
1670 "Ten thousand rogues, vagabonds and beggars were shipped from England, and some were sold as slaves in the colonies, many in Boston"
1671 40,000 English in New England/ +- 20,000 Indians

1672 Conviction of Alice Thomas for keeping a brothel, apparently the first case...from 1670 to 1680, Suffolk Country Court sat on 11 cases of prostitution
Sewall mentions Haverhill man who raped Goodwife Nash of Amesbury in a pasture
A boy executed for bestiality with a mare in daylight.
An abandoned infant in the stall of a tobacco shop
French and English "dancing masters" - Francis Stepney
Drunkenness rampant
Increase in suicide
Increase Mather: "Was there ever a place so like unto New Jerusalem as New England hath been?....Hath been because now "the unconverted, not zealous for God, indifferent to matters of religion."

1672-74 John Easton, Quaker of Newport rose to be governor of Rhode Island "In speaking of him as Governor of Rhode Island, the latter must not be confused with the Providence Plantation of Roger Williams as Rhode Island in those days meant the Indian island of Aquidnick, the Rhode or Red Island of the English."

1673 Day of Public Fasting to implore divine protection against attack
+ French threat + Indians + Quakers + Baptists
3/10 infants died from scarlet fever, measles, smallpox

1676. Edward Randolph sent, a leading advocate of royal control responding to accounts of the Puritans anti-monarchial sentiments.
Increase Mather defender of Charter...by one account he even excited his audience to defend the charter by arms

1679 Great fire
1679 "The mart town of the West Indies" - "constant traders"

1679 Reform Synod listed evils - "this perishing people"

1680s climaxed an insidious religious and social deterioration evident for twenty years, says Silverman. Other scholars deny a "myth" of decline. Silverman disagrees, decay of piety, after 1660 and much more towards 1680s when few of the first generation remained. "Failure of many young persons to experience grace" - only the Gracious, the Saints, were entitled to full church membership

1680 First commercial bank in Boston

1684 Mass Bay charter annulled - the Bay colony was transformed into a royal colony under direct supervision of the crown. Also plan to consolidate all New England colonies in a dominion
James 11 followed through with decision and sent Edmund Andros ("Tyrant Andros") to Boston...had been unpopular as governor of NY and NJ - with 60 red-coated guardsmen to Boston
"A crew that began to teach NE to drab (use prostitutes), drink, blaspheme, curse and damn, committing insufferable riots among the quiet and peaceable people"

Randolph made five visits....
1686, May 14...bearing a revocation of the Charter and King's commission for a new government. Randolph brought Anglican clergyman Ratcliffe who preached in Town House.
Revocation of original charter was disastrous but expected - 1) illegal mint 2) established religious rather than property qualification for universal suffrage 3) discriminating against Anglicans

Dominion of New England under Sir Edmund Andros

1686 - Andros dismissed over 50 years of self government.
Increase Mather arrested. Accused of defaming Randolph...treasonable letters. Secretly took ship for London to bargain for colonists rights and protest actions of Andros.
Andros lasted two years and four months x trade crippled

BS D73 ...the South Church was seized, by force and church services were held there. The people regarded this as an act of sacrilege. They daubed the doors and walls, smashed the windows, and obliged the minister to leave the country....Andros seized...In the course of 48 hours the revolution was accomplished without loss of a single life.
While Andros may be detestable figure in the history of New England, while at the head of affairs in Virginia, his official life was marked by many acts of progression and development in that section of the country. He was rough, intolerant arrogant ruler, but was after all a reflex of the English king from whom he got his power. The outbreak against his authority was a most wholesome one in its influence, for it prepared the way for religious freedom and put an end to theocratic rule in America.
The revolt of the people of Boston against Andros in 1689 was bolder and even more perilous than that which took place on the same ground 86 years later. It was revolt of a handful of peace-loving people against a great and warlike nation. Had the people been less bold or less prompt in their action, or had King James held his own against William of Orange, the movement would have been disastrous and the consequences of their failure would have been felt by us today. Treason has always been held by England to be an unpardonable crime, and as every man of prominence took a more or less active part in the affair, the colony would have been swept clean of its best men.

Eliot: shall we betray our Liberties? Let us do as our fathers have done. Die in the possession of these things.

December 20: Andros "in a scarlet coat laced - Dominion of New England...MA Bay, Ply, NH, ME, Narragansett Country. (In 1688 + RI CT NY NJ) - He kept his hat on when he administered oaths in the Town House

South Church = Anglican service on Andros' insistence.

"the foundation being destroyed what could the righteous do?"
NOW= An English colony.

"MA was not a wilderness Zion but a royal possession"

Catholic James I proclaimed in Boston by military display...a day of humiliation.
Cotton Mather x Andros x a day of thanksgiving for the royal birth. James' son, a possible Catholic ruler.

William of Orange landed in England with a Dutch army. "a glorious triumph over enemies and suffering"
April 18, day Cotton Mather was to be arrested, Boston took arms against Andros.

DECLARATION OF THE GENTLEMEN - 12 articles.
By nightfall the Dominion had ceased to exist and Boston lay again under Puritan rule.
Some New Englanders called for independence from the mother country but most desired only a return to the Charter government.

May 22 - a time when for over 50 years, expect under Andros, MA Puritans held their annual election

1688 Mrs. Glover, a "witch" from Ireland, hanged at Boston Neck

1688 James II driven off and replaced by his daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange
"Glorious Revolution"
People of Boston rose in revolt, seized and imprisoned Andros - Previous year Increase Mather had sailed to England to plead against Andros

1689, summer William declared war on France. War spilled over into colonies opening 70 years of European warfare in North America and exposing New England to invasion from whole armies of Indian and Gaelic bloodhounds" (Mather)

1690, French Indian attack on Schenectady
Canadian expedition by New England " a victory over Catholicism and a way to show loyalty to William." Led by Sir William Phipps, a member of the North Church.
32 ships...."a disaster" that cost L50,000 and 200-1000 men

What once was Indian lands became in 1691, the King of England's royal province and the days of Puritan rule in MA and CT were finished

1690 "Publick Occurences both foreign and domestic" - First newspaper in America - immediately banned
1690 First anti-slavery tract in colonies by Samuel Sewall

1690 BS B17 "....those pilgrimatic Puritans who in Macaulay's view drove imagination from its last poor refuge, the stage. In their eyes the acted drama was the evil one's subtlest snare. When, about 1690, a dancing master, one Francis Stepney, who in a condition of mild lunacy had come to Boston to practice his art, declared that by one acted play he could teach more charity than all the ministers and the Old Testament put together, our square-toed predecessors drove the ribald sinners forth, after imposing on him a fine equivalent to one of $1000 now, this for seditious utterances....
A quarter of a century later tempers were different. Great changes had taken place in politics and letters. Anne had come to the throne of England. Addison. Steele. Pope and Swift were in the zenith of their powers. Dryden was writing his plays and creating a theory of the drama.
In Boston during the short incumbency of Andros, the citizens had seen "public challenges" fencing bouts, juggling, and even meager pageants. Hence it is not surprising that an amateur performance in the council chamber itself was mooted as a fitting celebration of the Queen's birthday in 1714. Although Justice Sewall noted it with much alarm and resolved to prevent it. Probably private performances occasionally took place, for in 1750 Otway's "Orphan" was produced at the British Coffee House on King, now State Street.
Then and there occurred Boston's first theatrical riot. So many wanted to see the performance, and so few could be accommodated in the small room where the performance took place, that entrance became the right of might. The strenuous rejoiced for a while, then they cooled off in the lock-up. The town was scandalized. Within a few weeks a law was on the statutes prohibiting, under heavy penalties public performance of stage plays."
It is significant that private performances where no money was received were tacitly exempt from these provisions."

1691 William and Mary agreed to a new compromise charter
NB representatives of General Court to be elected by the voters on basis if property, not religious affiliation
Set stage for decline of MA's "Aristocracy of Saints" - old church oligarchy

"It may well be that the atmosphere of fear and tension that prevailed in MA in the early 1690s contributed in no small way to the brief but frightening outburst of hysteria in 1692 over the presence of witches and witchcraft in the colony"
1690-1670 new century approaching fueled the hysteria
Increase and Cotton: "Satan was walking the streets."

1700 General Court passed law forbidding any Roman Catholic priest to remain in colony under penalty of death -- In 1688, in the midst of Catholic scare, an elderly woman named Ann Glover was accused of being a witch and hanged on Boston Common.

BSN: Extracts from Sewall's diary:
March 7, 1676: "A pretty deal of Thunder this day."
Apr 9, 1676: "It thundered a pretty while. Carried my wife to Dorchester to eat cherries, raspberries, chiefly to ride and take the Air."
"Mr. Willard speaks to the 7th commandment, condemns naked breasts; and seems to be against the marriage of first cousins."
"Neighbor Fifield brought me the news, who had it from the Cryer of fish."
Dec 30, 1686: "An Indian man is found dead on the Neck with a bottle of rum between his legs."
Jan 2, 1685: "Last night dreamed that Christ came to Boston. Admired the goodness and Wisdom of Christ in coming hither and spending some part of his short life here."
Feb 16, 1677 "Brewed my wife's Groaning Beer."
Jan 24, 1685: "This day so cold that the Sacramental Bread is frozen pretty hard and rattles sadly as broken into plates."
May 11, 1686. "Mr. Mather's Maid a member of (blank) church is brought to bed of a child. Nothing suspected before that I hear of. "'Tis said he has turned her out of --~s house."
Sept 3, 1686: Mr. Shrimpton, Capt. Legett and others came in a coach from Roxbury about 9 o'clock on post, singing as they came. At Justice Morgan's they stop and drink healths, curse, swear, talk profanely and bawdily to the great disturbance and grief of good people. Such high handed wickedness has hardly been heard of before in Boston."
May 4, 1687: "I spent a pretty deal of time in the burying place to see the Graver of tombstones; push caterpillars off the apple trees, go to meeting of Mistress Averyes; read out of Dr. Sibs about submitting to God's Providence. Sang 110 psalm."
Oct 18, 1687: "Eliot said the King was turned a Puritan and he was ravished at it."
Oct 27, 1687. "Mr. Joseph Eliot preached the lecture from I Corinth 2.2. parallels the diseases of New England with Corinth; among others mentioning itching ears, hankering after false teachers, and consequently sucking in false principles, and despising, sitting loose from the true teachers. Advised to fly into the Arms of a crucified Christ because probably might have no whether else to go."
Mar 30, 1686: Mr. Larkin sought after Mr. Mather this week to Arrest him, Mr. Mather on Tuesday was taking physick and so was free, and since hath purposely avoided him.
May 30, 1688: Mr. Joseph Eliot here, says the two days wherein he buried his Wife and Son, were the best that ever he had in the world."
Dec 16, 1688: Visited Madame Horseman, formerly Dulcibella Dunch."
Mar 22, 1706: This day Mr. Jer. Cushing dies at Scituate. Jno. Turner dies there suddenly pm the same day. He has the character of a drunkard and a striker of his wife."
June 27, 1710: "I cut down the Elm that annoyed the coach house stable."
Apr 11, 1712: I saw six swallows flying together and chirping rapturously."
Aug 10, 1715: Constable Eady, Allen, Salter, Herishor, Simson, Howell, Mr. John Marion, dissipated the players at nine pins on Mount Whoredom.
Jan 15, 1715. "Bread was frozen at the Lord's table. Mr. Pemberton administered. Though it was so cold, yet John Tuckermoty was baptized. At six o-clock my ink freezes so that I can hardly write by a good fire in my wife's chamber."
Feb 8, 1715: "Sloop run away with by a whale out of a good harbor at the Cape. How surprisingly uncertain out enjoyments in this world are."
Apr 19, 1724: My grandson John Sewall of Brookline dies aged about 16 mo and 10 days."
Aug 20, 1724: Mathew brings him in his coffin to my house in the night and is set in the best room; a goodly corpse."
Apr 8, 1702: Mrs. Thatcher on her death bed troubled at her marriage to Mr. Kemp, her husband, some smell of relation between them."

BSN "Over 400 of Cotton Mather's sermons were published but since in one of these he bewails the fact that so many people waste their time with romances, it would seem that there was some light reading. Actually, the Puritans read many books that would be classed today as obscene. Booksellers were numerous. A writer describing the town in 1740 said there were five printing houses and that their presses were full of work. The town house was surrounded by booksellers shops and there were many others in the town. In the late 1700s lower Washington Street was called Booksellers' Row. New York, the same writer said, had only one little book shop and there were not at all in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, the Barbados or the sugar Islands."

BSN: Printing got off to a poor start in this city. In 1638 the Rev Joseph Glover left England intending to found NE's first press. He had a wife, four assistants, a press and a font of type. Harvard college had a house ready for this occupation. Mr. Glover died in mid-Atlantic, but his wife decided to carry on. She knew little about the craft and her four helpers even less. Stephen Daye, one of her helpers gets credit for being the first printer, but it was actually his son Matthew who did all the work.
Their first product was a copy of The Freeman's Oath. This was followed by an almanac, the Bay Psalm Book, and a number of religious and political pamphlets. Since the press was in his backyard Dr. Dunster, the president of Harvard, thought it was only neighborly to drop over and see what was going on. Two years later he married the widow and her press. When Mrs. Dunster died two years later, the press became the property of the college and they immediately jockeyed a law through the Great and General Court making it illegal for anyone to set up a press outside Cambridge.
Stephen Daye drifted away and a new printer, Sam Greene, was hired. He was just as poor a printer as Stephen and the results were just as deplorable.
In 1660 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel decided to print an Indian bible. They sent over a new press, new type and a skilled printer, Marmaduke Johnson.
Marmaduke had a good time. He set himself quota of one page a day which left him sufficient leisure to make violent love to of Sam Greene's daughters. It was a full year before the slow witted father found out and by that time the love affair had progressed quite a bit.
Marmaduke was hailed into court on some pretty serious charges. He did not help his cause by casually announcing that he had a wife in England. The court promptly fined him five pounds and ordered him to take the next boat back to England.
Marmaduke serenely returned to his press and continued to print the Indian bible one page a day.
A year and seven months later the court awoke to the fact that Marmaduke was still in Cambridge. He was rearrested and ordered to leave in six weeks.
John Eliot was much more interested in having the Bible printed than he was in the immoralities of a superior printer, interceded with the court to have the edict of banishment postponed for a year. The stay was granted and before the year was up the printer was able to produce a certificate of his wife's death in England.
The cause of printing in New England was saved.
In 1688 Marmaduke was again summoned before the General Court - this time charged with printing a book which was too playful for the court's taste. The book, the Isle of Pines was a bit gay and Johnson was fined five pounds.

BSN: In 1673 the town undertook a considerable engineering feat. They built a wooden wharf from the foot of Copp's Hill to the foot of Fort Hill. Cannon were mounted on this Barricado and passageways were cut through it. In case of enemy attack the shipping in the harbor could pass through the inner cove behind this barricade and be protected by the guns. By 1823 it was felt that this was no longer needed and as there was a need for land, so this cove was filled in.

BSN: The New North Church in Hanover Street was the result of a church row in the Old North in 1719. The Old North was rent asunder by the rival claims of two candidates for the ministry - Mr. Webb and Mr. Thatcher. Mr. Thatcher won by a very small majority and when he was installed the friends of the rival candidate filled the gallery and urinated over the rail upon those below them. They then left the church and formed a new congregation meeting in Hanover Street."

BSN: Salt Lane, Marsh Lane, and Creek Square little alleys that lie all tangled up together back of Union Street looking like a nest of eels. On Creek Sq. is a range of four brick warehouses showing signs of great antiquity but still good and serviceable. These were our first WPA project. Erected by John Hancock as a means of giving employment to needy workmen. They also gave a neat income to John. - The chief landing place for boats was at the dock in what is now Dock Square. The ocean flowed up as far as Elm St and all the land East of Union St. was under water.

BSN: Seven Star Lane led to the Old Mill at Windmill Point. Later it became Summer Street and eighty years ago, it was beyond dispute the most beautiful avenue in Boston. Magnificent trees skirted its entire length and the mansions and gardens of the old merchants lined both sides.

BSN: Bellingham: 3 times Gove and 4 times deputy (1665-1672) Also lawyer, justice of the peace, and a judge
At the age of 50 he married the fiancée of his best friend. She was 22. Performed ceremony himself. Objections taken to law. Judge ruled the marriage valid. Bellingham was the judge.

BSN: Old Shoe Store (Marshall St) 1660 original building owned and occupied by William Courser, town crier and innkeeper. The first town crier. In 1737 occupied by James Davenport, brother in law of Benjamin Franklin. 1764-1785 owned by John Hancock. Here Ebenezer Hancock, paymaster of the Continental Army had his HQ. The old Shoe Shore is the oldest brick building still standing in Boston.

BS E53 "Few people realize what a narrow spot this peninsula called Boston was in the last century before the advent of bridges. To go to Harvard college, the colonists were obliged to travel eight miles by land, and to Charlestown three miles further. The only direct route out from the city was by the Neck and over what, in the past century, was styled the Great Road to Dedham. This avoided all topographical obstacles by doubling them, that is going round the hills and rocks.

BSN: Meeting House Punch:
4 barrels of beer
24 gallons West Indian Rum
35 gallons New England Rum
35 pounds loaf sugar
25 pounds brown sugar
465 lemons.

Probably the first American cocktail was the Coow-Woow circa 1684:
½ glass rum
½ glass water
1 large pinch ginger.

BSN: Mather practiced medicine along with theology. He said "Sickness is in fact the whip of God for the sins of man." His regular prescriptions for children's maladies was "Take half a pound of Sowbugs, put them alive into a quart of wine." The dose of this tincture was two ounces twice a day."
May 4, 1686 was Cotton Mather's wedding day. Two Sundays later he preached in Boston on "Devine Delights." He asserted that after all reading the Bible was the most delightful thing that he had experienced.

James Otis in a letter to his sister wrote "I hope when God Almighty in his righteous Providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning." It was.

Boston Newsletter, first newspaper published in the American Colonies to have a permanent life. First issue appeared Apr 20, 1704.
Public Occurences: The first newspaper published in the American Colonies. Appearing in
1690. It lasted only one day.

BSN: BIBL Woman's Life in Colonial Days by Holliday (Cornhill Co Boston 1930)
Man whipped at the post for riding for a midwife on Sunday.
Dorothy Talby was hanged for murdering her daughter of three: She had been a member of the Church of Salem but showing signs of melancholy and delusions - "After much patience and divers admonitions the church cast her out. Whereupon she grew worse; so that the magistrate caused her to be whipped. Soon after she was so possessed with Satan that he persuaded her to break the neck of her own child that she might free it from further misery."
The social training of young ladies was a succession of don'ts "Sing not, hum not, wriggle not - When any shall speak to thee, say not, "I have heard it before," snigger not, Never question the Truth of It."

BS T206 "She often told me she had seen people at the whipping post...The last whipping she saw was of a pretty woman with a fine head of hair which she let down to cover her back for protection. This did not protect her as the lashes cut into her back and made the infliction worse, This must have been as late as 1800."

Bibl: "Naomi: or Boston Two Hundred Years Ago BS U13 no author given

(Three histories of King Phillip's War.. Hubbard, Mather and Church... "Mather is a repetition of Hubbard without giving credit")

Eliot: "As an evangelist he personally catechized blacks whose brutal treatment he deplored."

Phipps "self-made man" diver/silver treasure 37,000 ounces "Thanks God we are made!" He married widow of a wealthy merchant + L11,000 share of treasure

Elliot's "leather girdle" Phipps, "golden cup"

1690 Cambridge Association of Ministers
Aimed at restoring (if it ever existed) a special spiritually-minded Puritan community of Pilgrim families, children who did not play at the rear of the meetinghouse on Sabbaths, boys and girls who shunned mixed dances, cheerfully obedient servants catechized by caring masters, sailors who sang psalms instead of bawdy songs
Insincere or politic?

"Demonstration of loyalty to the crown was an old game"

NB:
Philip - twisting Eliot's buttons
James the Printer and Old Jethro
Gookin's life threatened in the streets of Boston

BSD62 Phipps funeral note of invitation: requested the attendance of a gentleman and his family at the funeral. Against a black background, gleamed skeletons, death's heads and crossbones. The empty hour glass, the spade and other grave-digging implements, emphasized the sad message the written words conveyed and a scroll entwining these ghastly emblems bore the words "Remember to die"

State House relics: a corner clock tolls out the hour in the silvery, lingering tone so peculiar to old timepieces. There is a personality about one of these old clocks, which no other inanimate object shares in the same degree, and as the slow "one two three" of this aged servant of time falls on the ear, one turns instinctively as if spoken to. This was the hall clock of the Rev, Mather Byles. A hundred years ago it struck the hour for the "punning parson."

+ a tinder box formerly used here in Boston. It looked like a candlestick set in a shallow tin box. The box contained tin rags rendered inflammable by partial combustion. The end of an old file had been flattened and bent like a hook at one end, and with this sparks were struck from a piece of flint in tinder, slightly igniting it. A small stick which had been dipped in sulphur was applied to the tiny burning spot and ignited by vigorous blowing. The faint blue flame thus obtained was communicated to the candle.

+ Dorothy Quincy's slippers...dainty satin shoes, with pointed toes.

+ It was in this building that William Lloyd Garrison sought refuge from the mob of October 21, 1835. Mayor Lyman took him in here and by a ruse he was got out from the northern door into a close carriage and driven to the then Leverett Street jail for protection. A rebel then, a hero now!

Boston: many gabled half-timbered houses of late-Gothic inspiration. The rough weather forced the covering of the half-lumber houses, the lowering of the slopes (?) and the simplification of plans.
Cobbled streets of Boston

Bibl Boston in 1682 and 1699 ed George Parker Winship x Burt Franklin NY 1905 repr. 1970
....A LETTER FROM NE... Scapegrace London Taverner Ned Ward, pamphleteer..
"The child who learned to spell from the New England Primer , as soon he was able to master words of five syllables, was taught "for-ni-ca-ti-on"...This word, one of 14 of that length, may have been selected because it seems to have been expected that there would be many too-recently married young people who would have occasion to make public confession thereto in church, in order to secure baptism for their first-born infant.
As Charles Adams has shown, in such staid old towns as Braintree, Dedham and Groton, which are not in the districts where bundling was most in vogue, there can have been very little shame attending the confession that the young pair had complied with the custom, a survival from the time when trial before marriage was recognized as a wise precaution, which assured them that their union would be blessed with offspring. The custom did not, unhappily, always lead to a permanent mating, and the frequency with which the colonial lawmakers returned to the subject of bastardy shows how serious was the burden imposed on the taxpayers by the necessity of assisting the deserted mothers. As late as 1774, Gov Hutchinson, when Lord Dartmouth "took notice of the commonness of that vice among the young people of New England" could only reply by speaking "largely of the piety of the first settlers"
EDWARD WARD - Trip to New England 1699 "Bishops, bailiffs and bastards were the three terrible persecutions which chiefly drove our unhappy brethren to seek their fortunes in our foreign colonies."

1685: Bideford Witches...the last executed for witchcraft in England.

"Master" not "Reverend" used to close of 17th century.

1690 Sun Tavern, Dock Square built 1690. Originally it was only thirty feet from the dock. In 1712 it was the dwelling of Thomas Phillips. At that time the house was already known as the Sun Tavern a favorite resort with many of the young men of Boston, in 1755, who were attracted not only by the cheer which he dispensed but by the agreeable society of his daughters, two of whom were married in its hospitable parlor to persons of distinction. Susannah became the wife of Colonel William Palfrey, the Revolutionary Patriot and grandfather of the historian, John Palfrey. Elizabeth married John Fleet the enterprising printer. The Sun Tavern was for many years a placed noted for its clubs. During the siege the British took possession of the building and changed its name to the King's Arms.

WITCHES/QUAKERS

BSN Frog Pond - Gallows tree where Quakers and witches were hanged. The witchcraft delusion in New England history has been overdone. During the period of this madness
100,000 witches were burned in Germany; 75,000 in France; 30,000 in Great Britain and in New England just 32 of whom four were executed in Boston.

Common: "Witches and pirates hanged there and their naked bodies thrown into the Frog Pond. Deserters shot and buried where they fell. History records only 14 duels in the United States - four of them were on Boston Common"

BS G 178 Jasper Dankers, Dutchman visited Boston in 1680 and kept diary... see clipping. "I have never been in a place where more was said about witches and witchcraft..."

BS R215 Rev Edward Horton "The hanging of the witches seems to many people the most blamable deed of the Puritans, but in my opinion, the treatment of the Quakers was more so. In executing Quakers our forefathers were trampling on their own beliefs, but in hanging witches they were only acting from a theological standpoint, The treatment of the witch idea was more lenient than in any other part of the world. Blackstone, the legal authority, Wesley and William Baxter were endorsers of the idea.
In the midst of the nervous community of people surrounded by danger, these strange beliefs from the old world found good ground. When we remember as we must that the actors in these old dramas lived chiefly in the literature of the Old Testament, much of the mystery of their actions is cleared up.
I admit that clerical bias had much to do with these acts; but were they also not subjects of the time in which they lived. This deplorable fanaticism was attended almost from the first by opposition, but men such as Judge Endicott stood for their convictions that the poor creatures should be made away with.

GAP in Cotton Mather's diaries " disturbed by his morbid nightmares."
1688, early in year, Abigail's five month old child died of convulsions.
1689, October - to Salem to attend dying 19-year-old brother Nathaniel...malignant tumor on hip. "Study killed him" Within two weeks he compiled a biography of him "Early Piety Exemplified"

("That monster Kirk" - colonel Charles Kirk rumored to have hanged 90 men and executed 30 more by 10s during an officer's dinner, upon toasts for the King and Queen, and Lord Jeffreys.)

Sir William Phipps, new governor. New charter incorporating Maine and Plymouth as Royal Colony of Boston. Charter abolished church membership as test for voting but the Congregational Church remained the established religion
1691 Charter + freemen + weakened Puritan political power + made it hard to pretend to unity of hearts and minds.
Trade which had thrived on evasion of the Navigation acts now curtailed by strict enforcement
Phipps did not enforce Navigation Acts. - Bio x unlettered/tended sheep to 18, then building and sailing coasters + treasure hunter 1684 x 1686 x 300,000 pounds.
Increase opposed the new charter, which granted liberty of conscience to all Christians except Catholics.

1692 - final outbreak of the Puritan paranoia...witchcraft trials
Increase on return from England and finding jails filled with witches: There is a power of devils in our air that are seeking to hurt us."

1689/9 Cotton had visited the young daughter of a Boston mason named John Goodwin...saw the daughter and three siblings...their necks twist round. "Fits" began after Goodwin's mother questioned a laundress suspected of stealing family linens. Washerwoman's mother bestowed very bad language on the Goodwin girl = Goody Glover
Confessed that she had "One who was her Prince"
Understood English but could speak only Gaelic
AFTER her hanging, their torments multiplied.
Cotton Mather took Martha Goodwin, 13, into house recently bought for himself and Abigail.
"The invisible chains"
"Some devils could read thoughts, not all."
She spent five to six weeks in Mather's house.
Much of the Goodwin children's behavior represented hostility toward Puritan norms.
"At Christmas Martha and her sister were by the Demons made drunk....
"Martha Goodwin's heir in Boston, stripped of the grotesque legitimizing guise of demonic possession was the archetypal rebellious adolescent = Benjamin Franklin."

BIBL: Memorable Providences relating to witchcraft and possessions (1689)
A Modest Inquiry - Rev John Hale

Did Mather excite accusations of witchcraft at Salem because of the Goodwin case? Did he promote the trial and sentencing of the witches?

Robert Calef, his angriest critic - "the most active and forward of any minister"
In 18 months between Goodwin case and Salem outbreaks Mather kept calling public attention to the existence of devils and witches.
Ministers denounced rising generation for wanting to explore sex, taunt their parents and deride the ministry.
"Devils swarm like the Frogs of Egypt in every chamber of our houses."
Mather's view of the devil as a spiritual and rational substance intensified his desire to witness and publicize cases of witchcraft

"No witches, no spirit, no God..."
Letters of Thanks from Hell

"A collective guilt on part of settlers for falling away from the high consecration of the Pilgrim Fathers"

Notation to Memorable Providences - another attempt on a family in June 1689
Between 1647 and 1691, the colonial court tried 80 cases resulting in 20 executions.

February 1692, on heels of the revocation of the Charter ...Salem Village, now Danvers: the girls identified three women or their shapes as tormentors.
Rev Samuel Parries home (20th century site of Danvers State Hospital for Mental Patients.) His daughter Betty and her cousin, Abigail Williams
Tituba, a West Indian slave half Carib/half Negro from Barbados
Gammer Osborne, a pauper who begged for food.
Old Ezekial Cheever recorded the pre-trial exams of Sarah Good
Jury found Tituba and Good guilty of witchcraft. Remanded to the Boston jail in chains. Good was nursing an infant which died in jail.
Afflicted rose to 10, including Sarah's daughter, Dorcas, aged 5, who had testified against her mother and was now accused of witchcraft
Girls who complained of bites - a sharp set of teeth
Dorcas Good to Boston jail where she spent eight months in jail (AT AGE 5)
Now examination moved from Salem Village to Salem

Jails full when Sir William Phipps and Increase Mather arrived back at Boston. Appointed a seven man commission of oyer and terminal, including four very close friends of Cotton Mather
CM was seriously ill - his health broken by excessive toil
"offered to take six of the afflicted girls in....was refused"
Boston accused witches returned to Salem for trial

Cotton Mather warned Richards about the use of spectral evidence - testimony that mischief had been done by a specter or apparition of the accused = condemnation of the innocent.
"of teats and similar body marks used for the devil's cursed succages"
most reliable evidence = credible confession

By the standard Cotton Mather set forth to John Richards, the new court on which Richards sat was RECKLESS and SEVERE

Bridget Bishop was first tried and hanged
1692 The Return of Several Ministers....Mather and 12 expressed dissatisfaction with trial, nevertheless (flabbergasting per K Silverman) "We cannot but recommend the speedy and vigorous persecution of such as have rendered themselves sorcerers"

Calef says document was "ambidextrous" and gives a great or greater encouragement to proceed , than cautions against them
Judges were older prominent men but also longtime family friends, especially Richards, a wealthy merchant
William Stoughton, the chief justice of the trials, "a real friend of New England" (never married)
"Every public servant must carry two handkerchiefs about him, one to wipe off sweat of travail, another to wipe off the spit of reproach.:

Mather himself was deeply uncertain about events at Salem. He was not fully convinced that the Salem girls had been bewitched. Possession of girls themselves? Or Witchcraft? Or was it the approaching millennium?

10 days after the hanging of Bishop, by one account 700 people stood accused and 100 lay in prison.

June 25, five tried, including Sarah Good. Despite Mather's warning, Good's trial evidence was spectral apparition of Good. Before her execution to town minister Noyes...
"I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink."
But despite his misgivings, Cotton found the judges' sentences "miraculously" confirmed. Immediately they were hanged, five persons from the town of Andover made a "most ample, surprising amazing confession of witchcraft."

Confession of the Andover witches is among the least known incidents of the Salem trials. Andover man sent to Salem for the possessed girls in the hope that they could identify the specters who were affecting his wife, who was ill and later died. The girls named persons, 50 accused and tortured for confessions.
ANDOVER TRIALS: "The devil was a small black man. He got them to undo their allegiance to the Congregational Church by denouncing their baptism and had them seal their covenant by signing his book...A black man with a high crowned hat who promised to reward his servants with new clothes and a horse.
...A little Red Book
Witch after witch told of riding poles to a meeting where 500 witches plotted to ruin New England
Ringleaders identified as Martha Carrier and a former minister, William Burroughs
CM called Burroughs the "ringleader" and Martha Carrier, "a rampant hag"

Cotton Mather: War from the Invisible World aimed at destroying Christian Israel

News came of Jamaica quake and the destruction of Port Royal...

August 19, five more hanged...First time that Cotton Mather attended the executions. Only documented evidence of his participation though he did preach to them in Boston prison and may have attended the Andover trials.

"Mr. Mather says they all died by a righteous sentence."

Two days before the execution, CM to John Foster, judge: I entreat you that whatever you do, you strengthen the hands of our honorable judges in the great work before them."

Accusations spread: Gov Phipps own wife + shipbuilder John Alden

Sept 9, nine condemned Giles Corey, 80, heavy stones were laid on him in a field until he was crushed to death...refused to plead his indictment. September 22 - eight were hanged.

BIBL INCREASE MATHER "The guilt of innocent blood on this land" : Cases of conscience concerning Evil Spirits persecuting Men...Cotton M did not sign, for the first time publicly dissenting from his father because of his certainty of a diabolical plot.
Wrote Wonders of the Invisible World in 1692, defending the trials.
I have set myself to countermine the plot of the devil against New England - KS says that the book resembles gigantic stammer... "that reviled book"

On November 29, with the Salem trials over, Cotton Mather took several people to keep a day of prayer with 17 year-old Mercy Short
Corroborating evidence that French and Indians attended witch meetings to concert the methods of ruining New England

News that the Devil planned to burn all Boston

1693 Sept 10 to October Margaret Rule could see their evil angels..."Black Master" strike and kick them like an overseer of so many Negroes.

Mather wrote: "After prayer with the utmost fervor and fasting (=possessed earlier) there appeared an Angel whose face shone like the Noonday sun. On his shoulders were wings...Angel appeared to him and prophesied in the words of Ezekiel 31 3/4/5/19 "Lord Jesus what is the meaning of this marvel" Amazing acquaintances with the angelical assistances

Calef report on the laying of hands on Margaret Rule by C and I - --~scandalous libels" - No appearance by Ms and dismissed
1696: Exchange of letters re the incident
"A semi-literate clotherer"
Calef's conviction that at Salem innocent people had been legally murdered
"crude matter and impertinent absurdities" - C on CM's treatise on witchcraft x see 100 marginal notes by CM in original BIBL

COTTON MATHER

BS H 10 Cotton Mather House x second building east of North Bennet on the North Side of Hanover Street...little grass plot in front of it... big timbers probably 229 years old (1906). Increase Mather lived near Paul Revere house but was burned out in the great fire of 1677 and built this house in which he lived until his death in 1723. Here he wrote his essays on doing good that were read by Ben Franklin at his father's fireside in Union St. 1688, from this house he escaped in the face of armed guards at his door one night in April 1688, disguised in the garb of one of his friends. This was the home of Cotton from the age of 14 until he established a home of his own a block or so farther up Hanover Street.
"The garret rafters with strings of dried apples, corn and other provisions."

BS R215 Rev Edward Horton "I would say that the key to Cotton Mather's life is his perfect devotion to the Puritan Commonwealth"
"...The bold but futile efforts to establish a theocracy in New England had its birth in the Reformation. The Puritan unity was one of aim, though there was great difference in smaller matters. The glory of God was everything.
...downfall of the Puritan theocracy. There had been a growing objection to limiting suffrage to the church members. There was the arrogance of the clergy and inadequacy of the laws. Then the difference of the customs of other colonies, which acted as a critique upon the colony, and what seemed to me a great factor, the conquests of martyrdom, and lastly the action of the mother country.
...What did this period contribute to the 18th century - It laid the foundations of the revolution. It enlarged the geography of the country and the country itself. Yet we are not sorry that the MA theocracy went down."
Boston printers under awe of Mather.
Angel's prophecy of the books he would publish to exalt his height above all other trees in the field
Paranormal experiences - "particular faith"- "a little degree of the spirit of prophecy"

Magnalia Christi Americana 1702 --The Great Works of Christ in America
A Puritan Pantheon "most appropriately named for of all the colossal monuments to cant and bigotry erected in an age when cant and bigotry seemed to count for religious fervor, this is easily the magnalia, the greatest of them all."

BS Heath notes: Magnalia Christi
The great object of the first planters of NE was to form a Christian Commonwealth, a design without parallel in ancient or modern times.
Intro by John Higginson, Jan 25, 1697 "for the Lord our God hath in his infinite wisdom, grace and holiness contrived and established His covenant so as he will be the God of his people and of their seed with them, and after them, in their generations in the ministerial dispensation of the covenant of grace in, with and to his visible church. He hath promised covenant mercies on the condition of covenant duties.
The wonderful works of God in the late plantation of this part of America; which was indeed planted as a design of enjoying and advancing the true reformed religion.
That the present generation may remember the way wherein the Lord hath led his people in this wilderness for so many years (according to that in Deut. 8.2) ...thou shalt remember all the way wherein the Lord hath led three in the wilderness this forty years.
That the generations to come in New England may know the God to their fathers and may serve him with a perfect heart and willing mind, as especially the first generations did before them.
Jer 23.2 When this people began to follow the Lord into this wilderness, he planted them like a noble vine.
That the little daughter New England in America may bow down herself to her mother England in Europe, assuring her that she was forced to make a local secession yet not a separation but hath always retained a dutiful respect to the Church of God in England.
Then was that as our great Own hath expressed it "multitudes of pious, peaceable Protestants, were driven by their severities, to leave their native country and seek a refuge for their lives and liberties with freedom, for the worship of God, in a wilderness, in the ends of the earth."

P41 "The overruling Providence of the Great God is to be acknowledged in the concealing of America for so long a time...till a Neapolitan stumbled upon it"
"I can contentedly allow that America was altogether unknown to the penmen of the Holy Scriptures and in the ages when the Scriptures were penned."

P64 The God of Heaven served a summons upon the spirits of his people in the English nation; stirring up the spirits of thousands to leave all the pleasant accommodations of their native country, and go over a terrible ocean, into a more terrible desert, for the pure enjoyment of all his ordinances.
The reasons for this undertaking:
1. raise a bulwark against the kingdom of the anti-Christ
2. God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general destruction
3. The whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of Adam, to be tilled and improved by them; why then should we stand starving here for places of habitation, and suffer whole countries to lye waste without any improvement?

P67 admission into the church: none were admitted without regard unto a blameless and holy conversion that being free from scandal they should be examined by the elders of the church, upon whose approbation of their fitness, they should publicly and personally own the covenant; so they were go be received unto the table of the Lord.

P48 Magnalia V2 -- Life of Samuel Danforth: b 1626 arrived in NE 1634
The church of Roxbury invited Mr. Danforth to become a colleague of Eliot
(because Eliot needed an assistant while he was out of town in Indian villages). Pastoral charge of that church he undertook in the year 1650. He took much care that none should keep an house of public entertainment in his town but should keep good orders and manners in their houses; and the tavern being in view of his own study window, when he saw any town dwellers tippling there he would go over and chide them away.

Book V p 156
Chap VII p 162 God's Covenant with Man was a Covenant of Works wherein life was promised to Adam. Man's fall made himself incapable of life by that covenant. The Lord was pleased to make a second called the Covenant of Grace
It pleased God to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus according to a covenant made between them both to be the mediator between God and Man
Chapter X All those whom God hath pre-destined unto life and those only he is pleased in His appointed and accepted time effectually to call by His word and spirit to grace and salvation...determining them to that which is good.
Chapter XVI Good works are only such as God hath commanded in his holy word and not devised by men.
The persons of believers being accepted by Christ, their good works are also accepted in him. He looking upon them in His Son is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere.
(unbelievers) who do all we can, we have done but our duty and are unprofitable servants... they cannot endure the severity of God's judgment.
Works by unregenerate men ...because they proceed not from heart purified by faith nor are alone in a right manner according to the word, not to the right end, The Glory of God, cannot please God and is more sinful and displeasing to God.
Chapter XVIII, p169 ...of the perseverance of saints...They whom God hath accepted in his beloved (in) a state of Grace

Vol 1 Magnalia....
213: Book III The Lives of near fifty divines, the ministers of the Gospel, that fed the flocks in the wilderness; an indeed, New England having been in some sort an ecclesiastical country above any in this world.
219: The ministers by whom New England was first planted were in a chosen company of men; picked out by a strange work of God upon the spirits of men inspiring them to secede into a wilderness.
God sifted three nations that he might bring grain into this wilderness.
The question was often put to our predecessors: What went ye out into the wilderness to see?
We came into the wilderness because we would worship God without that Episcopacy, that common prayer, and those unwarranted ceremonies, with which the Lord of our forefather's sepulchers has been defiled, we came hither because we would have our posterity settled under the pure and full dispensations of the gospel; defended by rulers that should be of ourselves.
224: Increase Mather's Introduction:
Historical Narratives which give a faithful account of the lives of eminent saints, choice instruments in the hand of the Lord, to promote his glory in the world. A special act of obedience to the Fifth Commandment, to endeavor in the preservation of the names, and honor them who have been fathers in Israel.
When the God of Heaven had carried a nation into a wilderness, upon the designs of a glorious reformation, he there gave them a singular conduct of his presence and spirit, in a certain pillar.
228: I saw a fearful degeneracy creeping (after the death of Cotton and of the elders). I saw a visible shrink in all orders of men among us from that greatness, and that goodness, which in the first grain that our God brought from three sifted Kingdoms into this land.
I'll show them the graves of their dead fathers and if any of them also retreat into a contempt or neglect of learning, or unto the errors of another gospel, or unto the superstitions of will - worship, or unto a worldly, a selfish conversation, they shall undergo irresistible rebukes of their progenitors here fetched from the dead for their admonition. If a grandchild of a Moses becomes an idolater he shall be destroyed.
243: John Cotton arrived at Boston Sept 3, 1633 - "Mr. Cotton effectively recommended that none should be electors except such as were visible subjects of our Lord Jesus Christ personally confederated in our churches. In these he propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory Israel, the peculiar people."
263: "O Happy Israel in America."
476 Book III: The life of the reverend John Eliot. The world would count me very absurd if I should say I had found the sepulcher of Moses in America. I have certainly found here Moses himself. We have had among us one appearing in the spirit of a Moses.
He came to New England in the month of November AD 1631
...Once going with some feebleness and weariness up the hill on which his meeting house now stands he said unto the person that led him," This is very like the way to Heaven --~tis up hill! The Lord by His Grace fetches us up. I might suggest unto the good people of Roxbury something for them to think upon when they are going up to the House of the Lord."
He justly espoused that way of Church government, which we call the congregational; that the church state which our Lord Christ hath instituted in the new Testament is a society of professed believers agreeing and assembling together among themselves, with officers of divine appointment. No approved writers for the space of 200 years after Christ make any mention of any other, visible, professing church, but that only which is congregational.
Congregational way--"the largess of divine bounty bestowed by the Lord Jesus Christ on his people that followed him into this wilderness.

503 Book III: The natives of the country now possessed by the New Englanders had been forlorn and wretched heathen ever since their first herding here; and though we know not when or how those Indians first became inhabitants of this mighty continent. Yet we may guess that probably the devil decoyed those miserable savages hither in hopes that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here...Eliot was willing to rescue as many of them as he could from that old usurping landlord of America.
Eliot saw our Indians the posterity of the dispersed and rejected Israelites, concerning whom our God has promised that they shall yet be saved by the deliverer coming to turn away ungodliness from them.
He saw the Indians using parables, anointing their heads, much delighted in dancing, computing the time in nights and months, giving dowries for wives, accustoming themselves to grievous mournings and yellings for the dead; all of which were usual things among the Israelites. He saw likewise the judgments threatened unto the Israelites of old strangely fulfilled in our Indians; particularly that Ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, which is done with exquisite cruelties upon the prisoners that they take. Prophesy in Deut 28:68
"The Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, thou shalt see it no more again and there shall ye be sold unto your enemies and no man shall buy you."
This did our Eliot imagine accomplished when the captives taken by us in our late wars upon them were sent to be sold in the coasts lying not very remote from Egypt on the Mediterranean sea and scarce any chapmen would offer to take them."

&&&&&

BIBL Life and Times of Cotton Mather Kenneth Silverman

Richard Mather, Dorchester, 34 years a preacher + Harvard overseer + conversion of Indians + Cambridge Platform of 1648
John Cotton, First Church of Boston

Four sons of Richard and two of John Cotton = Harvard and trained as ministers
Increase Mather, born June 21 1639, frequent child illnesses "tender and weakly"

Richard Mather married John Cotton's widow = stepmother
Increase Mather married John Cotton's daughter = step-sister?
Lived in John Cotton's house on Cotton's Hill

Increase's love of withdrawal and his often-expressed dislike of visitors
He loved to be in "no place on earth so much as my study" from 7 a.m. to midnight
"A true fear of God"
Love of study + personal feistiness + a realm of mystical experience and depressive longing for annihilation. Once while praying in his study he found his heart exceedingly melted. " and me thought I saw God before my eyes"
He often spoke from the pulpit of his desires to depart

To Ireland to attend Trinity...In 1661 returned to New England after restoration.
Boston North Church

Increase ordained at the North Church on May 27, 1664
Grousing over his pay, threatening to leave, acting dictatorially. Later he grew more affectionate toward his flock but he never wholly overcome or stopped speaking of his desire to return to England.

1669/1670 Depression shut Increase in all that winter.
1671 he began suffering attacks of ephiactes (?) - severe nightmare later described by his sons as little short of mortal.
The possibility of going insane filled Increase with inexpressible sorrows and fears "melancholy hypochondriacal vapors"

1668 "The island of North Boston - the most elegant and populous part of Boston"

Boston "the metropolis of the whole America"
Charlestown Ferry Mill Creek
Windmill Hill = Copp's Hill x 50 feet
Clark's square
Bell of the North Church silent between nine each night and five each morning

Cotton Mather, born 1663: Schoolmasters, Benjamin Tomson in the South End; Ebenezer Ezekiel Cheever, first great schoolmaster in Boston, taught for 38 years; also schooled at home.
To Harvard at 11 ½, ailing and in terror of dying, youngest in its history.
Stammerer. Subject to inhuman derision. Poured out to Christ thousands of supplications for a free speech. "No one ever stuttered while singing psalms." Advised to speak with a "drawling that shall be little short of singing."
"Beware of speaking too fast as long as you live"
After a month he returned home from Harvard. He may have stayed home in his freshman year.

(Harvard - president's house/college hall newly built in 1678
Small brick Indian school with 20 students in 1674)

Preoccupation was to read 15 chapters of the Bible each day, morning, noon and night.
He composed prayers for his school friends and obliged them to pay.
"rebuffed my playmates for their wicked words and ways"
"scoffs and blows for my rebukes"

Sophomore year: abused by fellow students. Hazing and fagging, bullied.
Demoralized at Harvard: Also caused by...

A violent event which his father claimed to have foreseen....Early 1674, Increase felt persistent intimation that God would strike NE by sword. Ezekiel 7.7. The day of trouble is near.

(Fighting in 1676 came within 20 miles of Boston.)

Increase set apart a special day to beseech God to cut off the Indian leader by a providential stroke. "In less than a week after this, the Thing was accomplished."

Cotton was nearly 14 and influenced by father's "prophecies"
"Great symptoms of a Hectic" -- extreme emaciation
"I am going apace to the Gates of the Grave"
"I am deprived of the residue of my years"
Harvard: "Residing in a place of much temptation"
Labored under a sense of his vileness and his unacceptableness to God

War had hardly ended when Increase became strongly possessed with fears that Boston would be punished by as judgment of fire.
1676, Nov 19, he preached a warning sermon that left his congregation unmoved
Nov 27, 5 a.m., he was awakened...Providence! Smelling something, he rose and looked out the window...Then somebody began to cry, "Fire!"
Family house + conflagration that destroyed his meeting house and also threatened all of Boston began in a building opposite the Mather house.
Destroyed 45 buildings, the North Church and warehouses...but for a heavy downpour of rain would have destroyed more.

1678 Commencement: 15 year old. His father, his two prestigious grandfathers and five uncles. President Oakes..."I do not despair that in this youth Cotton AND Mather shall in fact as in name coalesce and revive." (revive?)

1678 Uncle...John Cotton of Plymouth, a rather fat man with a handsome ruddy yet grave countenance. He could recite chapter and verse for almost any scripture quoted him. A living index of the Bible. His father was the famous John Cotton, who excommunicated him for lascivious, unclean practices with three women - And other adulterers were put to death? John and comely fat wife Joana - Cotton stayed with them in 1678 when smallpox epidemic was raging in Boston.

1679-1680 Unprecedented Reform Synod to discuss pressing social and moral questions
"the solemnest work in the world"

1680, August 22 17 years old, preached first sermon at grandfather Richard's church in Dorchester; next Sabbath for his father; next at church once led by his grandfather John Cotton. "Hopeful Sprout"
Joined his father in the North Church Ministry. North Church brethren appointed Cotton as a probationary preacher to them in 1680, but he was not ordained for another five years.
Cotton spent much of five years of his candidacy in battering, tireless self-examination "My diseases are so complicated that I am not able as much to mention them unto thee; much less can I remedy them."

Around 17, he undertook to engage his sisters in the service of Christ...One of 10 children

Self-guilt over masturbation: "Lord, wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way. I have certainly been one of the filthiest creatures on earth... To halt the irregularities which my thoughts within me have hurried me into." He resolved to practice extraordinary austerities and to emulate Saint Augustine in perpetual celibacy.

"unsavory Salt, fit for nothing but the dunghill"
"worthy of Death, Death, Death, forever"

Cycles of assurance and doubt were common, even formulaic among the Puritans = Jesuit Spiritual Exercises ...to find some means of living in Heaven while on Earth
Secret prayers ... "the straight way to the city of God" He recommended that it be practiced in a locked or barred room to prevent disturbance and permit intimate confession of secret sin, begging the Lord's mercy while laying prostrate on the floor, mouth to the dust

Ejaculatory prayers - a spiritual alchemy - This meant ceaselessly creating prayers with petition and supplications and sending them to heaven in an all-day stream of spontaneous praying. Lord wash that poor soul white in the blood of thy Son. And on seeing a black man...Lord, give that man High Attainments in Christianity.

Saw affliction of stuttering: "chastisement by my early wickedness and filthiness" Pride and anger. A tongue to save him...brought his stutter sufficiently under control by his 21st birthday. Yet it recurred later in life and made him speak with much deliberation.

At age 18 Cotton bought Increase a Spanish Indian servant
He also owned a watch with a "variety of motions" of which Increase was desirous. Although fond of the watch himself, he presented it to his father thinking "I owe him a great deal more than this"

1681, fall: Harvard voted to make Increase president. He interpreted the vote as a slight! He disdained rustic Cambridge. But he presided over 1681 Commencement at which he handed Cotton his MA - He could not accept presidency without consent of his church and they opposed appointment.

1683: Scientific Interests - Boston Philosophical Society
1684 Excesses in Cotton's devotions brought maladies ... made him splenetic.

1685 Ordination...but Increase still did not consider Cotton an appropriate colleague.
On morning of ordination: "an astonishing irradiation from Heaven." "rapturous touches and prospects."
North Church: three tiers, a good congregation meant 1,500 to 2,000 souls. He beheld "one of the vastest congregations that has ever been seen in these parts of the world"
Imposition of hands - JOHN ELIOT gave the new minister his right hand in token of fellowship in God's service...as James, Peter and John to Paul and Barrabas. "Right Hand of Fellowship" "Feed His Lambs"
"Greater Number of moved hearts and weeping eyes, than perhaps have been at any Time here seen together." = humility?
1685, June 28, first administered Communion.
October, first excommunication of Ruth Fuller who was seen holding onto the gate of her house, drunk

1685, as an ordained minister, also made an overseer of Harvard

1686 In vote to choose preacher for the annual artillery sermon, he received few votes, even though he was closely connected to a captain of militia.

1686, James Morgan, guilty of murder and condemned. Condemned criminals were brought to Church to be made living objects of an exemplary sermon. Morgan asked Cotton to preach his execution sermon. On March 7, before an enormous congregation in the North Church, criminal sat in auditorium, chained, holding a Bible... "a frightening example of the results of brothels, swearing and other vices"
On day of execution, Cotton preached in the South Church. Morgan asked Cotton to accompany him on the public march to the hanging. Before a huge crowd at the place of execution near which was a coffin, Cotton prayed with Morgan: Farewell, poor heart, fare thee well.

Bibl: nine page transcript of his conversation with Morgan on the Death March

Sermon notebooks x 7,000 pages...

"Write very good Spanish by studying it in the few leisure minutes in the evening of every day in about a fortnight or three weeks time"

1686, May 4 married Abigail Phillips of Charlestown: he was three months past 23, she was a month under 16..."the slavery of a lust seeming to assault me with a commission"?

"A profuse periwig" - English Puritan William Prynge denounced the wearing of the hairy excrescence of some other person but defended by Mather as an innocent fashion

Toleration Act of 1689 - in abolishing religious persecution, the act made NE Puritanism unnecessary... "We have seen with delight godly Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, and Baptists, all members in some churches and sitting together without offence about their lesser differences at the same Holy Table."

A warning to the flocks...Samuel May, "barber" ... "if a young woman became affected by his ministry he spent hours counseling her to lie with him," which he said was no sin for David and that Solomon did as much
Wife was his mistress and May was Samuel Axel, a Hampshire bricklayer

John Cotton, son = "notorious breaches" "terrible and amazing circumstances of my poor uncle."

1689 Brattle Street Church by Thomas Brattle
United Brethren - Manifesto - Mather attacked Brattle Street Church in The Order of the Gospel 1700 BIBL

Solomon Stoddard, Northampton: Communion should not be limited to those who had experienced grace. He would conceive a congregation not as a coterie of saints but as merely a group of people assembled by God in the same place.

Mather: "wretched novelties" of a "carnal, giddy rising generation."

1692...began to urge Congregationalists not to monopolize all godliness to our little party

1694 Fall: Visit of Good Angels to Boston - a religious revival in the North Church = "a strong descent of shining spirits...The angels told persons that Increase Mather need not perplex himself about going to England, for God would bring to pass what would be most for his glory"

invisible whisperer

Sir William Phipps: temperament of a corsair ...brawl with six men..."thick as well as tall and strong" -- three years governorship, then summoned to London in 1694 and died three months later. Succeeded by Bellomont

"loyal colonial Englishmen"

1696 Cotton x six children x 4 dead
1702 Hannah - "Nancy" -- fell into fire and burned right side of her face and right hand.
Samuel had "100 fits" and died.
"wonderful advice from heaven" "a son was born to me" = Increase Jr. "My Increase!" Convulsions. "The Good Angel of the Lord has told me so" i.e. that Increase Jr. will live.

Increase Sr. ousted from Harvard presidency. They had insisted that he live in Cambridge "the place which under all Heaven most abominable to him"

1702 Abigail had had a dream: breast... "warm wool cut from a living sheep + gum mastic" ...She revived...Abigail languished through summer... Dec 1 Abigail died despite repeated assurances that she would live.- He prayed in his study hoping for an irradiation from heaven. Instead, deprived of the agreeable charms of her passion, he found his mind buffeted by sexual longings..."impure thoughts which exceedingly abased me before the Lord." Fasting... "the blessed breezes of a particular Faith."

8 year old "Nibby" x smallpox (and 300 others in Boston) + Nancy + Increase Jr.
"his little folks called on him to pray with them a dozen times a day."

Two months after Abigail's death, a young gentlewoman wrote several letters to Mather, then visited him. Proposed he marry her= almost certainly Katharine Maccarthy, daughter of a landowner/shipowner who had helped found King's Chapel. (A relation of Henchman's surgeon Maccarthy?)
Kate was "an ingenious child" of 23 "a very airy person"
Mather became tempted to "impurities"
Three days fasting and praying in study "Extraordinary Things - I can only say that the angels of heaven are at work for me."
Stories spread through Boston about the affair

Widow Elizabeth Hubbard "arriving speedily to the enjoyment of a lovely creature" "amazing temptations in the time of widowhood" "the most aggressive consort (all things considered) that all America could have afforded me."

1702 "about to replace his father as the most prominent minister in America."
Increase Sr.: to treat losses of memory "60 drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread"

A quarter of Cotton's flocks were maritime...many children and numerous blacks
Sermons lasted 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours, his soul "soaring and flaming toward Heaven"
Many loved and honored him for his ministry -"his compassionate regard for the goodness of soul"

Published 388 separate titles "sprinkling the salt of religion around the world"

BIBL Sailor's Companion 1709 reproving smutty talk, masturbation and sodomy...given to every sizeable ship sailing out of Boston

By 1710 he may have been best known man in America. Still troubled in middle age by that "particular lust my pride, affection of Grandeur, and inclinations to be thought somebody"

(Cotton Mather) Estranged from government under Joseph Dudley (born Roxbury 1647/trained at Harvard as Minister/ related to him by marriage)....Lost respect of Mathers because under Andros, Dudley became censor of Colony press and chief justice of the colony... the people of NE were all slaves, and that the only difference between them and slaves were that they were not bought and sold." When Andros was overthrown, he was jailed under house arrest.. ill.. led back to Boston jail by 300 citizens...To England and accused of 119 illegal acts. He survived his exile and became a member of Royal Society. Appt. Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight - "A fourth in a string quartet" - opponents called them "a gang of half-penny viol players"

"Dudley's soul is as black as his hat" warned NE Agent in London, Henry Ashurst
1702 June 11 Dudley returned to Boston
Dudley + Rev. George Keith, a Quaker turned Anglican
His dedication to the imperial idea of an English colonial administrator, of a piece with his profuse wig and large outlays for food, his wish to marry his children into prominent families, his permitting public celebration of coronation day or queen's birthday when they fell on the Sabbath. -- Let us, he told the Council, be Englishmen!

Privately Mather dubbed him a "fop in boots" and worked to overthrow him.

Queen Anne's War: for Bostonians -- "French privateers capturing vessels almost in sight of the town and recurrent frightening rumors of a massive French invasion of NE

1704 Deerfield Raid. 50 French and 200 Indians killed 50 and carried off 100 of 300 inhabitants including Rev. John Williams and his wife Eunice, Cotton Mather's cousin, who remained with her captors and married into the tribe.

Dudley was an effective wartime governor. Nevertheless in summer 1706 some men employed by Dudley to effect a prisoner exchange...trading with French, including captain Samuel Vetch
Expedition to Port Royal...a failure.
Officers returning to Scarlett Wharf met by women, who gave them wooden swords... "Is your piss-pot charged neighbor? So-ho, souse the cowards. Salute Port Royal."

Dudley survived attack in Council

Mather: "Bribery, a capital crime among the pagans is a peccadillo among us"

Dudley's choice of president for Harvard was John Leverett.
Mather: " It was preposterous to make a lawyer, and one who never affected study of divinity, a president for a college of divines."
Anglican, basically? Or more complex?
Dudley response to Mather's attack 1707: included reference to his "vicious inclinations" re Kate Maccarty"

Mather exists in American imaginations as a sort of un-George Washington.

Isolation of Mather: He became the butt of scurrilous letters, defamatory broadsides etc. Knots of young men gathered below his window to sing profane and filthy songs.

Magnalia mocked in Oldmixon's history of the British Empire in America.
Boston attacks called him a "verbose megalomaniac"
Quaker rebuke of Mather: Thou art a monster, all mouth and no ears
"Eyes forever spying out occasions to magnify self"

A typical wonder child: Mather wrote 450 books.
"His soft bookish hands are indelibly stained with blood."
"A black image to set against our white busts of Washington and Lincoln"
"The Salem witch-hanger"

North Church: A new North Church three streets away - John Webb.
The old church had no pews?

Mather resolution "not to let fly with a snarl" when excluded from the governor's table. "I am to ready to express my resentment

"for men, even good men to speak evil of one another was the special vice of Boston" - Golden Curb for the Mouth (1707/09)

Mather embraced Christian Indians as brethren in Christ but damned infidels as "ravening howling wolves" Brutal, infantile and diabolic.
He exhorted some troops in 1689 to literally exterminate them. Turn not back till they are consumed; wound them that shall not be able to rise; though they cry, let there be none to save them. But beat them small as the dust before the wind and cast them out as the dirt in the streets.
Lazy drones and impudent liars
Children of the Devil
In 1712, he visited the languishing settlement at Natick reduced to 30 families.

Martha's Vineyard purchase : "Some little scraps of a vast country once entirely possessed by their ancestors."

"Not to Christianize but Puritanize Indians"
Nammatchekodtantamoonganunnonash = lusts!

SPG - Mather distrusted so that by 1716 he was referring to it as the Society for the Molestation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands

Hannah Dustan of Haverhill...scalped 10 Indians

Mather's Curiosa: intestinal worm, after some souvenir hunters...118 feet remaining.
"woolen snow" "100,000 bass" "woman with no stomach"

The Christian Philosopher - A dissemination and popularization of the new Christian knowledge.
A Fellow of the Royal Society

Mather: "belligerent courtesy, self-flattering modesty, fretful calm, denigrating compliments, unacceptable offers"

A minister's wife: constancy and fervency in devotion; ingenuity and labor in instructing family in piety. Compassion toward the miserable in their neighborhood.

House: "agreeable mottos" which he resolved to post in every room e.g. above study door "be short"

Servants and slaves = m. f. white, Indian, black.
Mather was pro-slavery but appealed for humane treatment. They are men and not beasts that you have bought
Debate on christianizing slaves: published a catechism to instruct "poor, stupid, abject Negro"

Mather's SLAVE = Onesimus
1706 Some members of his congregation bought for L40 or L50 a young black man of "promising aspect and temper"
Named him Onesimus after the black runaway in the New Testament who was converted and became virtually a son to Paul.
Allowed him to work outside the house and gain independent income and to marry.
He kept a strict eye on O's company and activities including some "activities of a thievish kind"

Deplored all severity in child-rearing
Trained his daughters to be gentlewomen; his sons to be ministers.

1713 Worst epidemic of measles in colonial America.
Boston infected 1000s and killed 168 in two months
"Letter about Measles" = early American medical classic - "Let nature take its course"

Elizabeth died. + maid + newborn twins + "Jerusha" - Five deaths in two weeks.
Of fifteen children, nine dead, six living.

Lydia Lee George, daughter of Rev. Samuel Lee m. John George, a leading merchant and Long Wharf developer - widow
Cotton married Lydia, wealthy and beautiful
"struck for a very valuable fish"
Often prayed together in his study with "tears and moans"
New house on Ship Street

76-year-old father, Increase, remarried Ann Cotton, widow of his nephew

Oneisimus began to prove wicked and grievous useless, forward and rebellious
Cotton allowed him to purchase his release by putting up money to buy a black youth in his stead - probably the little boy Mather acquired in Nov 1716, whom he called Obadiah.
Oneisimus continued to serve around the house + other servants + Spanish Indian girl

Samuel Mather "a very promising little spark"
Katharine was the 10th of 15 children to die

Creasy to England...debt etc. restless and turbulent. He was stricken with rheumatism, recovered and came home "to the business of the storehouse"

Dudley still in power
1716: Governor Samuel Shute
Jeremiah Dummer, a protégé of Mathers was business agent for MA at London "where he played cards and watched the great female beauties at the House of Lords"

CM was instrumental in creating Yale - Elihu Yale, a London diamond merchant born in Boston - went to India as a young man and made his fortune. President of the East India Company.

"Liberty of Conscience is the native right of Mankind"
An ecumenical movement had existed in a section of English Puritanism + German Pietists + Francke
CM now proclaimed growing cosmopolitanism of Boston as a model for a Second Reformation

He considered it a Popish and cursed lie that the children of ministers do usually miscarry more than others.

= Creasy "abandoned to sin" A prostitute named Creasy as the man who got her pregnant. "A harlot big with a bastard accuses my poor Creasy and lays her belly to him"
Hardly a session of the Boston Court failed to hear a bastardy case, usually assigning the onus and responsibility to the woman.
e.g. Elinor Redhead - Putative father to pay 10 shillings a week for as long as court declared, while it imposed a fine of L3 and 10 stripes at the public whipping post on his lover.
Mather contrived to keep Creasy's case from Court by "keeping him confined and retired with me: BUT only two weeks after disclosure, Crease "made a worse exhibition of himself unto me than I ever met withal" ???

Now his blissful marriage turned riotous Related to Creasy and his wife, maybe?
"three cancers"
Lydia reviled him. She so outrageously insulted him that Mather believed she must be mad.
Creasy: "My miserable, miserable, miserable son." Involved in a night riot with some detestable rakes.

1719 Boston economic crisis so severe that Mather saw the possibility of a revolution -- "a great part of the town can barely get bread to satisfy nature"
Governor Shute exacerbated the crisis.

1720: "News from Robinson Crusoe Island" pamphlet in which he told of Robinson Crusoe coming to Boston, here called the Island of Insania, chastising Elisha Cooke, Jr. for bringing chaos on the land. Pamphlet attacked Mather as Pope ... the great Don-Oago, the primate would-be of our Island.
Cooke and Co were the first in NE to argue a case with hardly as much as a genuflection in the direction of religion. - to argue that NE problem was moral and not financial and political.

BIBL: History of New England, London 1720

"former pollutions" His distress awakened an older form of coping: For the first time in 25 years, he began communing with angels.

As administrator of the Howell estate ( a sorry, sordid, forward and extremely wicked fellow, had he lived, he had soon brought a noble to nine pence) ... he would confront some poor sailor or fisherman for small debts.
Mather debt calamity re Lydia's husband's estate...George/Howell..
Return of his stutter "Last bout most shocking I have had in 20 years
Estate admin problems brought him near ruin "for paying the debts of people he despised"

How much had he done for sailors..."Yet there is not a man in the world so reviled, so slandered by sailors"
How much had he done for the comfort and salvation of blacks ....And yet some call their Negroes by the name Cotton Mather so they can with some shadow of truth assert crimes as committed by one of that name whom the Hearers take to be me.

"dark dispensations"

Threat of being lodged in prison. Four members of congregation saved him.
But Lydia... "satanic paroxysms" ... her niece in house "a monstrous liar and very mischievous, a sower of discord and a monster of ingratitude"

Lydia versus Hannah (burned in infancy)
Lydia raged all day "a thousand unrepeatable invections"
At midnight she left...
Then Creasy died, the 12th of Mather's children to die. 25 years. A ship bound from Barbados to St. Peter's, Newfoundland - "Ah, my son! My son!"
Lydia returned.
Sermon August 30...Many young people came to hear him
Then news that Creasy was alive! Two days later = reported that it was another vessel

"Stoop! Stoop!" Hit his head on beam..."You are young and have the world before you. Stoop as you go through it and you will miss many hard bumps."

Exhausting personal problems complicated by changed standards of life in Massachusetts whose earlier tribal solidarity was being fragmented by party interests.

"The relation between the New England minister and his flock being to many like husband and wife. (Benjamin Colman)

Rev Peter Thatcher of Weymouth - New North. The new brick church was called "Revenge Church of Christ" by opponents of Thatcher. A percentage of Mather's own congregation left.

1721 Smallpox lasted a full year and infected half the city. Because of the isolation of MA, the great infectious diseases tended to be epidemic rather than endemic.
"A heavenly afflictus - the speedy approach of the destroying angel"
Spectacle Island Pest House
Ship Seahorse from Salt Tortuga brought the epidemic /black man from ship, a servant.
Inoculation: "wonderful practice" in Turkey, Asia etc.
1721, April: First inoculation in England

His black servant Oneisimus had described to him the use of inoculations among his people, the Guramantese, and had shown him a scar left by it. - before he read accounts in the Transactions of the Royal Society
Dr. Zabdiel Boylston + both attacked and railed against
"malignant filth" Boylston described as "reckless and inept" "a cutter for the stone"
Opposition used "dialect" for Oneisimus' description to ridicule.

BIBL 1721, Aug 7, first issue of the New England Courant, James Franklin soon to be joined by younger brother, Benjamin: "chief aim to oppose the doubtful and dangerous practice of inoculation"
Courant: "a divine judgment on the country" + paper protested that they were taking their argument from the African heathen
On Mather: "equivocations, mental reservations, Jesuitical evasions"/ "innate itch of writing" Ridiculed Curiosa Americana : "pigeons in NE roosted in some undiscovered satellite of Earth" etc.
Courant (March 19-26, 1722) called him a "baboon" "peevish mongrel"
Creasy and "Sammy" to the defence of their father
Mather had never been so publicly, relentlessly and ferociously clawed.
Silence that left him depressed, he considered leaving Boston
Mather claimed that Courant was run by the Hell-Fire Club, a blasphemous London Club whose members styled themselves God the Son, John the Baptist etc.

1722 February...5889 afflicted/844 died

Dr. William Douglas, the one physician with a degree, suggested that they "fight Indians with inoculation"
"Many physicians opposed inoculation because it would have saved the town thousands of pounds that went into their pockets.
By end of September, 2757 infected, 203 died.
At the height of the epidemic someone tried to kill Mather 3a.m....threw a fire grenade into his house...the fuse shook out.
"Cotton Mather, you dog, damn you...I'll inoculate you with this, with a pox to you"
"He was filled with joy at approaching martyrdom"

John Williams, a sorry tobacconist: - "ministers are of a contrary party to the bulk of the people with respect to the public affairs in this town."
Salem trials where "so many innocent persons lost their lives"
Inoculation, the self-procuring of the smallpox.

? Indian hostages moved from Cambridge prison to Castle Island

The two years that followed the epidemic were the most harrowing in Mather's life.
Increase dying
Pity me! Pity me! Increase's terrible afflictions "large enough o have tortured a giant to death - mental, loss of memory, hiccups, stones etc...

Shute left for England on the Seahorse - complaints about NE loyalty in London

Creasy sued for L4 and L8 etc. "owed to Increase Gatchel, Hanover Street Dancing School, a dancing master and vendor of "good Italian fiddle strings"

1722 WILL: He specified that his black servant Spaniard should not be sold but given his liberty and esteemed a free Negro.
To Creasy he left nothing

He wrote a 239 page biography of Increase Mather.
Father's successor = Joshua Gee

"Death of the Daughter" - Rev Thomas Cutler, Yale Rector, at Commencement "and let all people say, amen" = Episcopal form of prayer. - "It was as if the president of the US sang the Internationale at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on 4th July"
Cutler considered his Congregational ordination invalid.
Cutler, the miserable apostate returned from England railing against Congregational ordination.
1724 New Church of England Chapel in North End made visible how the C of E had penetrated Congregational territory. = same chapel, excluding the wooden spire that was added later and from which Revere hung his lanterns. First Georgian church in America.
400 at the new church - Mather usually had 1600.
Cutler renounced Cambridge as a "snotty town" of the same name as English Cambridge. Proselytized and suggested that Harvard would "never be well" until it became an Episcopal college.
Synod planned to consider "evils that had provoked the judgment of Heaven - never met because of Cutler opposition.

Shute in London: "MA was again dancing to the old tune of sedition"
Mather gained the "utmost rage of the satanic party + lost the respect of Shute himself for a "misrespect"

Leverett died and Mather believed he would become president of Harvard, but it went to Rev. Joseph Sewall, son of Judge Samuel.
Sewall refused presidency - Mather rejected a second time -- to Benjamin Wadsworth

BIBL The Words of Understanding (1724) = re Creasy

1724/25 "a cough, a grievous breast-beater + fever + asthma"
Never published Biblia Americana

Preached in July 1726 on the execution of pirate William Fry...cursing, blaspheming, but holding a nosegay, settling the noose on his own neck (with an aside to the hangman that he did not know his own trade), smiling until at the entrance to Boston harbor his corpse dangled from chains.

1726, Elizabeth died, age 22. One of 3 remaining children of 15

Mather liberalism toward Quakers BIBL Vital Christianity 1725 "unspeakably abhors and laments the abominable persecution that you have suffered in former days" "our beloved friends"

Family Physician folk remedies e.g. "a dead hand on wens and tumors till the patient feel the damp sensibly strike into him" cow's urine = asthma boy's urine = sore throat
(not published till 20th century"
"nishmath-cajin" = probably seat of all diseases

Mather: the first American whose portrait others wanted for their homes ("mezzotint" "Pelham print")

As a Puritan, he believed and often emphasized that the true Christian dies joyously
"Lyric joy at prospect of death"

1727 October 29 Earthquake 2-3 minutes x worldwide West Indies, England, Sicily etc. "Day of Reckoning" Converts including Nancy- Four months before his death

Dec 24, with shocks still coming, Mather preached for the last time: "Farewell all friends below, I shall have nothing more to do here."

1728...meeting the King of Terrors with divine calm.
Jan 14: the earth again shook and rumbled ...a Sabbath...with a boom like a gun."
Two children of Lydia's daughter fell through ice and drowned
Two weeks later...more quakes and shocks

"Remember only that world "fructuosos" - to Samuel
Feb 13: "Now I have nothing to do here...My will is now entirely resigned to the will of God." His last word was "grace"
By custom Mather's body lay awaiting burial for nearly a week.

"Gargantuan and perplexing" "lived in the Mount with God"
"Most learned man and most voluminous writer NE had ever produced" - 388 published and unpublished works
"passionate stamina and courteous charity"
"though fatigues in body, never tired in mind"
"suffered his awesome bereavement in silence"
"submissiveness that would not grasp that at Salem people were being murdered"
meddlesome ambitiousness, guile, vanity, rashness, envy
"like some limping Vulcan ...in the mists of the country's history, from which only later
emerge the more real and substantial figures of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington...seems to symbolize what American character is not or should not be - bigoted, superstitious, authoritarian and devious."
"gross distortion of so complicated a man into a national gargoyle."
Samuel: "He alone was able to support the character of this country abroad, and was held in great esteem through many nations in Europe.
"Hope of putting America on the cultural map...in his curiousness, epic reach and quirkily ingenious individualism, he was the first unmistakably American figure in the nation's history

Mather's house was on Ship Street near the wharves and harbor
Samuel at North Church with Gee for 9 years...In 1762, his son Creasy died of fever in Havana. Samuel died 1785.

Hawthorne: "...mistook him for the visible presence of the fiend himself, but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather, proud of his well-worn dignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of his time, the one blood-thirsty man in whom were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude.... Mather in whom there was so much good, yet so many failings and frailties."

Bancroft: He is an example how far selfishness under the form of vanity and ambition can blind the higher faculties, stupefy the judgment, and dupe self-consciousness itself. His self-righteousness was complete, till he was resisted.
&&&&&&

WILLIAM PHIPS

BSN: I Dive for Treasure - Lt Harry E. Riesberg 1942

Born Feb 2, 1651 in Pemaquid (now Bristol) Maine, the twenty first of twenty-six children. As a boy he tended sheep in those rugged hills; later he went to Boston and worked in the shipyards there. He fell in love with Mary Spencer, daughter of Capt. Roger Spencer. Though in social position she was far above him, he vowed he had three great ambitions: "To marry her, to become captain of a King's ship, and to be the owner of a faire brick house in Green Lane (Salem Street) of North Boston."

Mary's father couldn't see Phips as much of a son-in-law, and ordered her to marry John Hull, wealthy ship designer and builder. The heartsick Phips took his savings, bought a small schooner and went to sea to make his fortune. He traded along the coast and in the West Indies, learning the business and making money slowly. Cruising in the Florida Straits, he located an unimportant wreck, and recovered a small amount of silver and other cargo. Then he ran into the tremendous story of the sinking of the Spanish "Plata Flota," still fresh in people's minds after 40 years, and the young captain became a man obsessed with one idea. - to salvage the Silver Shoals treasure.

(15 Spanish galleons wrecked at Silver Shoals in the Bahamas Nov 16, 1643 with $21,000,000 in gold silver and gems wrested by the Spaniards from the inhabitants of Peru and Mexico. All but one of the galleons was wrecked. The captain of the lone surviving ship was able to tell exactly where the wreck occurred.)

At that period, 1681, the Bahama Passage and all the Caribbean waters were thick with pirates and freebooters. Sir. Henry Morgan had sacked Panama only eleven years earlier. Buccaneers like Pierre le Grand, Bartholomew Portuguez and Montbars, the Gascon pirate known as the "Exterminator," were still at large; people talked excitedly of Francis L'Ollonais, who had looted $300,000 in treasure hidden by the Spanish on a cay off the coast of Cuba.

Phips knew what he would face in going after the Silver Shoals hoard; he'd need a big ship well armed. He decided to go to London. When he reached Boston where he intended to take passage to England, he found John Hull had died. Phips called on Mary. Just before he sailed for England, he and Mary were married.

This rugged Maine farmer-shipwright didn't waste any time when he arrived in London. He was determined to bring in as a partner no less than the King of England himself, and he applied for an audience. Bt months passed and the gates of the palace were still closed to the obscure colonial captain.

Eventually the stubborn fellow had his way. Friends at Court brought him to King Charles II The captain talked so convincingly about his expedition, dwelling on the vast fortune in silver bars and gold ingots and precious gems, that the King entered into his plan.
The Rose of Argier, a frigate of the Royal Navy which had been captured by the British from the Algerian corsairs, was signed over to Phips by the King. She was armed with eighteen guns and had a crew of ninety-five men; so the adventurer was confident he could handle any buccaneers that came along. The Rose of Argier sailed from the Downs Sept. 24 1683 and William Phips held in his hand the official articles naming him "Captain of a King's Ship"

He had achieved two of his three improbable ambitions.

At Silver Shoals the Rose hove to. The divers searched among the reefs; but at the end of a few weeks they had recovered nothing of value. The crew became restless and surly, decided there was no treasure, talked of other plans. On the second dog watch, which the Caribbean breeze played through the frigate's shrouds, the crew gathered below. They were going to murder the captain, seize the Rose of Argier, and raise the Jolly Roger.

Phips knew what was going on for a loyal cabin boy had given him the word. HE was waiting for them in his cabin, a bare cutlass lying on the table, the heavy butt of a pistol in his hand. Just before dawn he heard their bare feet pattering on the deck, and his ears caught the clank of cutlasses. Captain Phips grabbed the cutlass in his other hand, kicked the door open, and faced the mutineers.
"Well," he demanded, "What do you want?"

A swarthy seaman named Thompson stepped forward and announced the plans. Captain Phips listened. Then, without warning he threw down his weapons and charged the crowd, swinging his bare fists. His audacity took the mutineers off guard. They scattered and ran below.

Next day the Captain ordered the frigate beached and careened on a small uninhabited island close by. Toward evening, eighty seven on the crew slipped off to meet in the wood near the shore; there they signed round robin to the effect that, at seven o'clock he same night, they would seize the ship and maroon Phips and his eight loyal men on the island.

They sent for the ship's carpenter and told him what he could expect when their plans went through; he persuaded them to give him a little time to think it over. HE was allowed to go back to the ship, with a spy to keep an eye on him. On board, Chips faked a sudden attack of colic and was able to get to the Captain's cabin alone to have a restoring dram. He told Phips the plot.
The Captain told the carpenter to go back to the mutineers and pretend to join them. Then he called up the seven other crew members still aboard, and asked if they would stand by him. They pledged loyalty.

All the provisions and supplies had been stowed on the beach under a sailcloth tent, with the frigate's guns placed around it. Phips ordered his seven faithful men to bring the guns on board and train them on the tent. The mutineers came out of the woods. They found themselves directly in the line of fire...

...The attempted mutiny suppressed... Thompson, the ringleader, was publicly whipped before the crew. Phips realized this was no gang to trust and he sailed back to England, with the idea of getting a more trustworthy crew for another expedition the next year. Charles II dead and James II on the throne. The new ruler and his Council were not very hot for the colonial's wild scheme. The Rose of Argier was taken away and he was left without a ship, commission or financial resources.

But the Maine man had the stubbornness of a real salver. HE made a louder noise than ever with his treasure tales; they couldn't budge him. Even when thrown into jail on a false charge, he managed to get out. Denied the support of the Crown he tried to form a private syndicate of wealthy men. Christopher Monck, second duke of Albermarle, and others became interested.

Monck got from the King a warrant for Capt Phips dated July 18, 1686....One tenth part of all treasure found was to go to the King. Two frigates were bought. The James and Mary named for Phips parents and the Henry of London which was placed under the command of Francis Rogers who had been second mate of the Rose of Argier.

..."Night was coming and Phips was about to order the ships back to Puerto de la Plata when one of the crew looked over the side and saw in the translucent tropical water a coral plant with large vine-shaped leaves of unusual color. The sailor wanted it as a souvenir. One of the natives dived over the side. Then he came up with a thrilling report. Down below he had seen "greate guns."
Capt Phips turned to the officers and crew: "Thank God, we are now all riche men."

Entry made that night Jan 8, 1687 in log of the James and Mary:
This morning our Captain sent a long boat on board Mr. Rogers, which in a short time returned, wch. made our hearts very glad to see , whch was 4 Sows, 1 barr, 1 Champers, 2 Dowboyds, 2000 odd dollars, by wch. we understood they had found the wrecks...

Yet though we might most diligently make search, naught might be seen of ye galyon save ye great gunne, until such time as ye dyvers did docouvere that he wreck was hydden by ye lyme thereon. Such pieces of eight and dollars and halve dollars as were fished were with difficulty counted on ye decks, beinge bound one unto another so that blows with a maule must be struck theme that they should break aparte. Ye wrack lyeth within ye compasse of two reefs, weggette fast atwixt ye twain, with no manner of masts, nay of stern castle nor poope remainynge, but sunk to ye chail plates in ye sands and marle. And upon ye forecastle lyeth her great gunne and anklers, the wych are alle that might he seen from above the sea. Notwithstanding that ye dyvvers sid weary of dyvvinge to ten fathoms, yet they could make entry into ye bellie of ye wrack wherein must lie ye greatest of ye treasure."

From this date on the four divers fished the wreck daily except for stormy periods and on the Sabbath. The NE captain, for all his fierce drive, would not permit that.

Home bound with treasure - Terrific storm...Henry of London missing...six days after to Gravesend, battered and sea worn.
June 28, 1687, King created him Sir William; in person the king presented him with a gold chain and a royal medal. The delighted Duke of Albermarle gave the new knight a golden cup worth $5000 for Lady Phips.

High Sheriff of the Massachusetts Colony - "Sir William sailed back to Boston, after being away five years, to entertain his lady with some accomplishment of his predictions and then built himself a bricke house in the very same place which was foretold. A big two story building with white columns and a portico, standing on the corner of the present Salem Street and Charter Street. There were gardens and a lawn and a row of buttonwood trees.

On Oct 14, 1691 he became Royal Governor...He was called to London to receive his commission, then returned to Boston. A few months later, with the confidence of the people of the colony firm in him, he got a new and more liberal charter for MA and ruled as gov until his death.

On a trip to England he was stricken with malignant fever. He died on February 18, 1695 and the funeral ceremonies were like those reserved for royalty.

MOTHER GOOSE
BSN: Sunday Advertiser Aug 14, 1938 - In 1660 the Gooses owned nearly half of Boston. All the land between West and Winter Streets was theirs from Avon up to the Common and most of Essex and Bedford Sts besides.

Their house was on Washington Street across from Jordan Marsh, about where Kresge's is - only in those days it was Newbury Street instead of Washington.

There were 10 little Gooses and their father was Isaac, who took for his second wife Elizabeth Foster of Charlestown who became the immortal Mother Goose.

Isaac was 55 at this time and the second Mrs. Goose was 27. In the next 15 years she had 10 children of her own, after which Isaac died, and his widow wrote a rhyme...There was an old woman who lived in a shoe

By and by all grew up and the youngest daughter married Thomas Fleet, a Shropshire lad from England. Thomas worked in a printing plant in Pudding Lane (Devonshire) and was as poor as a church mouse. But when he married the rich Goose girl, he bought the press and invited his mother in law to live with them.

The Fleets had a whole houseful of children and each new arrival so delighted Grandma Goose that she took to wandering about the house, chanting this happy rhyme

Gooset, goosey Gander
Whither shall I wander
Up stairs -down stairs
In my lady's chamber.

The old lady remembered the lilting tunes of England, the tunes her mother knew. And so made up others like them, so that children swarmed to Pudding Lane, and sat upon the stoop to hear the songs she sang. Even Cotton Mather passing one day stopped to listen.
Some people thought Mother Goose was a witch because she had a hump on her back. It was lucky that Mr. Mather did not agree, else she would've been hanged from the scaffold on Boston Common. But fortunately he liked the old lady and in his diary in which he bewailed his sins, he praised her rhymes as:

While nurses sing and Babies crie
Old Mother Goose will never die.

When she was 92 Old Mother Goose caught cold and passed away. Shortly after her daughter, who was Mrs. Ann Fleet filed an inventory of the estate, There was 1 large looking glass and 1 small, 6 turkey worked chairs, 9 green chairs, 5 leather chairs etc.

Six months later, son in law Thomas presented an account against the estate of his mother in law which swallowed up every penny:

To Meat, Drink, Washing and Lodging for 14 years, 9 mo and 20 days at 6 pounds 13 shillings and four pence o'er year.
To four years ditto when lame
To cash paid for medicines
To funeral charges.

On and on the accounting went. And when it was added up, the total balanced exactly the inventory filed by Ann Fleet.

1719 BS A66
Songs for the Nursery or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children Printed by T. Fleet at his Printing House, Pudding Lane, 1719
Elizabeth Foster lived in Charlestown, where she was born in 1665. Married Isaac Goose of Boston in 1692 and came to live in city. Isaac had a green pasture ready for her on what is now Washington Street, and including the land in and around Temple Place. She was his second mate and began her maternal life as stepmother to ten children. These all seems to have been lively little goslings, and to their number she rapidly added six more. Poor Mother Goose! No wonder that her feelings were too much for her and she poured them out in a celebrated verse:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children she didn't know what to do."
She was no wild goose...stayed by her nest through cold and heat happy as the day is long, and living to be ninety two years old. (died 1757)

Her daughter Elizabeth became the wife of Thomas Fleet...living in Pudding Lane...when Thomas Fleet became a happy father she insisted on going to live with him as nurse of honor to his son and heir. A happy thought occurred to Thomas Fleet. He printed and sold songs and ballads at his printing house in Pudding Lane. While she sat in her arm chair or shuffled about lost in sweet dreams, he carefully wrote down what he could remember of her rhymes.

Title page bore a large goose, with wide-open mouth, showing that the proverbial irreverence of sons-in-law is not a thing of recent origin. They were just as saucy as they are now (1877) and just as ready to turn a penny at the expense of their mother in law
1698 admitted as member of Old South Church.

WILLIAM KIDD

BS V18 "Proclamation 27 May 1696, Gov William Stoughton, re King Williams War:
"That over and above the encouragement given by an act of this court of fifty pounds per head for every Indian man and twenty five pounds per head for any woman or child male or female under the age of 14 taken or brought in Prisoner; the Scalps of all Indians slain to be produced or delivered to the Commissioner or Commissioner for War (as the Law in that case provides and the benefit of plunder) there shall be allowed and paid out of the public treasury their necessary provision ammunition and accustomed wages for so long as they are seeking or pursuing the enemy."

1691 Kidd and Walkington employed by colony to harass the French,
1699, July Kidd and Lord Bellemont - to Boston x Antonío and Queddah-Merchant -What happened to her? - Two French passes which were found on Q-M were not sent by Bellemont to England. Kidd tried and executed.

BS F66 " Kidd, who had done such good service for the city of NY that he was presented with $150 gift...It was not found possible to bring home the charge of piracy but he was found guilty of murder of crewman Moore and hanged in May 24, 1701 with nine of his accomplices at Execution Dock, London.

"I well remember Capt Kidd's trial," said Sir Edward..."I was 17 and had just returned from a cruise as a midshipman in the Pomona, an 18 gun brig. Kidd's defence was that he had taken from the captured French vessels, what were known as French passes or guarantees from the French government of protection under that Flag, and that Bellemont had taken them from him in Boston and kept them. Many of the crew and captains with whom Kidd had fought against the French, spoke of his humanity and bravery. He did not have a fair trial. He was brow-beaten by the court; his witnesses were refused a fair hearing, and during a most extraordinary display of temper by the officials, he was outwardly calm - there was more said in his favor than against him.

And so Captain Kidd has been a bugbear for nearly two centuries, for nurses to frighten little children with.

What could have been the object of Kidd? He was a clergyman's son, was well-educated and had hitherto led a virtuous life. He had a wife and two children living in New York; he was a man of considerable property, and both in England and the colonies had the reputation of being a brave commander and an honorable gentleman. During his seizure of vessels, he never wantonly destroyed human life; there was no murdering of crews, as in ordinary piracy. He always respected Dutch vessels but claimed the Quidah Merchant and all other vessels taken by him were sailing under French passes. His crew was constantly in a state of mutiny. Moore was killed by a sudden blow, in the heat of passion, which in this day would not have been a crime greater than manslaughter. It is believed that Kidd was a political victim rather than a pirate, for which charge, rather than for the murder of Moore, he suffered death."

BIBL: The devil in the shape of a woman/ Carol Karlsen

1645-47 several hundred witches executed in England at height of the Civil War

malefic witch maleficium
"watching" = way of proving a woman a witch
"hag-ridden" literally
possession x bewitched - possession a possible precurser to being witch
Devil's mark or witches teat - "juries of women were im[paneled by local authorities to search the bodies of the accused for this sign of a witch's familiarity with the devil or lesser demons.

Timeline Background

1675 Cotton Mather admitted to Harvard at the age of 12
1675 Governor Juan Francisco de Treviño of New Mexico tries to suppress Pueblo religious practices by hanging four men and whipping 43 others. Among the latter is Popé, who later leads the Pueblo Revolt.
1675-78 King Philip's War. It begins when Metacomet (King Philip) leads an attack against Swansea in retaliation for the Plymouth colony's execution of three Wampanoag tribe members. Metacomet is betrayed and shot on 12 August 1676, and the war formally ends when Sir Edmond Andros makes peace in Maine on 12 April 1678.
1675 January, John Sassamon, a Christian convert was found dead; three Wampanoag men were held responsible. June, Tobias, Wampapaquan, and Mattashunama found guilty of murder and executed at Plymouth. Rhode Island colonists attempted arbitration between Pokanoket and Plymouth to avoid war; Plymouth resolved to use force to conform Philip. June 24, colonists in Swansea began the fight with Pokanoket (King Philip's War).
1675 (September) The Massachusetts settlements of Deerfield and Hadley experience the first of three raids from the Wampanoag and Nipmuck peoples.
1675 More than 600 ships and 4000 men were now engaged in New England fishing
1675 Laws upbraiding current fashion were enacted by the MA General Court. Indian attacks were blamed on the sins of the people, among which was the "manifest pride openly appearing among us in that long hair, like women's hair, is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair made into periwigs." CT case: 38 women were brought before a magistrate for wearing clothes not befitting their social position. One young girl was accused of "wearing clothes not befitting their social position. One young girl was accused of wearing silk in a flaunting manner, in an offensive way and garb not only before but when she stood presented." 30 young men arrested for wearing silk and sporting long hair.
1675 Law requires that church doors be locked during services because too many people leave before the service is completed.

"A man had to be worth $1000 for his wife to wear a silk scarf" (class distinction)

1676. February 10 Lancaster MA attacked by Indians led by King Philip. The settlement was destroyed after all the men were killed and the women taken prisoner.
May 2. Mary Rowlandson is ransomed after her capture during an attack on Lancaster.
30 July. Bacon's Rebellion. Tobacco planters led by Nathan Bacon ask for and are denied permission to attack the Susquehannock Indians, who have been conducting raids on colonists' settlement. Enraged at Governor Berkeley's refusal, the colonists burn Jamestown and kill many Indians before order is restored in October.
1676 August 12, Philip killed in ambush at Montaup
1676 Increase Mather, A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England
1676 Bacon's Rebellion, Jamestown, VA
1676 Looking Glass for the Times, Peter Folger, early American satire...Grandfather of Benjamin Franklin. Lashed into the Christians of NE for their behavior toward Quakers and others.
1676 October, first coffee house opened by John Sparry in Boston - coffee introduced into North America by 1668. Tea from the beginning. Coffee did not take first place over tea and chocolate until after Boston Tea Party (1773). Among alcoholic beverages, rum was a favorite in NE and beer in the middle colonies. Madeira took first place in wines, followed by canary, claret, burgundy, port, brandy and champagne.
1676 CT forbids anyone to wear clothes that do not match their place in society. This applies to the wearing of silk, gold or silver lace, or any other luxurious fabric or metal./ MA regulates the price of shoes; five pense half penny for all plain and wooden heeled shoes, and more than seven pence half for well made "French falls."
1676 BS J 65 "On November 25, the ship Katharine of Dublin reached Boston with a cargo of food for the people of New England. Thousands were destitute here as a result of the war..."that godly Antipeodobaptists be not excluded..." NB = The Irish Donation.

1677 Massachusetts produces a medical treatise on small pox and measles
1677 Massachusetts appoints colonial agents. Disclaims ownership of New Hampshire. Purchases Gorges title to Maine.
I677 Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians Hubbard
1677 First charter guaranteeing separation of church and state in the American colonies was framed by William Penn at the Quaker Colony of West Jersey

1678 Anne Bradstreet's Poems, a second edition of The Tenth Muse corrected by Bradstreet, is published posthumously in Boston.
1678 False "Popish Plot" to murder King Charles II and establish Roman Catholicism in England results in waves of anti-Catholic hatred with executions of innocent people.
1678-1679 Year-long smallpox epidemic in New England

1679 Nov 15, REV JOHN WHEELWRIGHT, died, BEING ABOUT 85 YEARS OF AGE, AND THE OLDEST PASTOR IN NEW ENGLAND

1679 Boston Fire. The worst in the colonies destroyed 150 houses and the dockyard in Boston. Thereafter, frame houses were abandoned by city ordinance, and all houses were constructed of "stone or brick and covered with slate or tyle."
1679 A colonial best seller, A Guide to Heaven by Samuel Hardy published in Boston/
1679 New Hampshire was separated from MA by Royal commission

1680. 10 August. Pueblo Revolt. In a coordinated uprising, Indians kill more than 400 Spaniards. According to the Timeline of the West, "Those who survive flee to Santa Fe, where they are surrounded by a combined force of 2,500 . . . After a skirmish which temporarily drives the Indians back, the Spanish retreat to El Paso on the Rio Grande." Popé establishes himself in the Governor's Palace and rules until his death in 1688. This revolt, according to David J. Weber, is "one of the most successful uprisings against Europeans in the New World." (Go to a bibliography of works on the Pueblo Revolt or to outline notes on the conflict)
1680 Thomas Brattle calculated the orbit of a comet of 1680...Unrecognized by Royal Society.

1680 BS J70 Trial of Goodwife Elizabeth Morse of Newtown for witchcraft but never hanged because of presence of Edward Randolph and fear of what would happen in England. She stayed in jail for a year and then was allowed to go home.

1681 4 March. William Penn, English Quaker, receives a charter from Charles II for land on which he will found Pennsylvania - May 1682: William Penn's Frame of Government - unusually liberal document
1681 Old Ship Meeting House erected in Hingham Mass by Puritans who never referred to a place of worship as a church. Representative of colonial "four-square" church construction, it lacks a spire and cross, but has a bell tower with a weathervane.
1681 First dancing master in Boston provoked outburst. "A person of very insolent and ill fame that raves and scoffs at religion." He was soon driven out. Increase Mather: An arrow against profane and promiscuous dancing drawn out of the quiver of the scriptures
1681 First American edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a bestseller.

1681 Christmas first "arrived in Boston' - Up to this year celebration of Christmas had been a crime.

1682 Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
1682-1725 Edward Taylor, Preparatory Meditations (published 1939, 1960) MA minister and physician considered the finest poet of colonial times...though he bound his poems himself, he never had them [published.

1683 Penn and Native Americans negotiate a peace treaty at Shackamaxon under the Treaty Elm
1683 Increase Mather and others form the Philosophical Society in Boston to promote scientific research and experimentation in the colonies

1684 Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is revoked by Charles II after critical reports reach England. MA had violated its charter by discriminating against the Church of England, setting religious rather than property qualifications for suffrage, and establishing an illegal mint. Revocation had been prompted by Edward Randolph, who had been appointed surveyor of customs and collector in 1678. He sent two unfavorable reports to England in 1682, then returned to England the next year to help prosecute MA for its charter violations. Revocation of the charter led to dissolution of the MA confederation. This ends the requirement of church membership for voting - End of era of Bible Commonwealth
1684 Increase Mather, Remarkable Providences (An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences), a collection of stories about the hand of God rescuing people from disasters.

1685 Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions
1685 Increase Mather is named president of Harvard, a post he holds until 1701
1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes - Huguenots to New World - Revere, Faneuil, Bowdoin etc.
1685 For performing marriages in Boston, a Huguenot minister was haled before a court
1685 James II becomes King of England, Scotland and Ireland succeeding his brother Charles II. Uprising against James is crushed.

1686 Dominion of New England. Governor Edmund Andros begins issuing a series of unpopular orders aimed at the consolidation of colonies into one large settlement. He dissolves the assemblies of New York and Connecticut, limits the number of town meetings in New England to one per year, places the militia under his direct control, and forces Puritans and Anglicans to worship together in the Old South Church.

1687 June 28 William Phipps, first knighted native American dubbed by King James II
1687 James II issues declaration of Liberty and Conscience, suspending laws against Catholics and dissenters in England and Scotland.
1687 First Anglican service in Boston

1688 Mary Glover executed in Boston as a witch
1688 The Philosophical Society of Boston disbands

1688-1689 Protestants fearing the restoration of Catholicism in England, demand "Glorious Revolution" leads to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy and the installment of Dutch Prince William of Orange and his English wife, Mary.

1689 February 13 flight of King James II to France and succession of William and Mary.
April. Rebellious colonists force Andros to take shelter in a fort for his own protection. Cotton supports the rebellion.
25 July. Andros is ordered back to England to stand trial. The colonies reestablish their previous systems of government.
1689 King's Chapel established
1689 Benjamin Church recruits Wampanoag men to fight the Abenaki
1689 Eastern Abenaki and French begin a war against the English (King William's War) - first of what came to be known as the French and Indian Wars - a series of colonial wars between GB and France that lasted three quarters of a century

1690 DEATH OF SAMUEL NANNY, son of ROBERT and KATHARINE - b, 1659 = age 31
Nanney Family Genealogy Forum
"Some say died in Boston, other in Barbados or Bermuda.
From Bermuda Archives = Inventory of goods = RG 1001/1A p333-334

"Copy of inventory taken by Daniel Johnson and Leonard White, of goods left by Samuel Nanny deceased with Mr. Susanna Jenour, widow. Later appeared May 10, 1690 before Governor Robert Robinson."

NOTE: Extensive possessions...incl "24 small bone combs for Negroes"

1690 French and Native Americans burn Schenectady, N. Y. and other areas; Massachusetts colonists capture Port Royal, Nova Scotia; and Canadian forces destroy Casco, Maine.
1690 Feb 3 First paper money issued by MA to pay soldiers who served in the campaign in Quebec
1690 Feb 8 French and Indian forces from Montreal burn Schenectady NY
1690 May 11 Port Royal captured by Phips. French recaptured 1691
1690 Oct 7 Quebec attacked. Repulsed by Frontenac
1690 Wayside Inn built in Sudbury MA. It was called the Red Horse Tavern and was characterized by a raftered ceiling and a bar in the form of a cage. Longfellow -Tales of Wayside Inn (1886)
1690 Benjamin Harris, New England Primer a standard colonial text book combined teaching of the alphabet and Puritan theology in moral couplets, as in "In Adams Fall - we sinned all"
1690 Sept 25 Public Occurrences, first newspaper Boston...expired four days later because Harris had published without permission
1690 American whaling industry first began large-scale operations out of Nantucket
1690 Population in colonies estimated at 213,000/ England's population is about 5 million

1691 William and Mary charter - royal charter
1691 Boston absorbed Plymouth under Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter that provided "liberty of conscience to all Christians except Papists

1692 May. Salem witchcraft trials begin. From June-September 22, 20 people are executed and two died in prison. See also the Examination and Confession of Ann Foster at Salem Village.
Twelve years after the Pueblo Revolt, Diego de Vargas and a force of 200 surrounds Santa Fe and asks the inhabitants to surrender peacefully, promising clemency for those who do so and return to Christianity
1692 Deodat Lawson, A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft
1692 New Hampshire established as a royal colony
1692, 1693 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World
Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, a volume denouncing the use of spectral evidence in witchcraft trials.
1692 First doctor of divinity degree to Increase Mather, sixth president of Harvard
1692 Macdonald clan in massacred at Glencoe, Scotland, for allegedly failing to take the oath to King William III

1693 The College of William and Mary is founded

1694 Bank of England founded by a company of merchants, who, in return for banking privileges lend the government $1,200,000.
1694 Samuel Willard's election sermon, The Character of a Good Ruler is published in Boston. It demonstrates that politics, religion and literature are close related in colonial times.

1696 4 June. Pueblo Revolt of 1696. Pueblo forces burn the missions at Santa Fe and 28 Spaniards are killed, but the rebels are eventually captured.
1696+ New Englanders especially active in slave trade after the Royal Africa Trade Company lost its monopoly in 1696
1696 Importation of slaves by Quakers forbidden
1696 Plot to murder William III uncovered and all conspirators are executed

1697 Massachusetts general court expresses official repentance for the witchcraft trials; Samuel Sewall confesses guilt from his Boston pew in the Boston South Church
1697 Sept 3 King Williams War was ended by Treaty of Ryswick - pointless war - all possessions returned to prewar status
1697 Oct Severe enactment against blasphemers and atheists in MA. Anyone denying the divine nature of the Bible could be imprisoned for six months, confined to the pillory, whipped, bored through the tongue with a hot iron or forced to suit on the gallows with a rope around his neck.

1698 New edition of the Bay Psalm Book contains music for the first time - 13 tunes in two-part harmony
1698 Africa trade is opened to all British subjects

1699 Peace treaty at Casco Bay, Maine, brings hostilities between the Abenaki Indians and the Massachusetts colony to an end.
1699 Early law to prevent spread of infectious diseases
1699 Captain William Kidd paid a visit to an n old friend in Narragansett Bay and leaves some treasure. Legend says that Kidd murdered a helper and buried him with the treasure to keep others away.- thus began the legend of his treasure.
1699 Card game was suppressed by Judge Samuel Sewall. A few days later he found a pack of cards strewn over his law. Gambling rampant despite numerous laws against it. Lotteries came under ban in New England by 1719 order.

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