Learning to Read in Puritan New England

Between the end of the 17th and the end of the 19th century, most New Englanders learned to read from The New England Primer. This book included an alphabet, short passages, and a catechism (John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Babes).

You can find the illustrated alphabet on the wikipedia page. Note that there are only 24 letters (I/J and U/V are combined). You may recognize some of the couplets:

A:

In Adam's fall,

We sinned all.

B:

Thy life to mend,

This Book attend.

F:

The idle Fool

Is whipt at school.

In one section, pupils are given lists of words with the same syllable count. The monosyllablic words are fairly tame (God, child, grace, knit), as are the disyllabic words(boldly, father, husband), but things get a little strange in the 3+ categories. Here are the first four trisyllabic words from the 1727 version:

Abusing

Bewitching

Confounded

Drunkenness

Cheery, no? The polysyllabic lists aren't quite as dreary, though you will find "Discontented" in the four-syllable list and "Fornication" on the five-syllable list.

The primer also includes some short prayers, such as the well-known "Now I lay me down to sleep. . ." For obvious reasons, I found this one more interesting:

I In the Burying place may see

Graves shorter there than I;

From Death's arrest no age is free,

Young children too may die.

My God, may such an awful sight

Awakening be to me!

Oh! that by early Grace I might

For Death prepared be.

Grief and the Myth of Puritan Stoicism

Over at The Historic Present, Lori makes a good point about the power of evocative epitaphs to combat the idea that the Puritans and their descendants were phelgmatic stoics who did not mourn their dead (particularly dead children) as modern Americans would.

The pernicious myth of Puritan dispassion has at least three main sources:

• the colloquial use of words such as "puritan" and "puritanical" to describe prudish or moralistic elements of American culture — I prefer "Comstockery"
• an assumption that the prevalence and capriciousness of death (particularly in early childhood) before the advent of modern medicine inured people to sorrow
• the work of historians such as Lawrence Stone and Phillip Greven who argued that the early colonists were subject to powerful fathers who were both physically and psychologically abusive and who controlled every aspect of their children’s and wives’ lives (This line or argument has been substantially challenged by more recent work by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Roger Thompson, John Demos, and many others, who have investigated cooperation, affection, and spaces for autonomous action within the Puritan family. If anyone is interested in these studies, I recommend Wallington's World by Paul Seaver — even though it's about an English Puritan, Seaver does a great job of examining the emotional involvement of Puritan parents.)

It's tough to draw too many conclusions about Puritan emotions from epitaphs because extensive epitaphs are rare before 1700, and I'm not sure that you can really call anyone past the 2nd generation a "Puritan." The epitaph as a form of literary expression in New England hit its peak between 1750 and 1830, so I don't want to misattribute sentiments to Puritans when they really belong to unitarians.

I also do not wish to promote ahistorical thinking by asserting that the experiences of death and grieving do not change over time. As Drew Gilpin Faust argued so convincingly in This Republic of Suffering, dying and mourning are social, historical processes. Certainly, the shock of losing a child in modern America is different than it would have been in an earlier era when parents would have shared that experience with many others and could access community-sanctioned explanations for children's deaths. 

Even with those caveats, I do think that epitaphs combat the idea that people in the past grieved less passionately because death was omnipresent. When we assume that people who are surrounded by death can't possibly feel the depth of emotion that we feel over our own tragedies, we dehumanize them. The same can be said of many Americans' indifference to the suffering in the developing world.

Eighteenth-century Americans felt the deaths of their loved ones accutely. Parents who lost children were devastated. For proof, we need look no further than the gravestone erected by Timothy and Sarah Stearns of Billerica, MA, in memory of their son, who died in 1795 at age 2:

Thrice of this cup we drank our fill,

Wormwood & gall we tast[e] it still;

O who can tell that never felt

What Parents feel for children's death.

This verse also appears on a baby's grave in Bedford, MA.
I don't know how much thought they put into this, but the verse is nearly perfect iambic tetrameter, the metre of folk ballads and Romantic poets.

Deliverance Mesenger

I've been a little distracted lately, so it took me until now to realize that

Deliverance Mesenger

is also a pretty funny Puritan name.

Puritan Name Award

Today's Puritan Name Award goes to

Dr. Cotton Tufts

of Weymouth, Massachusetts.

Although Dr. Tufts (1734-1815) was born in the 18th century, his name made me giggle, so he merits an honorable mention. I know you New Englanders want to honor the great men of your regional history, but if your last name is "Tufts," don't you think you'd stay away from "Cotton"?

17th-Century Names

Today's Puritan name comes from Windsor, Connecticut, where

Jezabel Wilson

was born on February 24, 1673.

She's no Godbert Godbertson, but I think it's a little cruel to name a little girl Jezebel in such a religious community. Perhaps her parents (the more conventionally named Samuel Wilson and Mary Griffen) wanted to inculcate humility or emphasize the depravity of all people, even babies. Even so, imagine carrying that name into your pew every week.

Dore illustration via.

Dimond Fitteyplace

Also, Pete would like to recommend Mr. Dimond Fitteyplace (d. 1771) for a Puritan naming award, though we will have to look into his birthdate to see whether he qualifies for 17th-century honors.

Visiting Marblehead: Mission #4

Mission #4: Find evidence supporting or refuting the hypothesis that carvers created stockpiles of decorated blanks that were later inscribed with the name of the deceased.

Were gravestones made-to-order from start to finish? Or did stonecutters decorate stones ahead of time and add in the particulars late? I'm sure we could find a satisfactory answer somewhere in the secondary literature, but it's more fun to wander around the graveyard and look for clues.

Pete and I found several examples that seem to indicate that stones were sometimes made ahead of time.

One of the most convincing was the Mary Traill stone (1850), which is highly decorated in the neoclassical style (I apologize for the crappy picture - this stone was under a tree and we didn't bring a mirror). Many similar stones nearby have a poem carved in the blank space on the plinth, but Mary Traill's epitaph is confined to the oval in the middle of the stone. The rectangle where someone might carve poem is framed nicely, but there's nothing there. This, along with the elaborate decoration and resemblance to the other stones in the family plot, seems to indicate that the stone was decorated before the specifics were added.

Another clue comes from the Martha Hawkins stone (1761). This is an unusual stone because the side panels are elaborately and professionally decorated, but the death's head at the top is rough, unprofessional, and lightly inscribed. This particular skull and crossbones design is found nowhere else in this graveyard, and similar icons are much more skillfully rendered. The epitaph seems to be somewhere between professional and improvised — the letters are neat and well-cut, but oddly spaced between very visible guidelines. Might this be an example of an apprentice who has mastered lettering and can be trusted to inscribe pre-decorated stones trying his hand at decorating a stone? More research would be needed to make a solid case, but it's easy to make up a story that could explain this stone. Perhaps Margaret Hawkins' son or another relative cut letters for the local stonecarver and was able to obtain a half-decorated blank for his mother/aunt/cousin. Maybe the family couldn't afford a professional stone, but the letter-cutter did his best to finish the blank. This is just a guess, of course, but it is plausible.

Some stones were obviously custom-made, but I think that we found enough evidence to suggest that others were produced with stock designs and filled in later.

Visiting Marblehead: Mission #2

Mission #2: Document examples of decorative motifs featuring breasts/gourds.

In Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815, Alan Ludwig devotes several pages to erotic imagery on gravestones, specifically breasts that "could symbolize the Scriptures, the Church, the ministry, or the divine milk needed to nourish the soul" (155). Ludwig also quotes a spiritual poem by minister/poet Edward Taylor that makes liberal use of breast-related imagery:

Lord put these nibbles then my mouth into
And suckle me therewith I humbly pray,
Then with this milk thy Spiritual Babe I'st grow,
And these two milke pails shall themselves display
Like to these pritty twins in pairs round neate
And shall sing forth thy praise over this meate.

In Marblehead, we found several boobalicious gravestones. These include the Mary Reed stone (1712/3), the Thaddeus Ridden stone (1690/1), the Joseph Reddan stone (1708), and the Elias Henley stone (1699). My favorite was the Benjamin Hills stone (1737/8), on which the pendant-like shapes have been modified into commas and appear to dance around the border (see below).

Visiting Marblehead: Mission #1

Mission #1: Find gravestones with misspellings, mistakes, and revisions that are literally carved in stone.

This turned out to be fairly straightforward, as at least a third of the pre-1800 stones had at least one identifiable error. These mistakes fell into two categories: first and most entertaining were the gaffes that contemporaries had identified as errors and tried to correct, second and less fun were the spellings that do not conform to modern standard English but were not necessarily "wrong" at the time.

A good example of the former can be found on the Elizabeth Russell stone (1771), on which the carver struggled with the words "Blessed" and "had." "Blessed was originally spelled with a long (or medial) s and a terminal s, but there is something else scratched in lightly between the letters s and e. Perhaps someone was unsatisfied with the long s and scratched in a second, lighter, terminal s. Maybe the terminal s was supposed to be carved farther to the right, but the carver adjusted the spacing. After blowing up the image and examining it more closely, I think it is possible that the carver may have begun carving the e before remembering (or being reminded) that "Blessed" needed a second s.
The other error on the Elizabeth Russell stone is the gouged-out letter (c? d? o?) that has been turned into an h at the beginning of the word "had." That part of the epitaph reads, "The Memory of the Just is Blessed. The Righteous shall be had in Everlasting Remembrence." The spelling of "Remembrence" probably didn't raise any eyebrows at the time (though the n is gouged out and recarved), but your guess is as good as mine for explaining the beginning of "had."

Other examples of mistakes include the Thaddeus Ridden stone (1690/1), on which the carver corrected a misspelling of the deceased's name and replaced the Gregorian date with a hybrid Julian/Gregorian date, and the Mary Brintnall stone (1688), where someone noticed that "Janury" was missing an a and stuck it in as best he could. We can tell that both of these mistakes were recognized as such in the seventeenth century because contemporaries attempted to correct them. The archaic spelling of "lyes" is not truly a mistake - it is merely one example of the many ways in which early modern English was not the same as modern standard English. In many cases, words (even names!) are spelled inconsistently within the same documents (or on the same gravestones). As long as the spelling was legible, it seemed not to matter too much whether it was consistent.


The Mary Brintnall stone is also a great example of how some carvers economized by using the vertical lines of some letters to serve as part of adjacent letters (click on the picture and observe the treatment of "here" and "the").




Probably my favorite mistake/misspelling example from this afternoon was the headstone for Samuel Cheever (d. 1724), the town's minister. The stone is obviously of lower quality than many of the later stones around it, but Cheever's family (or Cheever himself) seems to have wanted to commemorate his education with a Latin epitaph that was clearly beyond the stonecarver's skill. It is easy to imagine him hunched over a manuscript that made little sense to him, struggling to decipher the characters, and being forced to correct his work as he stumbled again and again. It's impossible to say whether the congregation was pleased with their minister's monument, but most of them probably couldn't read the epitaph anyway.

Peoples of a Spacious Land

In Peoples of a Spacious Land, Gloria Main summarizes the historiography of the 17th-century New England family from the 1980s to the present. In general, she is attempting to provide a broad overview rather than make strong, original arguments. Where she does argue, Main supports those authors who have challenged the idea that Puritans were stern patriarchs, preferring to portray the Puritan family in New England as loving, cooperative, and resourceful in the face of unexpected challenges. Rather than a well-organized colony dominated by a powerful elite, Main emphasizes the improvised nature of New England’s development as residents responded to local environmental, political, and economic situations.
Main supplements her summary with readings from the diaries of leading men such as Samuel Sewall, Cotton Mather, and John Winthrop, as well as those of some lesser-known colonists. Main does not attempt to analyze these sources in depth — rather, she uses them to illustrate the arguments made by other historians.
I do not wish to imply that this book is without merit. In fact, it is very useful because it condenses the arguments made by Ulrich, Thompson, Fischer, Allen, Demos, Cronon, Anderson, Bailyn, and many others (including anthropologists/archaeologists who have studied pre-contact Native Americans) into a readable overview. This would be an excellent text to use as an introduction to New England history because it touches on so many of the debates in the realms of environmental, economic, and family history (it is noticeably light on religion and politics).
My major criticism of Peoples of a Spacious Land is that the promise implied by the plural “Peoples” is never realized. Although Main declares that her work “compares English to native ways in order to explore the influence of cultural values,” most discussion of Native Americans seems overly speculative and is not well integrated into the book. At times, Main seems to be struggling to find something to say about any Indian group (at times extrapolating possible features of Narragansett culture by mining scholarship on other groups, including modern natives of Paraguay) just to fit her initial framework. These pieces seem tacked on and are not very useful. She does not really discuss how English observation of Indian habits might have shaped the colonists’ thinking about themselves and their new home and vice versa. Instead, the reader is left to compare the cultural norms of the two groups, but without any meaningful discussion of how they might have interacted in the 17th century.

Puritan Names

Honorable mention in the 17th-century naming Olympics goes to:

Godbert Godbertson!

Godbertson, a hatter, died in Plymouth Colony in 1633.
see Gloria Main, Peoples of a Spacious Land, pg. 78.

Update:
On page 97, Main presents the story of the Rev. Justus Forward of Belchertown (Yale class of 1754), who misses out on the laurels only because he was born in the 18th century.

Update II:
I've changed my mind. After a few hours' consideration, I have decided that Godbert Godbertson is actually an even better Puritan name than Humiliation Scratcher. Not only am I incapable of reading or saying "Godbert Godbertson" without cackling, I think that the name cuts through the half-assed religiosity of naming your kid "Thankful" or "Hopestill" or "Hatevil" and goes straight for the gold. In addition, Godbert Godbertson is the perfect 17th-century counterpart to Benjamin H. Grumbles, Shakesville's Gilded Age correspondent.

So, congratulations, Godbert, and our condolences to Humiliation Scratcher, who will no doubt take his demotion in stride.

Coming Over

I'm working on a prospectus for an essay on female migration from Europe to the Americas in the 17th century. The central question is why there was such a disparity between the volume of male and female migration at the time. The fact of the gender imbalance is well established, but there is still considerable disagreement over the motivations that led to migration.

There are two principal types of arguments about the reasons that people moved to America: the "push" and the "pull" arguments. "Push" arguments say that migrants left there homes in order to escape intolerable conditions such as religious persecution, unemployment, famine, etc. "Pull" arguments contend that Europeans were lured to America by the promise of opportunity, social advancement, etc.

One of the books I'm examining is Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century by David Cressy (1987). Cressy rejects the "push" argument that other historians such as Carl Bridenbaugh, Samuel Eliot Morrison, and Virginia DeJohn Anderson have embraced; that is, Puritans emigrated because they faced religious persecution in England. Instead, he emphasizes the individuality of each migrant's decision and the multiplicity of religious, economic, and personal motivations that inspired his or her to move to New England.

Although Cressy is pretty good about acknowledging the difficulty of ever pinning down exactly why any person decided to migrate, he does advance a modified pull argument. Personal tragedy or economic hardship might have given someone a nudge, but Cressy explains migration as an opportunity for advancement.

The one thing I'm not convinced by is Cressy's dismissal of involuntary migration. He discusses reluctant servants briefly, but says that Irish convicts, Scottish captives, and other coerced emigrants are an anomaly. This may be true of New England residents, where forced migration may have accounted for as little as 10% of the population, but in general, forced migration was the rule rather than the exception in the 17th century. While historians readily acknowledge that this was the case for Africans, the consensus that most British migrants were forced as well is more recent.

Next up: Lorena Walsh and Lois Carr's "The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland."

She's (No Longer) a Witch!

I'm at my parents' house today, hanging out and watching basketball. Go Huskies!

This morning, I was reading the Hartford Courant and came across this piece about clearing the names of the men and women executed for witchcraft in Connecticut in the 17th century.

Several descendants of the accused testified in front of the state legislature, asking that their ancestors be exonerated. Fair enough.

The commenters on the Courant's forum are being pretty vicious. Some are decrying the enormous waste of tax dollars (do non-binding resolutions really cost much?), others think the legislature ought to be focusing on more important issues (a few hours to right a wrong is excessive?), and others are going straight for the misogyny aspect, calling the descendants (including the 14-year-old girl who spearheaded the project) lesbians, witches, and money-grubbing hags.

Poster "Nothing better to do" writes,

These two have nothing better to do?? This is a useless issue that should not have even began as a school project. So 8 and 9 generation later this is going to do what for who??? Or is this going to turn out to be a money maker by having these two sue???And what about witches today??? Oh wait, I forgot....freedom of "religion". And then we'll mix in a little "women's rights" movement verbage so all the bases will be covered. Bake at 350 degrees, and wala!!!! You end up with a huge waste of people's time!!!!

"Rick" from Windsor says,

Wait a minute ... if Lawlor equates James Tillman and these ladies' ancestor, is he saying we now owe them money? Let's see ... Tillman got $5,000,000 for wrongful imprisonment. Five million, owing since 1662, at 2.5% interest would be $25.7 trillion. Good luck collecting, ladies!

"Wollfy" from Austin, TX opines,

And how much of our tax dollars will be wasted on witchcraft...too much is the answer. I'll solve it for them....ok they were not witches, done. next

Funny, isn't it, how the mere mention of justice for women brings out the trolls. It's an easy joke, but I can't resist the urge to turn a mirror onto "Nothing better to do." "Rick" seems not to understand the difference between bringing a civil suit to court and testifying before a legislative committee that is considering a non-binding resolution. Does "Wollfy" pay many taxes in Connecticut? What is so offensive about the legislature spending a few hours exonerating people who were wrongfully executed?

Part of the problem seems to be that the Avery family (descendants of accused witch Mary Sanford) describe their spiritual beliefs as "pagan." The article did not indicate that anyone was arguing that 17th-century witches were actually witches - rather, the families were arguing that the women were not guilty of the crime for which they were executed. Since witchcraft accusations in the 1600s generally included the assumption that female defendants were guilty of sexual intercourse with the devil and suckling his imps, it's fair to say that they were probably innocent. That's not good enough for the howling mob on the internet, though. They are supremely offended because their time and money is (not really) being wasted. How dare these women patiently ask for official recognition that their foremothers did not deserve to be executed? When did it become legal for women to speak in public anyway? Bitches.

Puritan Watch

Ever since I found my interests drifting backward in time from the 18th century to the 17th century, I have become more aware of references to "Puritans" in the modern media. Typically, these references characterize the early residents of Massachusetts Bay as dour, grim, sexually repressed, and allergic to happiness. Many historians much abler than I have already shown this idea to be flat-out wrong, but it persists.

Today's sighting comes from the New York Times. The article is about Dr. Carla Pugh, who builds simulators to help med students and young doctors practice examinations and procedures that make them feel icky - mostly exams involving reproductive organs. Dr. Pugh is doing fine work, and I applaud her. However, the quote at the end (from sex columnist Dan Savage, whom I usually love) is inappropriate:

What good is a mechanic who doesn’t like getting greasy? If you have a squeamish doctor, get a new doctor. That’s America. Canada got the French. Australia got the convicts. We got the Puritans and we never got over it.

For the record, there was plenty of "earthiness" in 17th- and 18th-century American culture. Savage is possibly thinking of the Victorians (though that is somewhat problematic as well).