“Unfolding Histories” at the Cape Ann Museum

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester is hosting its first major archival exhibition, showcasing notable documents from its collection and those of seven other local institutions.

“Unfolding Histories: Cape Ann before 1900” is organized around ten themes: Native American history, education, religion, African-American history, literary imagination, charity and welfare, women’s history, temperance, warfare, and transportation. The museum says:

Organized thematically, Unfolding Histories lets the documents tell the stories of Cape Ann, thereby highlighting often neglected experiences and perspectives. This archival record richly depicts the political and social structures of our nation before its founding, through its early years and on up to 1900, and provides windows into the working and cultural life of a place that would become a haven for artists and writers.

The Boston Globe reported, “The show consists of some 80 items: letters, books, maps (one of them executed by no less than Samuel de Champlain), official documents, photographs, diaries, Native American artifacts, even stereopticon cards.”

The Cape Ann Museum’s Twitter feed has been sharing items from the exhibit under the hashtag #unfoldinghistories. Highlights from the Revolutionary era include:

• this note about the outbreak of war inserted into Gloucester’s town records.
• a love letter from 1776.
• a handwritten certificate of emancipation in 1777 (shown above).
• taxation to support a Continental soldier in 1782.
• records of payment for housing a black mother and child in 1783 (the same year the Massachusetts courts made slavery unenforceable).

The exhibit was curated by Gloucester resident Molly O’Hagan Hardy, who is also director for Digital and Book History Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society. The other organizations lending documents for the exhibit are the Annisquam Historical Society, Essex Historical Society and Shipbuilding Museum, Essex Town Hall, Gloucester City Hall, Gloucester Lyceum & Sawyer Free Library, Manchester Historical Museum, Sargent House Museum, and Sandy Bay Historical Society.

“Unfolding Histories” will be on display until 9 September.

The Difficult Career of the Rev. John Cleaveland, Jr.

John Cleaveland was born in the part of Ipswich that’s now Essex in 1750. He was the son and namesake of the town minister.

John, Jr., apparently grew up expecting to study at Yale, where his father had graduated five years before his birth. But that didn’t work out.

Mortimer Blake’s A Centurial History of the Mendon Association of Congregational Ministers (1853) said Cleaveland had a younger brother and “the father being unable to support both in college, decided to treat both alike, and give them the best education he could.”

However, Yale’s library catalogue says there were three younger brothers, two becoming doctors and one dying young, as well as three sisters. And John Cleaveland, Jr., was “debarred by his health from completing his education” at that college.

For whatever reason, the younger John Cleaveland never graduated from Yale. Indeed, he may never have entered. In 1773 he married a woman named Abigail Adams in his father’s home town of Canterbury, Connecticut. Two years later John joined Col. Moses Little’s regiment of the Continental Army, for which his father was chaplain.

After the war, John, Jr., studied theology on his own. Finally in 1785, at the age of thirty-five, he was ordained in Stoneham. His tenure there was peaceful until June 1793, when Abigail Cleaveland died.

Or more precisely, the Rev. Mr. Cleaveland’s tenure was peaceful until January 1794, when he married Elizabeth Evans, his young housekeeper. Even in a society that wanted ministers to be married, some people thought six months was too soon. What’s more, there were doubts about the new Mrs. Cleaveland’s faith. “She was not pious,” Blake wrote. “This marriage with a non-professor, troubled some pious minds at Stoneham.”

Most important church members stood by their pastor. Their opponents therefore resorted to unorthodox means of showing their disapproval. According to William B. Stevens’s 1891 History of Stoneham:

At one time they nailed up the door of the minister’s pew, at another, covered the seat and chairs and the seat of the pulpit with tar. Not content with these indignities against the pastor, some one vented the general spite by inflicting an injury upon his horse, probably by cutting off his tail.

The church stood by him, but the town voted to lock and fasten up the meeting-house against him, so that for a time public worship was held at the house of Deacon Edward Bucknam. They refused to raise his salary, requested him to relinquish his ministry and leave the town, declined to furnish any reason, and rejected his proposition to call a council…

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Channell on “Revolutionary Sailors” in Quincy, 3 Sept.

On Wednesday, 3 September, the Thomas Crane Library in Quincy will host a talk by Fred Channell on the topic “Discover Historic New England: Revolutionary Sailors.” The event announcement says Channell “will present his research about his family members who fought in Boston Harbor during the Revolutionary War.”

It looks like Channell is a descendant of the subject of this item in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register from 1859:

Death of an Aged Man.—Abram Fitz-John Channell died at Georgeville, C.E., on the 9th instant, aged about one hundred and ten years. He was born in Shefford, Bedfordshire, Eng., and was apprenticed to Harris Varden, tailor, Whitehorse Yard, Drury lane, London. At eighteen years of age he was impressed, and made one or more cruises on board an English man-of-war. He then engaged in the merchant service, and in the course of a few years found himself in Chebaco Parish, Ipswich, Me., where for many years he successfully carried on the business of tailoring and hotel keeping. He resided for many years in that part of Ipswich now called Essex. From Essex he removed to his late residence in Canada. He was a man of great activity, energy and enterprise, and his uniform habits of temperance doubtless contributed many a year to his long life. He had descendants of the fifth generation whom his own eyes have looked upon, and whom his arms have held.—Journal, January 21, 1858.

According to cemetery records, Channell died at the age of 107, meaning he was probably born in 1750. Later American sources said he fought on the Continental side in the Battle of Sullivan’s Island in June 1776 and the Rhode Island campaign the next year. But that information didn’t make this Canadian obituary.

Fred Channell published a book about his ancestor last year called The Immortal Patriot. In addition to the lives of Revolutionary-era sailors, it’s said to discuss “grave robbing, lake monsters, strange religions, and smuggling.” His event is scheduled to last from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M.

“Our excellent and venerable Father John Wise”

Yesterday I quoted a 1745 item from the Boston Evening-Post that appears to be a satirical commentary on the enthusiastic reception the Rev. George Whitefield was getting in Boston.

That item suggested Whitefield’s fans might “cordially approve of the well-known Churches Quarrel espoused, wrote by our excellent and venerable Father John Wise, Anno 1715.” Which sounds like an allusion every reader should recognize, and I didn’t.

So I Googled and Wikipedia’ed and otherwise caught up a bit to 250 years ago. I learned that the Rev. John Wise (1652-1725) was a minister in the part of Ipswich, Massachusetts, now called Essex. He gained a reputation for never shying away from controversy.

Wise first became prominent when he went to jail for leading protests against Gov. Edmund Andros in 1688. That act would have been widely respected in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, but the newspaper specifically referred to his activity in 1715.

In 1710 Wise published a pamphlet called The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused. It was a reply to proposals from the Rev. Cotton Mather and other big-congregation clergymen for stronger “associations” among New England’s Congregationalist meetings, presumably to hold off the growing influence of Anglicanism.

Wise answered by declaring that it was important for congregations to maintain their independence not just from the Church of England but from any higher authority. His pamphlet suggested that Mather and his “association” proponents were “gentlemen inclined to presbyterian principles.” Though the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland was just as Calvinist as the Congregationalists, Wise distrusted its hierarchical structure.

I suspect the style Wise chose for his argument made him appear more radical. The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused was “A Reply in Satire,” and it got biting at times. In addition, Wise came from a working-class background while Mather and most of the other ministers recommending an “association” grew up in the elite. Mather wrote in his diary:

A furious Man, called John Wise, of whom, I could wish he had, Cor bonum [a good heart], while we are all sensible, he wants, Caput bene regulatum [a well-ordered mind], has lately published a foolish Libel, against some of us, for presbyterianizing too much in our Care to repair some Deficiencies in our Churches. And some of our People, who are not only tenacious of their Liberties, but also more suspicious than they have cause to be of a Design in their pastors to make abridgments of them; they are too much led into Temptation, by such Invectives. But the Impression is not so great as our grand Adversary doubtless hoped for.

That was in 1715, when Wise’s pamphlet was reprinted. I bet that whoever wrote the newspaper item was looking at that edition rather than the original from five years before.

In 1717 Wise published a more sober argument for the same position titled Vindication of the Government of New England Churches. One of his intellectual innovations was to base ecclesiastical independence on English liberties as well as scriptural precedents.

William Allen’s American Biographical and Historical Dictionary (1809) said about Wise:

In the beginning of his last sickness he observed to a brother in the gospel, that he had been a man of contention, but, as the state of the church made it necessary, he could say upon the most serious review of his conduct, that he had fought a good fight.

In 1745 the Evening-Post writer appears to have remembered Wise mainly as an anti-authoritarian, thus an inspiration for Whitefield’s “New Light” followers. Decades later, in 1772, Wise’s two anti-association pamphlets were reprinted, which might have reflected more interest in his ideas of liberty. And after the U.S. of A. was established, some authors have looked back at Wise as a forerunner of the country’s fight for independence.

[The image above shows the John Wise House in Ipswich, photographed by Elizabeth Thomsen and available through Flickr under a Creative Commons license. The house is apparently now for sale.]

“A Dish of Fryed Clams”

I’m grabbing the chance to quote William Pavlovsky’s letter in Saturday’s Boston Globe because it fits right in with Boston 1775, it saves me from coming up with own material, and I think more people should hear about Dr. Alexander Hamilton of Annapolis.

Pavlovsky told the paper and its readers:

I would like to lay to rest, once and for all, the myth that fried clams were “invented” in Essex in 1916.

As proof of my contention, I offer the following from the “Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton,” an account of a journey through the northern colonies in 1744 by a physician from Annapolis, Md., and published as “Gentleman’s Progress” by the University of North Carolina Press. From the entry for June 15, 1744, at the Narrows Ferry on Staten Island, N.Y.: “I dined att one Corson’s that keeps the ferry . . . upon what I never have eat in my life before — a dish of fryed clams, of which shellfish there is in abundance in these parts.”

Hamilton adds that the diners stuffed them down with rye bread and butter, and that they “took such a deal of chawing that we were long att dinner, and the dish began to cool before we had eat enough.”

Dr. Hamilton’s delightful description of a journey from Annapolis to York, Maine, is in print at a reasonable price in the Penguin Classics volume Colonial American Travel Narratives.