“Others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants”

An extract from Daniel N. Gullotta’s review for Providence magazine of Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield by Sean McGever.

McGever highlights:

…the deeply hierarchical view of the world held by [Jonathan] Edwards, [John] Wesley, [George] Whitefield, and their evangelical contemporaries. From their perspective, just as God ordains some to be princes and governors, so too are others destined to inhabit the lower rungs of society as servants, laborers, and even slaves.

Slavery, therefore, was believed to be ordained by God and, in the words of Puritan clergyman William Gouge, such an understanding was “clearly and plentifully noted in the Scripture, that any one who is any whit acquainted therewith may know them to be so.”

While such views seem counterintuitive to our modern-day egalitarian norms, McGever adeptly explains why 18th-century evangelicals would have perceived our anti-hierarchical tendencies as nothing but a “hellish confusion” to borrow a description from the Puritan theologian John Owen.

Despite their divinely ordered view of the world, 18th-century evangelicals, following their theological ancestors, acknowledged that slavery was a sinful product of the fall. The question for most Christian thinkers was not whether slavery was biblical, but rather how it could be practiced biblically.

The book discusses how Whitefield promoted importing enslaved Africans as a solution for Georgia’s labor problems. Edwards wrote little on slavery for public consumption but defended and practiced it privately. As for the last of these prominent evangelists: 

Later in life, Wesley felt compelled to speak out as the abolitionist movement, driven primarily by Quakers in the 1770s, gained momentum. Readers might be surprised at how little Scripture he used in his shift to opposing slavery, favoring instead ideas drawn from natural law and reasoning. McGever…theorizes that Wesley would never have adopted his abolitionist stance had he been raised in America or even just spent more time there, arguing for the essential contingency of many deeply held beliefs.

Seeking John Morey in Roxbury

There were two generations of men named John Morey (also spelled Mory) in Roxbury.

The first John Morey was born in 1687 and married a woman named Hannah. They had several children, including a baby named John in 1736 who died early and another named John born on 23 Jan 1738. The couple’s daughters married into the Pierpoint and Turrell families.

This John Morey became prominent and wealthy. In 1734 he served as one of the two coroners of Suffolk County. As of 1741, he was using the suffix “Esq.” in a newspaper advertisement. In 1745 and 1753, Morey took in poor teenagers under indenture from the Boston Overseers of the Poor.

Morey also owned enslaved people. According to Hannah Mather Crocker, he was the owner of a mason named John Marcy, whom he hired out for jobs in Boston. Marcy was evangelized by hearing the Rev. George Whitefield, joined the Rev. John Moorhead’s church, married an enslaved servant of Lt. Gov. William Dummer, and eventually gained his freedom.

That John Morey died in 1771. He left an estate valued at almost £3,400. It included a large farm and lots of livestock, but also an eight-day clock, a map of the city of London, and five books—more luxury goods than an ordinary farmer had. He was labeled a “Gentleman” in his son’s newspaper advertisement settling the estate.

Also on that 1771 estate inventory were:

• …a Nego [sic] Boy Named Cato about 12 Years Old…[valued at £]32.0.0
• …a Negro Garl About 11 Years Old…26.13.4
• …Ditto Named Bino About 7 Years Old…16.0.0
• …Ditto Named Zippra an Inferm garl…6.0.0

It looks like the clock went to the West Roxbury meetinghouse. At least, the publication of an 1853 sermon referred to the meetinghouse having that clock with Morey’s name as donor on it. The church also received a silver baptismal basin in 1774; I’m guessing that was given by the younger John Morey but at the behest of his father.

Back in 1768, that second-generation John Morey had turned thirty and married Mary Cheney, born in 1743. The following year, that couple had their first baby, a son they naturally named John. He was followed by Hannah in 1771, Ebenezer Cheaney in 1774, and Susannah in 1776.

Mary’s father was Ebenezer Cheney (1699–1780) of Roxbury. His will left her considerable real estate in Middleborough. The couple prepared to move south. On 2 Oct 1783 John Morey advertised in the Independent Chronicle to sell “A very valuable Farm in Roxbury…containing one hundred and fifty Acres,” plus “Salt Marsh” and “near twenty Acres of good Wood Land.” Interested parties could speak with Morey or three of his neighbors, one being Eleazer Weld, Esq. Morey also called in his debts.

In March and April 1785, four Boston newspapers ran identically worded advertisements announcing the sale “By Publick Vendue [i.e., auction], on the premises, the Monday the 25th day of April next, The valuable FARM of Mr. John Morey, lying in Roxbury.” Reflecting the postwar economic situation, this ad said:

N.B. The payment will be made easy to purchasers, as the whole sum will not be immediately wanted, and government securities will be taken at their common rate of discount.

This time people could inquire of Weld and two other neighbors, but Morey was no longer said to be living on the property.

The facts of John Morey’s life shed a little light on the sale/indenture of the boy named Dick Morey in July 1785, discussed yesterday. For one thing, Morey was leaving that child behind in Roxbury as he moved to a new farm in Middleborough. David Stoddard Greenough paid him £5 for Dick’s next sixteen years, less than the value of a seven-year-old girl for life back in 1771. 

More ominously, it looks like that enslaved girl named Bino whom Morey inherited in 1771 was probably the mother he called “my Negro servant Binah” in 1785. She had given birth around 1780 when she was about sixteen years old. We don’t know who the father was, but he was white since Bino was listed as “a Negro Garl” and her son as “a Molatto Boy.” The list of possible fathers has to start with John Morey himself.

Finally, the Eleazer Weld who helped in selling the Morey farm was also one of the magistrates who affirmed Dick Morey’s indenture in 1787.

John Morey died in Middleborough in 1800, his widow Mary in 1821.

David S. Greenough and his wife Anna had a son (shown above) in the Loring Greenough House in 1787. Anna also had one surviving child from her first marriage. Those boys presumably grew up with Dick Morey as a household servant or farm hand in between their ages but not in their class.

However, I haven’t found any record of Dick Morey past those two documents from 1785–1787.

“The First BIBLE ever printed in America”?

As I quoted yesterday, Isaiah Thomas grew up as an apprentice printer hearing stories about how his master, Zechariah Fowle, had helped to secretly print a New Testament in the late 1740s.

Thomas also heard about a complete Bible completed by another Boston printing partnership, also surreptitiously, by 1752.

However, it’s worth noting that in his History of Printing in America (1810), Thomas admitted about the New Testament publication, “I have heard that the fact has been disputed.” While he claimed John Hancock had owned a copy of the full Bible, he couldn’t point to any extant examples or describe how they might be recognized.

Indeed, in 1770 another Boston printer publicly denied the existence of any previous American-made Bible. The 3 Dec 1770 Boston Evening-Post included a large advertisement that began:

The First BIBLE ever printed in America.

PROPOSALS
For printing by Subscription, in a most beautiful and elegant Manner, in two large Volumes Folio.
The HOLY BIBLE,
Containing the OLD and NEW TESTAMENTS,
Or a FAMILY BIBLE,
With Annotations and Parallel Scriptures.
By the late Rev. SAMUEL CLARK, A.M.

The following paragraphs promised large and elegant type and paper manufactured in America—or “superfine Imperial Paper” for those few ready to pay double for extra quality. The book was to be delivered in seventy installments of five pages each, starting two weeks after three hundred people had subscribed.

The printer making this offer was John Fleeming, late of the Boston Chronicle, now working out of “his PRINTING OFFICE, in Newbury-street, nearly opposite the WHITE-HORSE Tavern, Boston.” He had married Alice Church in August and was probably looking for a way to support a family.

The annotator Samuel Clarke (1626-1701) had been a Nonconformist minister in Britain who first published his edition of the Bible in 1690. That book was reprinted in Glasgow in 1765, which is probably how Fleeming, a Scotsman, got the text. The Rev. George Whitefield praised Clarke’s work, and of course Americans widely admired Whitefield. Indeed, almost half of Fleeming’s advertisement was a quotation from Whitefield.

Within the next two months, the same ad appeared in many other New England newspapers and in New York. However, Fleeming must not have collected the subscriptions he hoped for. In modern terms, his Kickstarter campaign failed. That edition was never published.

In 1782 the Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken likewise announced that he would print the first English Bible in America. And he actually completed the job that September. The Continental Congress and George Washington both praised the enterprise. Many copies survive.

Obviously Fleeming and Aitken didn’t acknowledge the editions that Isaiah Thomas had heard about. Thomas would have said that was because the Kneeland and Green Bible, and the Rogers and Fowle New Testament that preceded it, had been disguised as London publications in order to get around a special grant to certain British printers.

In different writings Thomas specified that the Boston Bible appeared in 1749 and carried the imprint “London: Printed by Mark Baskett, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”—but that man didn’t start publishing Bibles until the 1760s. Was this a mistake for Thomas Baskett, who did issue Bibles in the 1740s? Or is its main significance as evidence that Thomas hadn’t actually seen the Bible he believed did exist?

Many book collectors have searched for the fake Baskett Bible that was actually printed in Boston. Presumably this means finding a Bible with a London Baskett imprint but with typography that didn’t match copies known in Britain.

However, only one candidate for such a book has been found, surfacing in 1895, according to an article in the Boston Globe. Three decades later, Dr. Charles L. Nichols’s close examination showed that was actually a genuine Baskett Bible from 1763 that someone had altered by removing one volume’s title page and clumsily changing the date on the other to 1752. See his findings delivered to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Nonetheless, as Nichols stated in a follow-up paper for the American Antiquarian Society (P.D.F. download), he remained convinced that there was a Bible published surreptitiously in Boston, even if Thomas didn’t have all the details right.

Subsequent scholars, including Randolph C. Adams in The Colophon in 1935 and Harry Miller Lydenberg in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1954, were more skeptical. They concluded that Thomas’s report was simply wrong.

Perhaps the digitization of books will produce the anomalous copy of a Baskett Bible that collectors have sought. More likely, however, Zechariah Fowle just lied to little Isaiah about how he’d labored long and hard over a secret publication of the Bible.

The Big News in Boston 250 Years Ago

On 1 Oct 1770, 250 years ago today, the Boston Gazette ran three major pieces of news.

The first item came from Philadelphia, where on 12 September a group of seventeen merchants had published a public letter saying:

Many of the inhabitants of this City, who sometime since entertained hopes of advantage from a continuation of our Non-Importation Agreement; being now fully convinced, it cannot answer the end proposed; and that the Trade of this City must severely feel the effects of adhering to that measure, while the Colonies around us are enjoying the advantages of our inactivity, are of opinion, it is a proper time to make an alteration in said agreement.

The choices, as this group saw it, were “whether said agreement should continue, or be dissolved, so far as to open the Importation of Goods from Great-Britain as usual, tea, and such other articles, as are or may be subject to duties, for the purpose of raising a revenue in America excepted.”

Ten members of Philadelphia’s non-importation committee responded by calling a public meeting, as described in the city’s initial agreement, to decide what to do. That was the biggest crack yet in the North American colonies’ boycott to protest the Townshend Act. Parliament had repealed all but the tea duty, so many merchants were eager to take that as a win and get back to business as usual.

Edes and Gill also reported on the opening of a new session of the Massachusetts General Court on 26 September. Once again, acting governor Thomas Hutchinson had convened the legislature on the campus of Harvard College in Cambridge, removing it from Boston as his superiors in London had ordered.

Once again, the lawmakers responded by complaining about that venue instead of passing the laws the governor wanted. A house committee led by speaker Thomas Cushing recommended that “it was for the Interest of the Province still to adhere to their former Resolution not to proceed to the public Business.” The General Court didn’t immediately adopt that measure, instead agreeing not to debate it until more far-flung delegates arrived and also to observe a fast day the following week—which produced the same delay.

Most momentously, however, the Boston Gazette reported:

By an Express arriv’d last Evening from Newbury Port, we have the melancholy Account of the Death of that eminent Servant of God, and faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, the Rev. Mr. GEORGE WHITEFIELD;———

He was taken the with Asthma Yesterday Morning about 6 o’Clock, and expired almost instantaneously.

Whitefield, born in Gloucester, England, in 1714, had toured the American colonies seven times since 1738, attracting thousands of people to his sermons. He was a spark of the “New Light” revivals that roiled New England congregations in the middle of the century, and he remained immensely popular. Historians estimate that across the British Empire his audiences totaled up to ten million people.

Whitefield’s death on 30 September was not only the biggest news in that issue of the Boston Gazette, but for some people it was the biggest news of 1770—even bigger than the Boston Massacre, the repeal of the Townshend duties, and the new ministry in London under Lord North.

The Great 1770 Quiz Answers, Part 4

Here are answers to the final questions from the Great 1770 Quiz.

X. Match the following men to their experience of tarring and feathering in 1770.

1) John Adams
2) Robert Auchmuty
3) Henry Barnes
4) Theophilus Lillie
5) Patrick McMaster
6) William Molineux
7) Owen Richards
8) Jesse Savil

A) tarred and feathered by a mob in Gloucester
B) tarred and feathered by a mob led by a Connecticut captain
C) found his horse tarred and feathered
D) threatened in writing with tar and feathers while visiting Salem
E) found the outside of his shop tarred
F) carted around by a mob with tar and feathers but not tarred and feathered
G) filed suit against half a dozen people for tarring and feathering someone
H) defended a man accused of tarring and feathering someone

I discussed George Gailer’s lawsuit against the people who attacked him with tar and feathers in October 1769 back here. Robert Auchmuty was his lawyer (thus G) while John Adams defended David Bradlee (thus H).

Ben Irvin’s 2003 New England Quarterly article “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776” lists all the other incidents in its appendix. Other historians mention them as well. Owen Richards and Jesse Savil were low-level Customs officers. Henry Barnes, Theophilus Lillie, and Patrick McMaster were businessmen who defied the non-importation movement.

The threat to tar and feather William Molineux was an anomaly. Instead of enforcing the Customs laws or defying non-importation, he defied Customs laws and enforced non-importation. But that threat is recorded on the front page of the 20 Aug 1770 Boston Gazette, as shown here, right under a mention of tar and feathers being readied for importers in Woodbridge, New Jersey. By the sestercentennial of that news item, I hope to understand it a little better.

The correct answers are thus Adams (H), Auchmuty (G), Barnes (C), Lillie (E), McMaster (F), Molineux (D), Richards (B), and Savil (A). Once again, both Kathy and John got all the answers right.

XI. One of the most famous men in the British Empire visited Massachusetts in August and September 1770 and never left. Who was he?

This question offers so few specifics that I don’t think it’s Googlable. It’s a test of knowledge of the British Empire in 1770 and Massachusetts trivia.

The man was the Rev. George Whitefield. The popular British evangelist made many preaching tours through America. According to his 1877 biography and the 1903 edition of John Rowe’s diary, Whitefield’s final New England tour saw him preaching at:

• Rhode Island: Newport (4-8 Aug), Providence (9-12 Aug).
• Massachusetts: Attleboro (13 Aug), Wrentham (14 Aug), Boston at various churches (15-18 Aug), Malden (19 Aug), Boston again (20-24 Aug), Medford (26 Aug), Charlestown (27 Aug), Cambridge (28 Aug), Boston again (29-30 Aug), Jamaica Plain in Roxbury (31 Aug), Milton (1 Sept), Roxbury again (2 Sept), Boston again (3 Sept), Salem (5 Sept), Marblehead (6 Sept), Salem again (7 Sept), Cape Ann (8 Sept), Ipswich (9 Sept), Newburyport (10-11 Sept), Rowley (12-13 Sept), [laid low by diarrhea, 14-16 Sept], Boston again (17-19 Sept), Newton (20 Sept), [ill again, 21-22 Sept].
• New Hampshire: Portsmouth (23-25 Sept).
• Maine: Kittery (26 Sept), York (27 Sept).
• New Hampshire: Portsmouth again (28 Sept), Exeter (29 Sept).

Whitefield returned to Newburyport, but he died at 6:00 A.M. on 30 September. Per his wish, the minister was buried in the crypt of the Newburyport meetinghouse, shown above.

Both John and Kathy answered this question correctly.

XII. Young servant Charles Bourgate accused his master Edward Manwaring, a Customs official, of shooting at the crowd during the Boston Massacre. At Manwaring’s trial in December, however, a jailhouse informant testified to hearing Bourgate say that Elizabeth Waldron had induced him to tell that lie. What did Waldron allegedly offer Bourgate for his testimony?

This question helpfully pointed to a specific moment of testimony, but of course the challenge is finding a record of that moment. A report on Edward Manwaring’s trial was printed alongside the transcript of the Rex v. Wemms et al. trial of the soldiers for the Boston Massacre—but not in every copy.

The copy of the trial record that Harbottle Dorr must have bought early and bound with his newspapers ends with an index of witnesses. But later copies like this one on archive.org have an appendix reporting on Manwaring’s acquittal.

I’ll discuss Charles Bourgate’s accusations next month. For now, I’ll just quote what a debtor named James Penny testified that the French boy had told him:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. Waldron, the wife of Mr. Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

The answer to this question is thus “gingerbread and cheese.”

And it’s further evidence that William Molineux was everywhere in 1770 Boston.

Once again, Kathy and John both knew the putative bribe.

XIII. Three brothers from Massachusetts, two of them prominent in one of 1770’s most famous events, are said to have died at the same place, yet they were thousands of miles apart. Who were they, and how is this possible?

One of 1770’s most famous events was the Boston Massacre trial, and reports of that proceeding often note that Samuel Quincy (1735-1789) was one of the prosecutors while his younger brother Josiah Quincy, Jr. (1744-1775), was one of the defense attorneys.

Did they have a third brother? Yes, Edmund Quincy (1733-1768), who was a merchant rather than a lawyer.

And where did the three men die? They all died “at sea,” but in different corners of the north Atlantic. Edmund was on a voyage to the Caribbean for his health. Josiah was returning to Massachusetts after meeting with British Whigs in the crucial winter of 1774-75. And Samuel, having become a Loyalist and taken a Customs service job in Antigua, was sailing to Britain with his second wife, again in hopes of restoring his health, and died off the African coast.

The Quincy brothers’ deaths was the tricky bit of trivia that got me thinking about making another quiz. I’m pleased that fact wasn’t too obscure for people to find. Or at least not too obscure for both John and Kathy.

By the narrow margin of a single question, John provided the most correct answers. Congratulations to him, to Kathy for an impressive performance, and to everyone else who puzzled over this quiz.

(John, please comment on this posting with your mailing address, which I’ll keep private, and I’ll send you a copy of The Atlas of Boston History provided by the University Press of Chicago.)

“Next Door to Brazen Head”

Yesterday I related how the brazier James Jackson came to Boston from London and by December 1734 opened a shop called the Brazen Head, after its brass-covered sign.

That November, Benjamin Franklin directed a letter “To Mr. Henry Price At the Brazen Head Boston, N.E.” Price, a tailor, had come to Boston from England in 1723. Ten years later he founded the town’s first Freemasons’ lodge, having been named “Provincial Grand Master of New England and Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging” during a trip home. Franklin was writing on Freemasonry business.

I’ve found no other links between Price, the Brazen Head, and Jackson. Six years later Price advertised under the sign of “the Golden Fleece, in Kingstreet,” which was appropriate for his work as a tailor. It’s conceivable that Franklin just mixed up his mythological metallic signs. It’s also possible that Price and Jackson lived close together, and the Brazen Head was already a neighborhood beacon useful for directing mail.

Certainly it’s no surprise that a shiny brass head hung out on the town’s main street would become a landmark. Within five years, neighboring shopkeepers used Jackson’s shop sign to direct customers to their own businesses.

Here, for example, is an advertisement from the 7 Sept 1736 New-England Weekly Journal:

Several Sorts of Glass Bottles, as also good velvet Corks, To be Sold by Mr. Belthazar Bayard, next Door to Brazen Head in Cornhill, Boston.

Bayard married Mary Bowdoin, and the couple were both eventually buried in the Bowdoin family tomb in the Granary Burying-Ground, shown here. Mary was a first cousin of Gov. James Bowdoin, commemorated on the plaque now affixed to that tomb.

Back to the Brazen Head. Here’s another advertisement from the 12 Nov 1739 Boston Evening-Post:

Just published,
An excellent SERMON on Regeneration, Preached to a numerous Audience, by George Whitefield, A.B. of Pembroke College, Oxford. Printed in London; Reprinted in Boston, and Sold by Charles Harrison, over-against the Brazen Head in Cornhill.

The eye-catching shop sign also meant that Jackson had less occasion to advertise his main business of brasswork. But, as was standard for Boston shopkeepers, he undertook to sell other things and needed to promote those goods. For example, the Boston Gazette for 23 June 1735 ran this notice:

JAMES JACKSON, Founder,
At the Sign of the Brasen Head in Cornhill Boston makes and sells all sorts of Founders’ Wares, also Mends, Tinns, Buys or Exchanges all sorts of Copper, Pewter, Brass, Lead or Iron by wholesale or retail. Likewise a two Wheel’d Chaise well finish’d, and lin’d with Scarlett broad Cloth, with a good Harness, also a Chair lin’d with red Morocco Leather, with a good Harness, and both new, to be Sold reasonably by said Jackson.

A couple of weeks later, on 7 July 1735, the New-England Weekly Journal announced:

Brown paper, TO BE SOLD, for ready Money, by James Jackson, at the Brazen Head in Cornhill, Boston.

P.S. There will be no more Brown Paper made at Mr. Fry’s Mill at Stroudwater, at Casco-Bay

Which brings us to papermaker Richard Fry, one of Massachusetts’s more contentious characters in the 1730s and ’40s.

TOMORROW: The controversies of Richard Fry.

“The concourse of spectators was greater than we ever remember”

Earlier in the week I wrote about the funeral of Christopher Seider. The merchant John Rowe stated in his diary, “I am very sure two thousand people attended his Funerall.” That would have been one of every eight people in Boston.

John Adams watched that event with Rowe and wrote:

a vast Number of Boys walked before the Coffin, a vast Number of Women and Men after it, and a Number of Carriages. My Eyes never beheld such a funeral. The Procession extended further than can be well imagined.

But within a couple of weeks came the funeral of the first four victims of the Boston Massacre, and that was even bigger. “Such a Concourse of People I never saw before—I believe Ten or Twelve thousand,” wrote Rowe. That was more than twice the reported capacity of Old South Meeting-house.

A report printed in several newspapers guessed:

It is supposed that there must have been a greater Number of People from Town and Country at the Funeral of those who were massacred by the Soldiers, than were ever together on this Continent on any Occasion.

However, back in 1740 Boston newspapers estimated that on several days the Rev. George Whitefield had preached to crowds of 15,000 to 23,000 people on Boston Common. The siege of Fort Carillion in 1759 also involved more than 20,000 people.

Be that as it may, the grandest if not the most crowded funeral that eighteenth-century Boston ever saw took place on this date in 1793: the send-off for Gov. John Hancock. The Guardian of Freedom, published in Haverhill, stated: “The concourse of spectators was greater than we ever remember to have seen on any occasion.”

The main reason for that turnout was fond feelings for Hancock. Most people in Massachusetts admired their governor. Many authors have written that Hancock accomplished little in his final years, but that assumes he went into politics to make changes. Once independence was achieved, and perhaps even before, I think Hancock’s main aim was to increase and preserve his own popularity by keeping most people happy, and in Massachusetts he achieved that.

Another reason for the big occasion on 14 Oct 1793, I think, arose from the circumstance of Hancock’s death on 8 October.

TOMORROW: How the governor died.

Winiarski on the New Lights in Boston, 1 March

On Wednesday, 1 March, the New England Historic Genealogical Society will host a talk by Prof. Douglas L. Winiarski of the University of Richmond based on his new book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England.

The publisher’s description says:

The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century.

George Whitefield’s preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit—visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions—countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today’s evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment.

This conflict was known at the time as the argument between “New Light” and “Old Light” ministers.

In 1842, the Rev. Joseph Tracy dubbed it “the Great Awakening.” That phrase first appeared in Moravian Christian literature of the early 1700s before it became part of the New Lights’ vocabulary. The Rev. John Wesley used it in an extract of his diary he published in 1740. Two years later, Whitefield included the phrase in a letter as a term for a local revival. In 1741, the Rev. John Webb (1687-1750) of Boston’s New North Meeting titled a sermon Christ’s Suit to the Sinner, while He Stands and Knocks at the Door: A Sermon Preach’d in a Time of Great Awakening, at the Tuesday-Evening Lecture in Brattle-Street, Boston.

Prof. Winiarski’s talk is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. at the society’s headquarters on Newbury Street. It is free, and attendees can register here.

The Mystery of “Mrs. W——”

Yesterday I quoted Phillis Wheatley’s “Ode to Neptune,” published in London in 1773 with the subtitle “On Mrs. W——’s Voyage to England” and dateline “Boston, October 10, 1772.”

For readers seeking to identify “Mrs. W——,” the poem offers some internal clues:

• Her last initial was W, of course, and she was almost certainly married and alive in October 1772.
• Later the poem addresses her as “my Susannah.”
• She was about to make a voyage across the ocean to the Thames River in England.

Given the first two clues, most people’s first guess is that Phillis wrote this poem to her mistress, Susannah Wheatley. Except that other evidence strongly suggests that Susannah Wheatley never went to England.

Phillis Wheatley almost certainly addressed her mistress in another poem titled “A Farewel to America. To Mrs. S. W.” But that was when Phillis was about to sail to London and Susannah was staying behind in Boston.

The next guess is based on notes in a copy of Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 book of poetry owned by the American Antiquarian Society. Beside the “Farewel” poem someone penned “Mrs. Susannah Wright,” and then a different someone penciled, “eminent for her Wax Works etc.”

Scholars agree that the “Mrs. S.W.” mentioned in “A Farewel” is Susannah Wheatley. So some have argued that the notes in that A.A.S. copy were actually meant for another poem—namely, “Ode to Neptune.” A woman named “Susannah Wright” who traveled to England in late 1772 would fit all the internal clues. However, no one has identified such a woman or linked her to the Wheatleys.

The “eminent for her Wax Works” line has prompted other interpreters to assert that Wheatley addressed her “Ode to Neptune” to Patience Wright (shown above), who indeed became famous on both sides of the Atlantic for her wax likenesses of people. Wright was in Boston in the early 1770s, and, like Wheatley, she created a tribute to the Rev. George Whitefield.

Patrick Moseley wrote a whole article in New Essays on Phillis Wheatley (2011) about the relationship of Patience Wright and Phillis Wheatley as two women seeking sustenance and respect from their arts in the pre-Revolutionary British Empire. But there remain some inconvenient facts:

• Patience Wright sailed for England in February 1772, months before Phillis Wheatley wrote her poem about “Mrs. W——” embarking.
• Wheatley’s poem clearly addresses its subject as “Susannah.”
• There’s no evidence Wheatley and Wright had any relationship aside from those notes in the A.A.S. copy, which have no source, get Wright’s name wrong, and are attached to a different poem written for someone else.

So here’s my contribution to Wheatley scholarship: The “Mrs. W——” mentioned in “Ode to Neptune” was Susanna Wool(d)ridge, daughter of London merchant William Kelly.

TOMORROW: Who?!

“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.]

The Mystery of the Meeting “at West-Corcus in Boston”

On Friday the Journal of the American Revolution at AllThingsLiberty.com featured my article on the word “caucus,” which surfaced in Boston in 1760, became increasingly accepted over the next decade and a half, and took final form in the history that the Rev. William Gordon published in London in 1788.

People have puzzled over the origin of that word since 1763, when it was still spelled “Corcas” or “corkus.” A lot of the theories about its derivation are based on the “caucus” spelling, and though that might well be how Bostonians pronounced the word, that’s not how they saw it. Instead, we have to look for roots of “Corcas.”

Around 1940, Craigie and Hulbert’s Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles reported that an article in the 19 Aug 1745 Boston Evening-Post referred to a neighborhood in Boston called “West-Corcus.” Other language reference books have repeated that fact as a possible clue, but I don’t see any sign that their authors went to look at that reference in context. I just did. Of course, the Early American Newspapers database makes that task a lot easier today.

The newspaper item does indeed call for a meeting “at West-Corcus in Boston.” However, the whole piece appears to be one of those sarcastic eighteenth-century essays pretending to be someone on the opposite side of a controversy in order to lampoon that side’s views. That makes it very hard to parse out what details, if any, readers were supposed to recognize as relating to real life and what were obviously satirical.

In this case, the controversy was prompted by the visit of the Rev. George Whitefield (shown above, courtesy of NNDB.com) to Boston in early 1745. His “New Light” style of open-air preaching had set off a split and long debate with the “Old Lights” of traditional Congregationalism. (A century later a religious historian would dub this period “the First Great Awakening,” but at the time it seems to have felt more like people who were already religious staying up late arguing fine points of theology when what really mattered was who was in charge.)

This Evening-Post item takes the form of “A Layman” asking the publisher to run a “NOTIFICATION” that says:

WHereas the Association of Lay-Brethren, lately convened at Boston, to take into their serious Consideration the Conduct of those Reverend Clergymen, who have encouraged the Iteration [i.e., departure] of Mr. George Whitefield, whereby the Liberties of the Laity have been invaded, Peace and good Order in many of their Families destroyed, and Reason given for the Report of an unhappy spread of dangerous Doctrines and Divisions, as well as Clerical Encroachments and Usurpations; judge is highly seasonable, that all the Laymen in the Country, who lament the said Disorders, dangerous Doctrines, Divisions and Clerical Usurpations, and cordially approve of the well-known Churches Quarrel espoused, wrote by our excellent and venerable Father John Wise, Anno 1715. should have a general Meeting in order to declare their united Approbation of and Adherence to the great Truths of the Gospel, as exhibited in said Book, and recommend the same, and to consult of proper Methods to maintain them, as an happy Band of Union and special Means to prevent those Disorders, Divisions and Encroachments, and recover and preserve the Gospel Order and vital Piety they lead to; as also to make Enquiry, and bring Accounts of the State of said Ministers in the several Churches, both as to their Doctrine and Behaviour, and to bear proper Testimony against such Errors and evil Practices of theirs as may appear to have any threatening Aspect on Religion and good Order among us.

It is accordingly proposed, that there be such a general Meeting, and that it be held on the last Wednesday of September next, at WEST-CORCUS in Boston aforesaid. Published at the Desire of the abovesaid Association, by
Z. T. Clerk to the Association.

The item closed with a couple of “important Questions” for that gathering to consider:

Whether Christ, after his Resurrection, promised his Presence and Blessing to any other but ITINERANT Preachers? And if not,

Whether the standing Ministry ought not to be dismissed to make way for those Apostolical Preachers? Which will save this Province at least 50,000 per Annum.

Read literally, this item suggested doing away with all the settled ministers and meeting-houses in Massachusetts in favor of traveling preachers like Whitefield. But I don’t think the author expected folks to read the piece literally.

Rather, it’s an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of Whitefield’s popularity over the long-established ministers of Boston and surrounding towns. The writer was basically sneering, “If all you people want to stand outside and listen to some guy who just arrived in New England last year, then maybe you don’t want to have meeting-houses at all! Maybe you’ll listen to just anyone passing through town!”

What might the phrase “at WEST-CORCUS in Boston” mean in that context? It doesn’t appear to be the real name for a Boston neighborhood, as Craigie and Hulbert assumed; there’s no other reference to such a place in the newspapers of the day. But beyond that I’m not at all sure.

• Was there already a political “Corcas” operating under that name, fifteen years before the next mention of it in the newspapers, and were its leaders known to be fans of Whitefield?
• Was “Corcus” a glancing reference to the Scottish kirk, which in 1745 might imply that Whitefield and his followers were somehow less loyal than adherents of established meetings, as well as less respectable?
• Was “West-Corcus” a reference to a tavern in the western part of town? Again, there’s no other reference to such an establishment in the newspapers.
• Was “Corcus” just a nonsense word, suggesting that anyone who’d want to attend this meeting should go to the ends of the earth?

TOMORROW: And what’s all that about “our excellent and venerable Father John Wise, Anno 1715”?

Reviewing the Review

The Massachusetts Historical Review is the Massachusetts Historical Society’s annual journal. It usually contains about four scholarly papers and some book reviews. Copies go to members and subscribers, and people with access to J-STOR can see the articles individually.

Volume 14, published at the end of last year, has three articles on eighteenth-century New England history, which made it particularly interesting for me. (Some issues focus on the U.S. Civil War, industrialization, and other minor topics.) There’s also a review by Chernoh M. Sesay of both Vincent Carretta’s biography Phillis Wheatley (discussed back here) and the essay collection Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom.

The issue’s first paper is “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” by Amalie M. Kass. It recounts the dispute over the new smallpox inoculation in 1721-22. The Rev. Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston favored the new technique. Dr. William Douglass and the young printer James Franklin were the loudest voices against it. In the end, the numbers showed its value—one of the earliest uses of epidemiological statistics to settle a scientific question.

There have been many studies of that event over the years because the principal figures helpfully wrote a lot about it. This webpage from Harvard offers links to their original back-and-forth pamphlets and a bibliography of later studies. Here’s a PDF download of one more article from John Hopkins, another from Illinois Wesleyan, and a recent undergraduate thesis at William & Mary.

I found Kass’s article to be a solid and thorough narration of events without many surprises. One thing that did intrigue me was that Mather had stumbled onto the germ theory of disease:

The Animals that are much more than Thousands of times Less than the finest Grain of Sand, have their Motions; and so, their Muscles, their Tendons, their Fibres, their Blood, and the Eggs wherein their Propagation is carried on. The Eggs of these Insects (and why not the living Insects too!) may insinuate themselves by the Air, and with our Ailments, yea, thro’ the Pores of our skin; and soon gett into the Juices of our Bodies.

The minister’s microscopes weren’t good enough to really see germs, much less the smallpox virus, and this passage from his book The Angel of Bethesda wasn’t published until the 20th century. So he was very lucky to hit on the right idea without strong evidence and quite unlucky not to be able to publish his work and get credit for it.

The next paper is Douglas L. Winiarski’s “The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England’s Era of Great Awakenings.” Winiarski is writing a study of changing New England Congregationalism in the 1700s, to be titled Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. As I reconstruct events, that research included cataloguing “prayer bills,” or short handwritten notes seeking prayer that congregants handed to ministers or left at meetinghouses to be read during services. And that led Winiarski to one such prayer bill, preserved at the Historical Society of Old Newbury and published in Joshua Coffin’s 1845 local history (with modernized spelling and capitalization).

That handwritten document purports to be a prayer by the Rev. Christopher Toppan of Newbury himself, worried about the devil causing his horse to throw him. Winiarski examines it against scores of other prayer bills, finding it unusually long and detailed, as well as oddly spelled and not from Toppan’s own hand. (It’s also inconsistent in its use of the long S, a detail not noted in the paper.)

Winiarski describes the furor of what was later called the “First Great Awakening,” in which Toppan first welcomed and then opposed the preaching of the Rev. George Whitefield. The paper concludes that this document was written and posted to lampoon Toppan and not, as first published, a sincere (if “deranged”) prayer by him. There’s no clue pointing to the real culprit, however. The great value of Winiarski’s paper is its look at New England religious practices in the 1740s. That one curious document can be a peephole into the New Light/Old Light debate.

TOMORROW: A study of one runaway slave, or many.

Phillis Wheatley’s Early Published Work

When Ezekiel Russell invited readers of the Boston Censor to order a collection of poems by Phillis Wheatley in early 1772, she was already known in town as a poet.

Wheatley’s verses circulated in manuscript, and some had been printed. Her first published work was a 1766 poem on two sailors who had nearly been lost at sea, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin”; it appeared in the Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767. A note in that Rhode Island newspaper described her as “a Negro Girl (belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston).” When Hussey and Coffin dined at John Wheatley’s house and “told of their narrow Escape, this Negro Girl at the same Time ’tending Table, heard the Relation, from which she composed the following Verses.”

In 1770, Wheatley wrote her poem on the death of the immensely popular Rev. George Whitefield. Russell and John Boyle published that on 11 October in two different forms in Boston—broadside and pamphlet. Those editions stated that the author was “PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.—And has been but 9 Years in this Country from Africa.” The printers went to the expense of advertising one form (which cost “7 Coppers”) in the Boston News-Letter.

Boosted by Whitefield’s popularity, that poem was reissued by other Boston printers, and by printers in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and London. It was appended to the back of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton’s sermon on Whitefield’s death, published in both Boston and London, with the name of “PHIILIS, a Negro Girl, of Seventeen Years of Age,” on the title page (as shown above).

The following year, a Boston woman named Jane Dunlap published a pamphlet titled Poems Upon Several Sermons Preached by the Rev’d and Renowned George Whitefield While in Boston, She alluded to Wheatley’s reputation with these lines:

Shall his due praises be so loudly sung
By a young Afric damsels virgin tongue?
And I be silent!

In 1771, a broadside titled “To Mrs. Leonard, on the Death of her HUSBAND” was published with the credit “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom. (This is a rare example of her being identified with a surname before she became free.) Her “On the Death of Doctor Samuel Marshall” appeared anonymously in the Boston Evening-Post on 7 October. Some scholars suggests other poems in Boston newspapers, including one on the Boston Massacre, were also Phillis Wheatley’s work.

Obviously, all those printers accepted that those poems were worthy of publication. Almost all gave Wheatley credit for them, highlighting rather than hiding her status as a young slave from Africa. Jane Dunlap acknowledged her as a poetic forerunner.

Furthermore, in nearly two centuries of research about Wheatley, no one has yet found any Bostonian expressing doubt that she composed her own verses. No one wrote to those newspapers pooh-poohing their credits—and Bostonians weren’t shy about arguing in the newspapers. No letters survive voicing skepticism about the Wheatley family’s outlandish claims about their slave girl.

I’m sure that some Bostonians were surprised at the notion of an enslaved teenager who had arrived in America only in 1761 being able to write poetry in the high style. It was a remarkable achievement. But the only person we know put that surprise into writing was Thomas Wooldridge, visiting from New York, and he was quickly convinced.

So where’s the evidence that Bostonians were “piqued” about Phillis Wheatley’s poetry?

TOMORROW: Two readings of one letter.

The Unhappy Ministerial Career of the Rev. John Carnes

John Carnes was born in Boston in 1723. His father was a pewterer who improved his social position through militia service. During the Big Dig, archeologists explored his land in the North End and discovered wine bottles personalized with the man’s name in the wax seals. Carnes had many children, but only young John was apparently interested in becoming a minister, so his father sent him off to Harvard, paying the tuition in pewter tableware.

While John was at college in 1740, the Rev. George Whitefield (shown here) made his first visit to Cambridge, reportedly preaching under an elm on the common. John felt inspired by this “New Light” religious revival, though the professors and tutors were more suspicious.

John Carnes graduated in 1742, earned his master’s degree, and was ordained as the new minister at Stoneham in December 1746. The following July, he married Mary Lewis of Lynn, three years his senior and from a comfortably wealthy family. John and Mary Carnes looked like they were in for a typical rural Massachusetts minister’s career: many uneventful years in the pulpit, children every two or three years, &c.

But the Stoneham congregation came to dislike and disrespect Carnes. They never raised his salary, and didn’t pay what they promised in a timely way, and finally drove him to resign in July 1757. He published his side of the dispute in the Boston Gazette the next month.

Carnes and his family moved back to his wife’s home town of Lynn. After preaching in various meetings, he accepted the job of minister at Rehoboth’s Seekonk parish in April 1759. Almost immediately some congregants started to complain. Their objections may not have been about Carnes so much as how people were taxed for his salary. The grousers appear to have been a minority of the congregation, but a loud one.

In 1763 a council of men from eight other churches met to arbitrate the dispute. They questioned Carnes and his opponents and concluded:

nothing has appeared inconsistent with either his christian or ministerial character. We have reason to conclude that he hath been uncommonly supported under his continued trials and temptations, discovered a serious spirit, and endeavoured in the midst of numberless discouragements, to carry on the great design of his ministry.

But his opponents still weren’t satisfied, and asked the Massachusetts General Court to intervene. A committee of the legislature investigated the situation in Reheboth and decided once again that Carnes had done nothing wrong. But they found “an unhappy alienation of affection in his people to him, and incurable.”

In December 1764, at the Rev. John Carnes’s request, the Seekonk congregation dismissed him from their pulpit. He was forty-one years old, had a wife and five children to maintain, and had failed twice at the only profession he was trained for.

TOMORROW: John Carnes comes home to Boston.

James R. Lowell: “Musing Beneath the Legendary Tree”

On 3 July 1875, Cambridge planned a big public celebration of the centennial of Gen. George Washington’s first full day as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The focus of that event was the Cambridge common, and specifically the Washington Elm.

The city invited local poet James Russell Lowell to compose and deliver an ode on the occasion. Lowell wrote to a friend:

We, too, here in my birthplace, having found out that something happened here a hundred years ago, must have our centennial; and since my friend and townsman Dr. [Oliver Wendell] Holmes couldn’t be had, I felt bound to do all the poetry for the day. We have still standing the elm under which Washington took command of the American army, and under which also [Rev. George] Whitefield had preached some thirty years before.

Actually, Whitefield’s name had become attached to another elm, “a few rods” away; he reportedly preached under it in 1740 when he wasn’t welcomed into the pulpit of the Congregationalist meeting-house. But that tree had fallen down in 1872, and his audience might have been big enough to range under the Washington Elm, too, right?

Lowell’s letter shows how the idea that Washington “took command of the American army,” really only hinted at in the first published mentions of the Washington Elm, had become standard history. His poem is quite long, and doesn’t even get to the tree and Gen. Washington until the third section:

Beneath our consecrated elm
A century ago he stood,
Famed vaguely for that old fight in the wood
Whose red surge sought, but could not overwhelm
The life foredoomed to wield our rough-hewn helm:
From colleges, where now the gown
To arms had yielded, from the town,
Our rude self-summoned levies flocked to see
The new-come chiefs and wonder which was he.
No need to question long; close-lipped and tall,
Long trained in murder-brooding forests lone
To bridle others’ clamors and his own.
Firmly erect, he towered above them all,
The incarnate discipline that was to free
With iron curb that armed democracy.

A motley rout was that which came to stare, 

In raiment tanned by years of sun and storm, 

Of every shape that was not uniform, 

Dotted with regimentals here and there; 

An army all of captains, used to pray 

And stiff in fight, but serious drill’s despair, 

Skilled to debate their orders, not obey; 

Deacons were there, selectmen, men of note
In half-tamed hamlets ambushed round with woods,
Ready to settle Freewill by a vote,
But largely liberal to its private moods;
Prompt to assert by manners, voice, or pen,
Or ruder arms, their rights as Englishmen,
Nor much fastidious as to how and when:
Yet seasoned stuff and fittest to create
A thought-staid army or a lasting State:
Haughty they said he was, at first, severe,
But owned, as all men own, the steady hand
Upon the bridle, patient to command,
Prized, as all prize, the justice pure from fear,
And learned to honor first, then love him, then revere:
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint
And purpose clean as light from every selfish taint.

Musing beneath the legendary tree,
The years between furl off: I seem to see
The sun-flecks, shaken the stirred foliage through,
Dapple with gold his sober buff and blue
And weave prophetic aureoles round the head
That shines our beacon now nor darkens with the dead.
O, man of silent mood,
A stranger among strangers then,
How art thou since renowned the Great, the Good,
Familiar as the day in all the homes of men!
The winged years, that winnow praise and blame,
Blow many names out: they but fan to flame
The self-renewing splendors of thy fame.

Lowell obviously expected his audience to recognize his allusions to Washington without needing to hear the general’s name until later. Indeed, he expected them to understand references like “that old fight in the wood” (Braddock’s defeat) and “buff and blue” (the uniform Washington had designed for his Virginia militia regiment, eventually adopted by the Continentals as well).

The politics of Lowell’s poem are less subtle: Washington’s mission was to “curb that armed democracy.” The final lines are a paean to Virginia, “Mother of States and unpolluted men,” welcoming that Confederate state back into the U.S. of A.

Despite Lowell’s letter, neither he nor Holmes was the most popular poet living in Cambridge at the time. That was their friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but he didn’t enjoy public speaking. Longfellow excerpted Lowell’s ode in his huge Poems of Places anthology, but was never inspired to write his own verse about the Washington Elm. Instead, he supposedly wrote one line.

TOMORROW: Cambridge adopts the Washington Elm as a civic symbol.