The Lockes in Wedlock

Three years ago I wrote about the sestercentennial of the Rev. Samuel Locke’s inauguration as president of Harvard College.

Normally I wouldn’t find such a ceremony interesting, but that was all in service of the really juicy 250th anniversary that I can finally discuss this month: Locke’s departure from that job after people discovered he’d impregnated his housekeeper.

The earliest surviving source on that affair is the letter of John Andrews that I quoted here. That’s a mostly sympathetic account, dwelling on Locke’s religious crisis: he had mystified his colleagues by holding back from taking communion and leaving chapel suddenly during prayers. He exhibited “most sincere grief,” earning the “ye. compassn. of all.”

Yet Andrews also described Locke offering his housekeeper £150—for what, it’s not clear. A doctor who graduated in the Harvard class of 1782 told Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley that he’d heard Locke had summoned his own physician, Dr. Marshall Spring of Watertown, but then couldn’t express his request. Was he trying to ask for an abortifacient?

Most striking, Andrews blamed Locke’s wife for the trouble, writing that her “vices, has been ye. means of drivg. him to it.”

Mary (Porter) Locke was born in 1738, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Porter of Sherborn. Her mother Mary, a Coolidge from Cambridge, died in 1752. Her father the minister died in 1758. At the age of twenty, therefore, she was left an orphan with a fair amount of property in her home town.

Samuel Locke came to Sherborn in 1759, having taught school and preached in Lancaster and Plymouth. Within a few months the congregation offered him the job of minister. In January 1760, less than two months after being ordained, Locke married Mary Porter in Natick.

On 11 February Locke wrote a letter to Edward Wigglesworth in Boston, having apparently heard that that young merchant was getting married:

It seems to be ordained by Providence in ye. oeconomy and constitution of all created, animate nature we are acquainted with that each individual of ye. several species should be drawn by some secret attraction to those of its own kind; and indeed it appears to be a necessary precaution for ye. preservation of order amidst ye. immense variety of creatures that people ye. world and for ye. regular conservation and increase of ye. several classes into which they are divided.

But man has a nature peculiarly adapted for society and friendly intercourse and is directly urged to it by ye. great difficulties, if not utter impossibility, of subsisting alone independent of and inconnected with others of ye. same nature with himself,—his wider capacities demand more gratifications, and he feels in himself innumerable wants which a life of sollitude cannot supply, and many powers to which it cannot give employment.

Hereupon he is naturally led by some affections amost peculiar to our kind to select some from among ye. many individuals of human nature for peculiar intimacy and tenderness in order to improve the condition of his existence and refine ye. common principles of benevolence into a peculiar affection for some individuals.

And I apprehend in particular with regard to ye. nuptial tie (ye. closest of any) we are not only directed to it by ye. constitution of our nature and ye. many miseries which a forlorn individual must necessarily suffer while he stands alone without any prop to support him, but also by ye. continued course of Providence in preserving in all ages such an apparent equality between ye. sexes.

This, I think is an additional call to every one to be up and doing. You will therefore, Sr., I trust, find a complyance with your duty in ye. respect a solid foundation of ye. most substantial happiness which this world affords,—and that it will be a happy medium of improvement in sosial virtue, and of increasing to you that felicity which I cannot describe but heartily wish to be ye. portion of every human creature in a way consistent with ye. wise designs of ye. great Father and governor of ye. universe.

Locke’s language was highly philosophic, but the bottom line was that he believed a man needed a wife for his “innumerable wants’ and “many powers.”

The Lockes had three children in regular fashion:

• Samuel, Jr., in 1761.
• Mary in 1763.
• John in 1765.

Then they didn’t have any more. That’s an unusual pattern for a New England couple of this period. Sometimes a husband and wife had no children, suggesting a fertility problem. More typically, the wife was pregnant every two or three years for up to two decades. For a couple to have a few children and stop suggests that something came between them, medically or interpersonally.

At first Locke resisted recruitment by Harvard College, but in late 1769 he finally agreed and moved his family to Cambridge. Samuel and Mary were both familiar with that town, him from his college days and her from living with her maternal relations.

In his profile of Locke, Clifford K. Shipton wrote that “Mrs. Locke was a feeble, sickly woman,” but he cited no evidence to support that. Andrews was nastier, saying Mary’s unspecified “vices” had driven Samuel to adultery. Either way, the implication was that the college president turned to his housekeeper for sex that he couldn’t have with his wife.

The one female commenter I’ve found, Hannah Winthrop, made no remarks about Mary Locke but wrote that she hoped the post of president would “be filld with a person who may do Honor to the Station.”

In December 1773, 250 years ago this month, the Locke family returned to the town of Sherborn. The town’s pulpit had been filled by another minister, and no doubt some people no longer saw Samuel Locke as fit to preach. But Mary still owned property there, and Samuel had bought 120 more acres in 1772. The Lockes also had three children to raise, aged twelve to eight.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

“A See becoming Vacant in a Sudden Surprising manner”

As I quoted yesterday, in December 1773 the Rev. Ezra Stiles was worried by rumors from Cambridge about the sudden resignation of Harvard College president Samuel Locke.

On 20 December the Newport minister finally heard the cause, as he set down in his diary:

Mr. [William?] Ellery left Cambridge last Friday: he tells me that the Week before, President Locke resigned the Presidency of Harv. College, alledging two Reasons.

1. Ill state of Health.

2. That his Usefulness was ruined by the evil Report raised & spread abroad about him. This was that his Maid was with Child by him.

He sent in this Resigno. from Sherburn, whereto he is removed. A most melancholly Event, & humbling Providence!

Despite the nod to a claim that Locke was resigning only because of an “evil Report” about him, Stiles seems to have accepted that the president really had impregnated his maid.

I’ve found one comment about this incident from a woman. Hannah Winthrop was wife of the college professor delegated to secure college property in the president’s house. On 1 Jan 1774, she wrote to her friend Mercy Warren as quoted here:

I have no news of a domestick kind to tell you, we go on in the same little peacefull Circle as usual Varied with alternate sickness & health, sometimes Amused, sometimes astonishd with Viewing Events which happen in the great World. Here, beholding a See becoming Vacant in a Sudden Surprising manner. but it is best for one so near the seat where Candor ought to Reign, to draw a Veil over what the Delinquent tenderly Calls Human imperfections. I know you join me in earnest wishes that it may be filld with a person who may do Honor to the Station.

Harvard was already drawing a veil over a painful subject. Indeed, the college and its supporters did such a good job of keeping the “Sudden Surprising” news about Locke out of print that it wasn’t until Stiles’s diary entry was published in 1901 that historians knew about it.

Well, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley (1804–1885) filed a recollection of the event from a Harvard student. And Winthrop Sargent (1792–1874) must have read John Andrews’s postscript about it, quoted yesterday, when he published other parts of the same letter. Surely other researchers had seen those sources and others. But nothing about the affair appeared in print.

No evidence appears to have survived about Locke’s housekeeper. The vital records of Cambridge list a girl named Hannah Lock, baptized at some unspecified time in 1773, with no named parents. Was this the president’s newborn daughter? Likewise, a Hannah Lock died of consumption in Cambridge on 19 Nov 1809, with no further information about her in that record.

COMING UP: Wedlock.

“I should not have chose this town for an Asylum”

On 17 June 1775, as I quoted yesterday, John Adams complained that five friends from Massachusetts hadn’t sent him any letters with news about the province since he’d left for the Second Continental Congress.

I decided to look into what those men did in the previous two months.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper had fled from Boston on 9 April, halfway through Sunday services, wary that Gen. Thomas Gage might order his arrest. He settled in with Samuel P. Savage in Weston. By the end of the month Cooper had his wife, daughter, and clothing with him, but not his library or all his letters.

In early May, Cooper arranged to stand in as the minister in Groton. Or rather, since that town was far away and he liked being near the seat of Patriot power, he made deals with other ministers to go out and preach in Groton while he preached in their churches close by. For a while, at least, he could coast on his celebrity as Boston’s most silver-tongued minister and recycle his old sermons.

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College lived in Cambridge. As the king’s troops marched through town on 18–19 April, he and his wife Hannah fled for safety, first to the Fresh Pond area, then further the next day, fearing the redcoats would return.

Later Hannah Winthrop wrote to her friend Mercy Warren:

Thus with precipitancy were we driven to the town of Andover, following some of our acquaintance, five of us to be conveyd with one poor tired horse & Chaise. . . .

I should not have chose this town for an Asylum, being but 20 miles from Seaports where men of war & their Pirates are Stationed, but in being fixd here I see it is not in man to direct his steps. As you kindly enquire after our Situation, I must tell you it is Rural & romantically pleasing.

Back in Cambridge, militia companies arrived en masse, taking over the college buildings and larger mansions. Most of the townspeople left.

By mid-June, however, the Winthrops were back home, though only temporarily. The professor helped to pack up the Harvard College library and scientific equipment. College classes resumed in Concord in October, and the Winthrops settled there for the rest of the school year.

Adams’s list started with three lawyers, all from Boston. All also had ties of family or friendship to Loyalists, and that complicated their choices as the war broke out.

Benjamin Kent at some point got a pass out of Boston and, according to his profile in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, stayed with various friends in the countryside through the siege. Though he remained in the U.S. of A. through the war, in the mid-1780s he moved to Canada to spend his last years with his children.

William Tudor was just starting his legal career. He was also courting Delia Jarvis, a young lady from a Loyalist family. According to a family memoir, after the fighting started, Tudor tried to wrangle passes for himself, her, and her family from the Adm. Samuel Graves’s secretary, but that effort was fruitless.

On 12 May, Tudor “broke from Boston by the roundabout way of Point Sherly” in Chelsea (now Winthrop), leaving Delia and her family behind. He sought a position in the Patriot service. With John Adams championing him, Tudor became the Continental Army’s judge advocate general in the summer of 1775.

TOMORROW: The legend of Samuel Swift.

“Revolutionary War Refugees on Tory Row,” 20 Mar.

This is Evacuation Day in Suffolk County, celebrating when the British military left Boston in 1776.

In commemoration of the Continental Army’s first successful campaign under Gen. George Washington, I’ll deliver an online lecture for the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site and the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters.

Sunday, 20 March, 2:00 P.M.
Revolutionary War Refugees on Tory Row
register through this page

Our description:

Like all armed conflicts, the start of the Revolutionary War produced a flood of refugees seeking safety. Loyalist families moved into Boston for the protection of the redcoats. Patriot families fled the besieged capital. The Battle of Bunker Hill destroyed most of Charlestown, leaving more people desperate for homes and livelihoods. Tracking the changes in one wealthy Cambridge neighborhood away from the battles shows the impact of war on ordinary women, children, and men.

As I’ve developed this talk, I realized that I should move beyond the 1774–1776 years I usually cover to discuss when thousands of homeless men, women, and children streamed slowly along the road from Watertown into Cambridge.

Hannah Winthrop, wife of a Harvard College professor, described those people rather uncharitably:

To be sure the sight was truly Astonishing, I never had the least Idea, that the Creation producd such a Sordid Set of Creatures in human Figure—poor dirty emaciated men, great numbers of women, who seemd to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, by which they were bent double, the contents seemd to be Pots & kettles, various sorts of Furniture, children peeping thro gridirons & other utensils. Some very young Infants who were born on the road, the women barefoot, cloathd in dirty raggs

Such Effluvia filld the air while they were passing, had they not been smoaking all the time, I should have been apprehensive of being Contaminated by them.

Winthrop was so hostile because those refugees were the British and German-speaking soldiers captured at Saratoga, along with their families. They were to be housed around Boston before being sent back to Europe. At least that was the initial plan for what became known as the Convention Army.

When I alighted on the topic of war refugees for this year’s Evacuation Day lecture, I had no idea how loudly it would resonate with current events. Or to be more exact, since war has never stopped sending families fleeing somewhere in the world, how loudly this topic resonates with the current news.

We plan to record this talk and make it available through the sponsoring organizations later this spring.

“Plimouth has producd lately a Prophetical Egg”

Back in 2012 I wrote about the “prophetic egg” found in Plymouth at the end of 1776, forecasting victory for the Howes.

I quoted a couple of men with Plymouth roots, Dr. James Thacher and Elkanah Watson, recounting the story, plus a poem published in January 1777 which appeared to be the only comment about it.

Boston 1775 reader JPC just asked if the author of that poem might be Mercy Warren, as Alice Brown stated in her 1896 biography:

When an egg was found in Plymouth, bearing the legend, “Howe will conquer,” it was Mrs. Warren who at once sat down—possibly in an interval of needlework or brewing—and wrote a counterblast in her customary satirical vein, reducing egg and prophecy to naught.

Brown cited no evidence for that statement, so it’s possible that she merely assumed any Patriot poetry linked to Plymouth must have come from Mercy Otis Warren.

I looked into the question and, while I found no conclusive evidence, found more contemporaneous references to the egg and a provocative link.

On 14 Jan 1777, Hannah Winthrop, wife of Harvard College professor John Winthrop, wrote to her friend Warren:

I hear Plimouth has producd lately a Prophetical Egg that bodes no good to America for the year 77, but as it is said to be laid by a Tory hen I interpret it to be what is wishd, rather than what will happen. The inscription on it is said to be. Howe will Conquer America. but I believe the Prophesy will prove as Brittle as the Tablet on which it is engravd.

Thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society, that letter can be viewed here. It shows that Mercy Warren was informed about the egg, and more importantly—since she’d surely already heard that news by word of mouth in Plymouth—that she knew people in the Boston area were discussing it.

Back in 2012, I wrote that I’d found only one newspaper commenting on the egg, the 28 January issue of The Freeman’s Journal, or New-Hampshire Gazette.

I can now report that Portsmouth newspaper reprinted almost exactly a letter and poem that Benjamin Edes had published on the front page of the Boston Gazette one week earlier, on 20 January. That appearance makes it more likely the author of that poem was based in Massachusetts instead of New Hampshire.

Furthermore, Edes had been the first to print Mercy Warren’s closet dramas The Defeat and The Group and her poem “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs.”

Of course, Warren had supplied some of her work to other printers, such as Isaiah Thomas, and had seen some published without her approval. On his side, Edes published many other poets. So while their previous connection makes it possible Warren sent the egg poem to Edes for publication, it’s not conclusive.

To both JPC and myself, the poem about Plymouth’s prophetic egg doesn’t fit well into Warren’s usual style. But there is one phrase to examine more closely.

TOMORROW: “The Genius of America.”

Upcoming History Workshops for Teachers

Here are a couple of teacher workshops coming up at historic sites.

The Massachusetts Historical Society is offering “Women in the Era of the American Revolution” on 22-23 February. It says:

Study the revolution through the words and artifacts of the women who lived it. Correspondence demonstrates that women like Abigail Adams, Hannah Winthrop, and Mercy Otis Warren were vital consumers (and boycotters) of imported goods, and functioned as heads of household while their male family members served in the military or traveled on political missions. They recorded important events of the day, and, in the case of Warren, interpreted those events for a public audience. Throughout the workshop we will explore the daily lives of revolutionary women, including those who served as soldiers and secret agents, or followed the army as cooks and laundresses.

The program includes a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, presumably to view portraits of the women and artifacts from their lives. The registration fee is $40, and teachers can earn 45 P.D.P.’s and two graduate credits for an additional fee. For more information, contact education@masshist.org or call 617-646-0557.

Out in Deerfield this summer, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association is presenting two sessions of “African Americans in the Making of Early New England.”

The workshop’s introductory description says:

“African Americans in the Making of Early New England” will take place in the Old Deerfield Village Historic Landmark District and will focus on the 23 African American Historic sites in the District and on Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA, another National Historic Landmark. This workshop will bring together a wide range of primary resources—landscape, architecture, artifacts, documents, oral histories—along with secondary interpretations and lectures by specialists that will provide tools for K-12 educators to engage their students in learning about African Americans’ life experiences in early New England.

Here is a very detailed description of the planned program, which includes remarks by professors Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend), Jared Hardesty (Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston), and Joanne Pope Melish (Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860).

Teachers selected to participate are eligible for a stipend, thanks to support from our National Endowment for the Humanities. The two sessions are on 9-14 July and 23-28 July. The deadline for applications is 1 March, with applicants notified if whether they are accepted by the end of that month.

Ruth Otis: no Daughter of Liberty

Ruth Cunningham, daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, married James Otis, Jr., in 1755. He was the son of an important gentleman from Barnstable and Boston's most brilliant young lawyer; people anticipated a bright career in the royal patronage system for him.

The marriage probably turned out to be more than Ruth Otis bargained for. In the early 1760s James decided to throw his lot in with the Boston merchants and then with the popular party in Massachusetts politics. Ruth still favored the Crown. Plus, there was the whole madness thing to deal with.

Here's a not very sympathetic letter about Ruth Otis from Hannah Winthrop, wife of Harvard professor John Winthrop, to Mercy Warren in 1769. Warren was Otis's sister-in-law. Both she and Winthrop, and all three women's husbands, were strongly in favor of a boycott of British goods to protest the Townshend Act.

I went to see Mrs. Otis the other day. She seems not to be in a good state of health. I received a Visit lately from Master Jemmy [James and Ruth Otis's son, also named James, then age ten]. I will give you an anecdote of him. A gentleman telling him what a Fine lady his mama is & he hoped he would be a good Boy & behave exceeding well to her, my young Master gave this spirited answer, I know my Mama is a fine Lady, but she would be a much finer if she was a Daughter of Liberty.

Ruth Otis never changed her mind politically. When she died in 1789, she reportedly still preferred the British government to the new U.S. of A. that her brother-in-law Samuel A. Otis had gone to work for.

Ruth outlived both her husband, who was struck by lightning (yes, struck by lightning) in 1783, and her son, who died at British captivity in 1777. Of her two daughters, one married a British officer and moved to England; the other married the son of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln of Hingham. So the family remained split.