“Ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius”

When the Locke family returned to Sherborn, after the Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke resigned as president of Harvard College (because he’d fathered a child with his housekeeper), they had a nice home waiting for them.

The Lockes owned a “large convenient Dwelling-House” situated “near the Northerly side of the Common on the road to Holliston” and “opposite the Meeting-House.”

The attached estate included “two Barnes, and other Out-Houses,” and ninety-two acres of land, including “Pasturage, Arable land, Meadow, &c with a large quantity of good Fruit Trees; as also a valuable Lot of Wood.”

There had been some hurt feelings when Locke had left Sherborn’s pulpit in 1769, but the congregation found a replacement within a year, with the college providing some settlement money. The townspeople didn’t seem to hold a grudge against Locke personally.

In fact, Locke’s neighbors continued to refer to him with the honorifics “Reverend” and “Doctor.” In March 1774 they voted to put him on the committee of correspondence, which after the war started became the committee of public safety.

To supplement his income, Locke prepared boys for Harvard, having them board at his house. One student, John Welles, recalled him as “the most learned man in America,” and “a perfect gentleman, dignified.”

The Continental Journal for 22 Jan 1778 reported: “Thursday morning last [i.e., 15 January] died suddenly of an apoplectic fit, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Lock of Sherburn.” According to John Goodwin Locke’s Book of the Lockes, “He died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, when aiding in driving some cattle from his field.” (Sherborn’s published town records say the date was 15 Jan 1777, but apparently someone forgot to start writing the new year. That error confused later people, like the person who carved the headstone shown above.)

Contemporaries glossed over Locke’s adultery. A neighbor wrote: “Some domestic troubles embittered the last years of his life, but he was never known to make a complaint, but bore them with Christian resignation.” His successor at Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Langdon, is credited with this eulogy:

In Memory of ye. Revd. Samuel Locke D. D. [sic]

As a Divine he was learned and judicious—In ye. pastoral relation vigilant and faithfull—as a christian devout & charitable—In his friendships firm & sincere—humane affable & benevolent in his disposition—in ye. conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious—ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius—ye. extensiveness of his erudition—yt. fund of useful knowledge wh. he had acquired—ye. firmness & mildness of his temper & manners—his easiness of access & patient attention to others-join’d with his singular talents for government, procur’d him universal esteem, especially of ye. governers & students of Harvard College over wh. he PRESIDED four years with much reputation to himself & advantage to ye. public—after wh. he retired to ye. private walks of Life, entertaining & improving ye. more confined circle of his friends until his Death wh. was very sudden on ye. 15th: day of January 1778—aged 45.

For the president of a college Locke had embarrassed by having an affair to say he was in “conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious” suggests that some contemporaries shared John Andrews’s opinion that his wife had somehow driven him into the arms of his housekeeper. But Mary Locke left no account herself, and no one else commented on her.

Be that as it may, Locke left an estate worth over £3,600. The widow Locke continued to live in Sherborn and to raise their three children. There’s an advertisement for settling her estate in the 11 June 1789 Independent Chronicle.

Of Mary and Samuel Locke’s children, Samuel, Jr., became the local doctor. He married Hannah Cowden, and they had four daughters, one dying in infancy. He died in 1788, aged twenty-seven, thus probably before his mother.

In 1792 the Locke family farm was put up for sale. The sellers were the couple’s daughter Mary, the doctor’s widow Hannah, and Samuel Sanger, the same man who had administered the widow’s estate. It evidently did not sell because in 1794 the widow Hannah Locke advertised it again, now on her own.

Mary Locke the daughter died in 1796, aged thirty-three. The family historian wrote: “She had been an invalid for some years before she died.” He also stated: “She was a lady of considerable personal and mental attractions, and if we may judge from the wardrobe which she left, not inattentive to that personal adornment to which many of her sex are addicted.” That judgment seems to be based entirely on the number of gowns in her probate inventory.

The youngest sibling, John Locke, moved from Sherborn to Union, Maine, and then to “Northampton, where he died, as it is said, by drinking cold water when heated.” That death wasn’t so sudden, however, as to preclude seeking medical attention and writing a will. John Locke was only thirty-four years old, continuing the family tradition of dying young.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke’s grave went unmarked for decades. A sexton found his skeleton in 1788 when he was burying the eldest son. By 1853 the former minister’s remains had been dug up and reinterred in a new town cemetery. At the time his skull was judged to show “those phrenological developments which indicate great mental powers.”

When the younger Mary Locke died in 1796, both the Sherborn town records and the local Moral and Political Telegraphe newspaper described her as the minister’s “only daughter,” making a point. According to Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, however, the child Samuel Locke fathered in 1773 was also a girl, named Rebecca Locke. Clifford K. Shipton wrote that “she became a well-known figure in Boston and Worcester,” but I haven’t unearthed any sign of her.

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?