“Only three of which survived him”

In 1854 the New England Historic and Genealogical Register printed transcript of pages inserted into Samuel Adams’s family Bible, setting down the family genealogy.

Later the same material was reprinted in Samuel Adams Wells‘s biography of his ancestor.

That page showed that Adams’s parents must have been in near-constant mourning for their young children.

The genealogy starts with the births of the senior Samuel Adams in 1689 and Mary Fifield in 1694. They were married at Old South Meeting-House by the Rev. Dr. Ebenezer Pemberton (shown here) in 1713.

Two years later Samuel was among the men petitioning for land for a new church in the South End, which would open in 1719 as the New South Meeting-House.

Meanwhile, the couple was having children:

• Richard Adams, born 21 Jan 1716, “being on Saturday morning at seven of the Clock. The said Richard Adams dyed on Tuesday the 26th: day of June, about 10 of ye Clock at night.”
• Mary Adams, born 30 July 1717, “Tuesday morning, at 4 of the clock.”
• Hannah Adams, born 6 Nov 1720, “at half an hour after eleven at night, 1720, and dyed the 13th Jan. [1721] at eight of the Clock at night.”
• Samuel Adams the future governor, born 16 Sept 1722 “at twelve of the Clock at noon, being Sabbath day.”
• John Adams, born 4 Sept 1724, died 9 Aug 1725.
• A second John Adams, born 28 Oct 1726, died 15 June 1727.
• Joseph Adams, born 29 Dec 1728, “one quarter after one of ye Clock in ye morning, Sabbath day. Baptised pr. the Rev. Mr. [Samuel] Checkley ye same day.”
• Abigail Adams, born 20 July 1730, died 29 Aug 1730.
• Thomas Adams, born 22 Dec 1731, died 16 Aug 1733, “20 minutes after four of the Clock in the morning.”
• Sarah Adams, born 18 Nov 1733 at 8:30 A.M. on a Sunday morning, baptized the same day, died 28 Feb 1736.
• A second Abigail Adams, born 22 Oct 1735, died 31 March 1736.
• Mehetable Adams, born 12 Apr 1740, died 11 June 1740.

At the bottom of that page, Samuel Adams the Patriot wrote of his father:

Samuel Adams aforesaid, dyed on Tuesday the eighth day of March, 1747, about eleven o’Clock in the forenoon; having lived with his wife thirty-four years, and about ten months. By her he had twelve children, only three of which survived him.

Those three were Mary, Samuel himself, and their brother Joseph, not yet twenty years old.

Of the other nine siblings, only one baby had lived more than a year, and six had died in six months or less.

The elder Adams persevered in recording the detail of every birth and death. Indeed, he became more precise as time went on, recording births at the accuracy of five-minute increments instead of “about 10.”

The younger Samuel Adams grew up to marry Elizabeth Checkley, daughter of the minister who had baptized most of the family.

TOMORROW: Samuel Adams’s surviving siblings.

Edward G. Langford, Town Watchman

One of the Bostonians caught up in the Boston Massacre was Edward Langford, who identified himself during the subsequent trials as a member of the town watch. What background brought him to patrolling Boston at night?

Notes taken at the trials identify that man as “Edd. Gambleton Langford” (Robert Treat Paine), “Edward Gambett Langford” (John Adams), and “Edward G. Langford” (shorthand transcriber John Hodgson). Later church records state that Edward Langford died on 26 Mar 1777, aged thirty-eight—meaning he was born in 1738 or 1739.

All that appears to connect the watchman with Thomas and Judith Langford, shown in the records of King’s Chapel (shown here) as having two sons baptized there: Edward Mortimore Langford on 24 Dec 1737 and John Gamberto [sic] Langford in 1740. Perhaps the first Edward died young and the parents gave the future watchman the same first name, plus a middle name he’d share with his brother. (The family was unusual for the time for using middle names at all.) Thomas and Judith Langford also appear to have also had sons Nicholas, born in 1724, and Arthur, and perhaps a daughter named Mary around 1725.

Judith Langford died before Edward turned nine, and on 14 Aug 1746 Thomas Langford married Mary Beatel. They had more children, most of whom died young:

• Frances born in 1747.
• Sarah born and died in 1749.
• Nicholas born in 1750, baptized privately (often a hint of poor health), and died in 1751.
• A second Sarah born in 1752.
• A second Nicholas, born and died in 1754.

In 1757, close to his twentieth birthday, Edward Langford served as sponsor for the baptism of a baby named Ann Stone in King’s Chapel. That shows he continued to have ties to the Church of England. However, on 9 June 1761 the Rev. Samuel Checkley, Congregational minister of the New South Meetinghouse, married Edward Langford and Mary Gyles, several months after they first announced their intention to marry.

Edward and Mary Langford, along with a senior Mary Langford, sponsored the baptism of Arthur and Elizabeth Langford’s daughter Judith at King’s Chapel in 1765. (That’s why I suspect the senior Mary, Arthur, and Edward were all siblings, children of the late Judith Langford.) I haven’t found records of Edward and Mary having children of their own.

Nor have I found records indicating what profession Langford took up in the late 1750s and early 1760s. He appears to have been too poor to show up in real estate and town government records, too rich to be on the poor rolls. But on 27 June 1768, Boston selectmen’s records say:

Mr. [Benjamin] Burdick the Constable of the Watch presented Edward Langford as a suitable Person for a Watchman in the room of John Hyman who has left the Watch, and he was approved of by the Selectmen accordingly

Langford was thus hired to help Burdick patrol the middle part of the town at night, watching for fires or disturbances and calling out the time.

Three months later, British troop ships arrived in Boston harbor, bringing the first of four regiments of soldiers to patrol the town.

TOMORROW: So how did that go?

A Momentous Day for Samuel Adams

A couple of days ago, I listed Boston’s three representatives to the Massachusetts General Court as of 25 Sept 1765.

Under the pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts constitution, Boston could elect four representatives. (That still left its population underrepresented compared to the much smaller rural towns.) But one of the men Bostonians had elected in May, the young attorney Oxenbridge Thacher, had died unexpectedly on 9 July.

On the morning of 27 September, therefore, Boston had a special election in Faneuil Hall to fill Thacher’s seat. The town records say that the meeting began with a prayer by the Rev. Samuel Checkley. The selectmen then asked for all white male Bostonians who met the higher property requirements for a General Court election to vote by noon.

the Inhabitants withdrew & brought in their Votes for a Representative, and upon counting and sorting them it appeared that the number of Votes were 572 of which

• John Ruddock Esq. had 110 –
• John Rowe Esq. 137 –
• John Hancock Esq. 40 – and
• Mr. Samuel Adams 247 –

Note that Adams did not yet have the wealth to be accorded the honorific “Esq.” Nor did he have a mathematical majority, though he had a clear plurality.

The selectmen then organized a second round of voting. That time Adams received 265 votes out of 448 and “was duly Elected.”

Thus, four days after Adams had drafted Boston’s special instructions to its legislative representatives, he became one of those representatives. He made the short walk over to the Town House where the General Court was meeting and was sworn in that afternoon.

Whereupon Gov. Francis Bernard announced that sadly this legislative session was conflicting with important court dates and keeping some gentlemen away, so he had no choice but to adjourn the Massachusetts General Court until 23 October. That would be after the Stamp Act Congress in New York, and only about a week before the Stamp Act was supposed to take effect.

Thus ended Samuel Adams’s first day as a Massachusetts legislator.

Dr. Eliot’s Gossip about Boston’s Ministers

Yesterday I started quoting from Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s notes inside a copy of an 1821 pamphlet in the Harvard library. That pamphlet is a sermon about the split of the New North Meeting-House’s congregation in 1719, a major event in Boston.

Eliot was the youngest son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718-1778), a later minister of the New North Meeting. And the family clearly put some of the blame for the split on one of the ministers at the Old North Meeting:

The difficulties at the new north [meeting-house] were more owing to Cotton Mather & his influence than to any others. Increase [Mather] was in his dotage. He [Cotton] was afraid of [Rev. Peter] Thachers popular talents, joined & directed the opposition & thought to get them into his parish. if he had thought of their building another meeting house, he would have been quiet.

Instead, the group that split off from the New North formed a new congregation and built the New Brick Meeting-House, attracting some members from the Mathers’ church.

Eliot had other critical things to say about Cotton Mather in his marginal notes. On page 18 he wrote:

No greater enemy to the quakers existed. In his account of the witchcraft of John Goodman’s children, He says, that shewing them a bible or carrying them into his study, would instantly bring them out of their fits, the sight of a book of quakerism or the [Anglican] book of common prayer would throw them into horrid convulsions.

An Irish woman was hanged in Boston in 1688 on the testimony of the Goodman children.

Eliot recorded even juicier gossip about some of Boston’s other pre-Revolutionary ministers which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. On page 23 and then page 41 he wrote about what the Rev. Samuel Checkley (1695-1769) of the New South Meeting was known for:

for eating; he was the largest man in Boston, & his mouth was always full, & his jaw going when not preaching. My father used to say, he hated to preach after Checkley, on acct of the cracking of raisin seeds under his feet with which the floor of the pulpit was always covered. While the people were singing, he was chomping plumbs. . . .

Checkley lost his popularity more from his gourmandising disposition than any other way. he laid out all his money in tidbits, cakes, Raisins, oysters, &c. & ran in debt for other things. To such a degree that his parish chose a committee to get from him a schedule of his debts, which they paid. But he was ashamed to note the debt he owed in small shops for gingerbread &c. Those creditors became noisy, & another committee was chosen to receive & pay all such claims.

Checkley’s daughter Elizabeth became the first wife of Samuel Adams.

And about the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton (1705-1777), minister of the New Brick Church starting in 1754:

So high did his vanity carry him that when asked by Mr. Eliot to exchange, he observed that his people would consent to hear no other parson. His popularity burned out. But the parish dwindled more from his being a violent Tory, & the Bosom friend of Gov [Thomas] Hutchinson, who was one of his parish. Many people would not worship at the New Brick because of that circumstance.

Thus, in 1777 the shrinking New Brick Meeting had a building but no pastor while the Old North Meeting had no building but a popular pastor—the Rev. John Lathrop (1740-1816). They worked out the obvious solution, thus starting to reverse the splits of the early decades.

TOMORROW: A few more tidbits from Dr. Eliot’s notes.

[The photograph above, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream, shows the house in the North End where Dr. Ephraim Eliot grew up. It was originally built by the Rev. Increase Mather after the fire mentioned yesterday.]