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| source Note the difference between the two portraits. The older Edwards above, disapproving, the pursed mouth, slightly downturned, edging towards a frown, the intense stern gaze. Below, a more relaxed, kinder image of a younger man. |
SOURCE INFORMATION FOR JONATHAN EDWARDS
SLT - Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton, Chelsea House, 2005
SSJE - Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, Edited by H. Norman Gardiner, Macmillan, 1904
JEC - Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University
This chronology of Edwards's undated writings is based on that established by Thomas A. Schafer, Wallace E. Anderson, and Wilson H. Kimnach, supplemented by volume introductions in The Works of Jonathan Edwards , by primary sources dating from Edwards' lifetime, and by secondary materials such as biographies.
DCUN - Digital Commons: University of Nebraska
A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia - Thomas Hariot (1588)
NHC - National Humanities Center
UW - University of Washington: United States History: Timeline: 1700 - 1800 - Dr. Quintard Taylor, Jr., Professor of American History
UCB - University of Colorado Boulder: American Studies
DH - Digital History
IP - Infoplease: 1700–1799 (A.D.) World History
PM - A Puritan’s Mind: Of Insects by Jonathan Edwards
BHHC - Condensed from A Brief History of East Haddam, Connecticut, written by Dr. Karl Stofko and Rachel Gibbs
HO - History. org: Colonial Williamsburg
UV - University of Virginia: Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html
PG - Project Gutenberg: The Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather, 1693 - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28513/28513-h/28513-h.htm
NHA - Nantucket Historical Association: Christopher Hussey Blown Out (Up) to Sea by Ben Simons - http://www.nha.org/history/hn/HNsimons-hussey.htm
HAW - History of the American Whale Fishery From its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 by Alexander Starbuck - http://mysite.du.edu/~ttyler/ploughboy/starbuck.htm#sectionb -
PSU - Penn State University: Medieval Technology and American History -http://www.engr.psu.edu/mtah/timelines/timeline3.htm
WK - Wikipedia: Timeline of United States history - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_history
NOA - The Naming of America: Fragments We’ve Shored Against Ourselves by Jonathan Cohen - http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html
BH - Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John
BH - Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John
Others sources cited within.
1492 - With the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic ocean attempting to discover a western trade route to the East Indies. On 12 October, he landed in Guanahani, known also as the Bahamas.
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| Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes, St. Dié, 1507 source |
1499 - Amerigo Vespucci explored coast of South America, demonstrating that the West Indies and the Southern Lands were not extensions of the coast of Asia, but a New World.
1507 - The New World was first termed "America" by a German mapmaker, Waldseemüller, who credited Amerigo Vespucci with its discovery.
Inspired to publish a new geography that would embrace the New World, the group collectively authored a revision of Ptolemy, which included a Latin translation of Vespucci's purported letter to Soderini, as well as a new map of the world drawn by Waldseemüller. In their resulting Cosmographiae Introductio, printed on April 25, 1507, appear these famous words (as translated from the original Latin; see below) written most likely by one of the two poet-scholars involved in the project:
"But now these parts [Europe, Asia and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin form of Vespucci's name], as will be seen in the appendix: I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part after Americus, who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, [and so to name it] Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women.”
NOA - The Naming of America: Fragments We’ve Shored Against Ourselves by Jonathan Cohen -
1587 - Sir Walter Raleigh sponsors founding of the Roanoke Colony by James White.
1590 - The Roanoke Colony was found deserted.
1607 - John Smith founded the Jamestown Settlement
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| Jamestown Island - source |
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PROSPERO'S DREAM GONE TO CROATOAN: VIRGINIA AND ROANOKE ISLAND
In 1585 and 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh brought several hundred settlers to Virginia and Roanoke Island. The first almost starved to death, where it not for the assistance of the natives - who may have aligned themselves with the white strangers for more strategic reasons. The second disappeared somewhat mysteriously, leaving only the enigmatic “Gone to Croatoan” carved into the posts.
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“The opening of the 'new' world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night” - a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts - to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase experiment.
The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the "state of Nature," innocence and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a chaos or inchoateness which the adept would transmute into "gold," that is, into spiritual perfection as well as material abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it, a feeling of yearning for its formless form which took the symbol of the "Indian" for its focus: "Man" in the state of nature, uncorrupted by "government." Caliban, the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and Nature a "howling wilderness"--on the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split in European consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical dichotomy; it's rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes for colonization.
We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message "Gone To Croatan." Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. However, "Croatan" was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real - they’re still there, and they still call themselves Croatans.
So - the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London.
As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes - all the burdens of civilization - and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it.”
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
[ Quite a good cause can be made, as Dame Fraces Yates has done in her delightful book, Shakespeare's Last Plays, for the thesis that with the figure of Prospero, Shakespeare was actually defending the controversial magus, John Dee, and with him, indirectly, the whole magico-scientific tradition, loosely called 'Rosicrucianism' by Frances Yates, which Dee had exemplified in his lifetime (1527 - 1608).
Noel Cobb, Prospero's Island, 1984.]
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In 1607 Jamestown was established on the ruins of the Virginia colony and is considered to be the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
THE STARVING TIME: DIGGING UP CORPSES
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| A team of archaeologists from the Jamestown Rediscovery Project have unearthed hard evidence that the colonists ate their own dead during the deadly winter of 1609-1610 known as the Starving Time. source |
Consider: 104 landed, only 38 survived the first winter. In the first 15 years, of the 10,000 that arrived in Jamestown, only twenty percent were still alive and living there in 1622. [NHC] http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/settlement/settlement.htm
During the “starving time” winter of 1609, there is this harrowing account:
“They ate their horses, then rats, then shoe leather. Some were driven to murder and digging up corpses. Others stashed food as they planned a secret return to England. Food was begged from the Indians or, if not forthcoming, stolen. The resulting cycle of attacks and counterattacks brought more misery and death.” [NHC]
"WHEN THEY TURN THEM, A WHOLE SIDE WILL FLAY OFF AT ONCE AS IT WERE, AND THEY WILL BE ALL OF A GORE BLOOD, MOST FEARFUL TO BEHOLD."
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| Absent any illustrations of the epidemics in New England, these Aztec drawings depicting smallpox, coupled with the words of William Bradford, convey something of the horror. "A sorer disease cannot befall [the Indians], they fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. Ana then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep." (Quoted in Simpson, Invisible Armies, 8.) - Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me |
GOD'S PLAGUE: THOUSAND AND THOUSANDS OF DEAD INDIANS
The New World must have seemed a haunted and violent Wilderness to these first settlers.
After having been seduced by advertisements of abundant opportunities for fortune, they were quickly relieved of any illusions. (cf. Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia from 1588.) [DCUN] http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=etas
“When the first settlers arrived in America they found thousands and thousands of dead Indians and abandoned villages. It was precisely in these cultivated and cleared Indian lands that the English settled. American Indians had been decimated by European diseases such as small pox, flu, and measles. Instead of seeing this as a tragedy, in part caused by their settlement, the leaders of English settlements like John Winthrop argued that God sent a plague to the Indians in order to clear the land for English settlers. As a result of the plague of diseases brought by Europeans, the settlers would face no real active challenge to their settlement for fifty years. Historian Karen Kupperman argues that "if Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all." (p. 82)
William McNeil argues that the population of the Americas was 100 million in 1492. While William Langer argues that Europe had only about 70 million in 1492. (p. 83) Current estimates of the Indian population in the United States and Canada range from 10 to 20 million. (p. 85) As a result of the plague, 90 to 95 percent of Indian peoples in the America died in the 200 years after European settlement. Historian Richard White argues that "this was the greatest human catastrophe in human history."
Loewen concludes that without the plague European empires could not have conquered and settled the Americas. He argues that "the European advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to "settle" the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required." ( p. 83) Loewen argues that America was "not a virgin wilderness, but recently widowed." (p. 85) [UCB] http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/settling.htm referencing Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
NOT LONG SINCE POPULOUS NOW UTTERLY VOID
In the spring of 1619, the English explorer Thomas Dermer sailed south from Maine in a small open boat. Accompanying Dermer was a Native guide who’d been abducted by Thomas Hunt in 1614. The Indian’s name was Tisquantum, or Squanto, and after five long years in Spain, England, and Newfoundland, he was sailing toward his home at Patuxet, the site of modern Plymouth. In a letter written the following winter, Dermer described what they saw:
“[ We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness. Their disease the plague, for we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who descried the spots of such as usually die. When [we] arrived at my savage’s native country [we found] all dead.”
Squanto’s reaction to the desolation of his homeland, where as many as two thousand people had once lived, can only be imagined. However, at some point after visiting Patuxet, he began to see the catastrophic consequences of the plague as a potential opportunity.
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
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| Footnotes Since the Wilderness |
THE HAUNTED VACANCY OF NEW ENGLAND
Despite his personal vigor and equanimity, Massasoit presided over a people who had been devastated by disease. During the three years that the Pilgrims had been organizing their voyage to America, the Indians of southern New England had been hit by what scientists refer to as a virgin soil epidemic— a contagion against which they had no antibodies. From 1616 to 1619, what may have been bubonic plague introduced by European fishermen in modern Maine spread south along the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, killing in some cases as many as 90 percent of the region’s inhabitants. So many died so quickly that there was no one left to bury the dead. Portions of coastal New England that had once been as densely populated as western Europe were suddenly empty of people, with only the whitened bones of the dead to indicate that a thriving community had once existed along these shores. In addition to disease, what were described as “civil dissensions and bloody wars” erupted throughout the region as Native groups that had been uneasy neighbors in the best of times struggled to create a new order amid the haunted vacancy of New England.
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
❂
THEY SPENT THEIR DAYS DIGGING RANDOM HOLES IN THE GROUND
For that matter, our culture and our textbooks underplay or omit Jamestown and the sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in favor of Plymouth Rock as the archetypal birthplace of the United States. Virginia, according to T. H. Breen, ill-served later historians in search of the mythic origins of American culture. Historians could hardly tout Virginia as moral in intent; in the words of the first history of Virginia written by a Virginian: "The chief Design of all Parties concern'd was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony." The Virginians' relations with the Indians were particularly unsavory: in contrast to Squanto, a volunteer, the British in Virginia took Indian prisoners and forced them to teach colonists how to farm.
In 1623 the British indulged in the first use of chemical warfare in the colonies when negotiating a treaty with tribes near the Potomac River, headed by Chiskiack. The British offered a toast "symbolizing eternal friendship," whereupon the chief, his family, advisors, and two hundred followers dropped dead of poison. Besides, the early Virginians engaged in bickering, sloth, even cannibalism. They spent their early days digging random holes in the ground, haplessly looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting themselves out to Indian families as servants—hardly the heroic founders that a great nation requires.
James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
THE MYTH OF THE MAYFLOWER
The name Pilgrims was probably not in popular use before about 1798. Even though Plymouth celebrated Forefathers' Day several times between 1769 and 1798, and used a variety of terms to honor Plymouth's founders, Pilgrims was not mentioned, other than in Robbins' 1793 recitation. The first documented use of Pilgrims (that was not simply quoting Bradford) was at a December 22, 1798, celebration of Forefathers' Day in Boston. A song composed for the occasion used the word Pilgrims, and the participants drank a toast to "The Pilgrims of Leyden". The term was used prominently during Plymouth's next Forefather's Day celebration in 1800, and was used in Forefathers' Day observances thereafter. By the 1820s, the term Pilgrims was becoming more common. Daniel Webster repeatedly referred to "the Pilgrims" in his December 22, 1820, address for Plymouth's bicentennial, which was widely read. Harriet Vaughan Cheney used it in her 1824 novel A Peep at the Pilgrims in Sixteen Thirty-Six, and the term also gained popularity with the 1825 publication of Felicia Hemans's classic poem, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers." - Wikipedia: Pilgrims
13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.
15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.
16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.
Hebrews 11:13-16 King James Bible
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19. Did the English colonists call themselves Pilgrims?
The English colonists did not specifically label themselves in the letters, books and documents they wrote. Sometimes they referred to themselves as Planters (colonial farmers) to distinguish themselves from the Adventurers (men and women who financed the colony).
20. Why do we call the English colonists Pilgrims?
The word “pilgrim” was used once in the surviving writings of the early colonists. More than 20 years after the arrival of Mayflower, William Bradford wrote about the church's departure from Leiden, Holland to America. Referring to Scripture, as he often did, he wrote; "they knew they were pilgrims," in reference to Hebrews xi.13-16. Then, as now, a pilgrim is someone on a journey with a religious or moral purpose. Bradford did not repeat the reference nor did he use "Pilgrim" as a label or title for the English in Plymouth Colony. More than 150 years later, this quotation was applied to everyone in Plymouth Colony, including those who were not part of the Leiden congregation. The name gained popularity in the 1800s and remains in common usage today. - Plimoth Plantation: English Village FAQs
1620 - The Mayflower Compact signed.
"Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 settlers aboard the May/lower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony." - Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
"“Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.” - Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
“The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the Separatists, sometimes referred to as the "Saints", fleeing from religious persecution by King James of England. They traveled aboard the Mayflower in 1620 along with adventurers, tradesmen, and servants, most of whom were referred to, by the Separatists as “Strangers". - Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower_Compact
THE GREAT MIGRATION
When Jonathan Edwards was born (1703) the estimated Anglo population of the New World was only 275,000. Boston was the largest city with 7000. New York was next with 5000. [WU] http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/a_us_history/1700_1800_timeline.htm
The majority of this population had left England because of religious intolerance.
King James I of England made some efforts to reconcile the Puritan clergy in England, who had been alienated by the conservatism blocking reform in the Church of England. Puritans adopted Calvinism (Reformed theology) with its opposition to ritual and an emphasis on preaching, a growing sabbatarianism, and preference for a presbyterian system of church polity. They opposed religious practices in the Church that at any point came close to Roman Catholic ritual.
After Charles I of England became king in 1625, this religious conflict worsened. Parliament increasingly opposed the King's authority. In 1629, Charles dissolved Parliament with no intention of summoning a new one, in an ill-fated attempt to neutralize his enemies there, who included numerous lay Puritans. With the religious and political climate so hostile and threatening, many Puritans decided to leave the country. Some of the migration was from the expatriate English communities in the Netherlands of nonconformists and Separatists who had set up churches there since the 1590s.
The Winthrop Fleet of 1630 of eleven ships, led by the flagship Arbella, delivered 800 passengers to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Migration continued until Parliament was reconvened in 1640, at which point the scale dropped off sharply. In 1641, when the English Civil War began, some colonists returned to England to fight on the Puritan side, and many stayed, since Oliver Cromwell, himself an Independent, backed Parliament.
From 1630 through 1640 approximately 20,000 colonists came to New England. The 'Great Migration' 1629-40 saw 80,000 people leave England, roughly 20,000 migrating to each of four destinations, Ireland, New England, the West Indies and the Netherlands. The immigrants to New England came from every English county except Westmoreland, nearly half from Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The distinction drawn is that the movement of colonists to New England was not predominantly male, but of families with some education, leading relatively prosperous lives. Winthrop's noted words, a City upon a Hill, refer to a vision of a new society, not just economic opportunity.
Moore (2007) estimates that 7 to 11 percent of colonists returned to England after 1640, including about a third of the clergymen. - Wikipedia: Great Puritan Migration to New England (1620–1640): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(Puritan)
In 1630, “almost 14,000 English Puritans emigrated to New England in the Great Migration.” [NHC] http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/settlement/settlement.htm
They were united in a hatred of Roman Catholics and the Church of England. In 1700 “Massachusetts passes a law ordering all Roman Catholic priests to leave the colony within three months, upon penalty of life imprisonment or execution. New York then passes a similar law.” [WU] http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/a_us_history/1700_1800_timeline.htm
BACON'S REBELLION: HE WAS OF A PESTILENT AND PREVALENT
LOGICAL DISCOURSE TENDING TO ATHEISME
LOGICAL DISCOURSE TENDING TO ATHEISME
In 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown, and England decided to send a thousand soldiers across the Atlantic, hoping to maintain order among forty thousand colonists. This was Bacon’s Rebellion. After the uprising was suppressed, its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, dead, and his associates hanged, Bacon was described in a Royal Commission report:
"He was said to be about four or five and thirty years of age, indifferent tall but slender, black-hair’d and of an ominous, pensive, melancholly Aspect, of a pestilent and prevalent Logical discourse tending to atheisme. . . . He seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe that their whole hearts and hopes were set now upon Bacon. Next he charges the Governour as negligent and wicked, treacherous and incapable, the Lawes and Taxes as unjust and oppressive and cryes up absolute necessity of redress. Thus Bacon encouraged the Tumult and as the unquiet crowd follow and[…]”
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
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SEAFLOWER VS. MAYFLOWER
In 1676, fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, a similarly named but far less famous ship, the Seaflower, departed from the shores of New England. Like the Mayflower, she carried a human cargo. But instead of 102 potential colonists, the Seaflower was bound for the Caribbean with 180 Native American slaves. The governor of Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow— son of former Mayflower passengers Edward and Susanna Winslow— had provided the Seaflower ’s captain with the necessary documentation. In a certificate bearing his official seal, Winslow explained that these Native men, women, and children had joined in an uprising against the colony and were guilty of “many notorious and execrable murders, killings, and outrages.” As a consequence, these “heathen malefactors” had been condemned to perpetual slavery.
- Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
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Water turned stale, butter turned rancid, and beef rotted. If Mittelberger's voyage ranked among the worst, Atlantic crossing were frequently at or near the worst, and many more disastrous ventures were recorded. With bad luck, provisions could give out. The Love and Unity left Rotterdam for Philadelphia in May 1731 with more than 150 Palatines and a year later landed with 34, after having put in toward the end at Martha's Vineyard for water and food. On the way rations became so low that water, rats, and mice were being sold, and the storage chests of the dead and dying were broken open and plundered by the captain and crew. A ship called the Good Intent - the names of eighteenth-century vessels often reek with irony - arrived off the American coast in the winter of 1751 but found herself unable to make port because of the weather; she was able to put in to harbor in theWest Indies only after twenty-four weeks at sea. Nearly all of the passengers had died long before. The Sea Flower, which left Belfast with 106 passengers in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and lost 46 passengers from starvation. When help arrived, six of the corpses had been cannibalized.
Richard Hofstadter, White Servitude
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Such appalling losses in human life were not confined to convict ships. The voyage of the Seaflower is among the most poignant of all the stories. On 31 July 1741, the Seaflower put out of Belfast bound for Philadelphia with 106 passengers. She encountered heavy weather, sprang her mast and was then becalmed for several weeks. Supplies offood ran out and crew and passengers began to die. By the time she made Boston on 31 October - thirteen weeks after starting out - sixty-four were dead, including the captain. Six of the dead had been eaten by the survivors.
- White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America, Don Jordan, Michael Walsh
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According to Lapore, Indians were taken to Deer Island off the Boston Harbor in November 1675. Many tried to escape and were killed. Others died there, and still more where exported as slaves. All this was done with official approval of the court. By December the population there was 400 starving and cold Indians. One Indian (Nepanent/Tom Dublett) was released from Deer Island to negotiate for the release of a European captive May Rowlandson. In 1676 some 70 Indians were reported sold by the Massachusetts Bay Authority. About 110 were sold from Plymouth. They were declared as “legal” slaves that could be sold or purchased.
Notable among the exported slaves were Philip, son of the King Philip and his wife Wootonekanuske. A dispute waged about them and the Boston Clergy proposed their execution, but a majority did not want to hang a 9-year-old boy. They looked to scripture for an answer and in March 1667 decided to sell him into slavery. Hundreds had already been exported by then. That was considered to be merciful. Certificates legalizing their enslavement were issued and carried on board to make it “correct.”
As late as 1683, Missionary John Elliot wrote that “a great number” of “surprised” Indians were carried away including those exported as far as Tangier (Morocco) where many live and are born there and expressed a wish to return home. The Seaflower returns to the historical record in 1696 when it is among the first Rhode Island vessels to import African slaves to Newport selling four there, out of a cargo of 47 souls.
THE JOURNEY TO AMERICA: MISERY, VEXATION, LAMENTATION
In the 1600s and 1700s, by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America. Abbot Smith, in his study of indentured servitude, Colonists in Bondage, writes:
“From the complex pattern of forces producing emigration to the American colonies one stands out clearly as most powerful in causing the movement of servants. This was the pecuniary profit to be made by shipping them.”
After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their cost of passage by working for a master for five or seven years, they were often imprisoned until the ship sailed, to make sure they did not run away. In the year 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, born that year as the first representative assembly in America (it was also the year of the first importation of black slaves), provided for the recording and enforcing of contracts between servants and masters. As in any contract between unequal powers, the parties appeared on paper as equals, but enforcement was far easier for master than for servant.
The voyage to America lasted eight, ten, or twelve weeks, and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. The sloop Sea-Flower, leaving Belfast in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of starvation, six of them eaten by the survivors. On another trip, thirty-two children died of hunger and disease and were thrown into the ocean. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a musician, traveling from Germany to America around 1750, wrote about his voyage:
"During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water. . . . Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles. . . . On board our ship, on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one of the portholes into the sea. . . . "
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States.
SALEM: THE DEVIL'S TERRITORIES
The Salem Witch Trials has took place in 1692.
This is Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan Minister involved in the Salem Witch Trials: [emphasis & paragraphs mine]
The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession.
There was not a greater Uproar among the Ephesians, when the Gospel was first brought among them, than there was among, The Powers of the Air (after whom those Ephesians walked) when first the Silver Trumpets of the Gospel here made the Joyful Sound.
The Devil thus Irritated, immediately try'd all sorts of Methods to overturn this poor Plantation: and so much of the Church, as was Fled into this Wilderness, immediately found, The Serpent cast out of his Mouth a Flood for the carrying of it away.
I believe, that never were more Satanical Devices used for the Unsetling of any People under the Sun, than what have been Employ'd for the Extirpation of the Vine which God has here Planted, Casting out the Heathen, and preparing a Room before it, and causing it to take deep Root, and fill the Land, so that it sent its Boughs unto the Atlantic Sea Eastward, and its Branches unto the Connecticut River Westward, and the Hills were covered with the shadow thereof.
But, All those Attempts of Hell, have hitherto been Abortive, many an Ebenezer has been Erected unto the Praise of God, by his Poor People here; and, Having obtained Help from God, we continue to this Day. Wherefore the Devil is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprizing, more snarl'd with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountred; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon Enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell Trodden under our Feet.
He has wanted his Incarnate Legions to Persecute us, as the People of God have in the other Hemisphere been Persecuted: he has therefore drawn forth his more Spiritual ones to make an Attacque upon us.
We have been advised by some Credible Christians yet alive, that a Malefactor, accused of Witchcraft as well as Murder, and Executed in this place more than Forty Years ago, did then give Notice of, An Horrible Plot against the Country by Witchcraft, and a Foundation of Witchcraft then laid, which if it were not seasonally discovered, would probably Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country.
And we have now with Horror seen the Discovery of such a Witchcraft! An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural.
After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers; and notwithstanding the Great and Just Suspicion, that the Dæmons might Impose the Shapes of Innocent Persons in their Spectral Exhibitions upon the Sufferers, (which may perhaps prove no small part of the Witch-Plot in the issue) yet many of the Persons thus Represented, being Examined, several of them have been Convicted of a very Damnable Witchcraft: yea, more than One Twenty have Confessed, that they have Signed unto a Book, which the Devil show'd them, and Engaged in his Hellish Design of Bewitching, and Ruining our Land.
We know not, at least I know not, how far the Delusions of Satan may be Interwoven into some Circumstances of the Confessions; but one would think, all the Rules of Understanding Humane Affairs are at an end, if after so many most Voluntary Harmonious Confessions, made by Intelligent Persons of all Ages, in sundry Towns, at several Times, we must not Believe the main strokes wherein those Confessions all agree: especially when we have a thousand preternatural Things every day before our eyes, wherein the Confessors do acknowledge their Concernment, and give Demonstration of their being so Concerned.
If the Devils now can strike the minds of men with any Poisons of so fine a Composition and Operation, that Scores of Innocent People shall Unite, in Confessions of a Crime, which we see actually committed, it is a thing prodigious, beyond the Wonders of the former Ages, and it threatens no less than a sort of a Dissolution upon the World.
Now, by these Confessions 'tis Agreed, That the Devil has made a dreadful Knot of Witches in the Country, and by the help of Witches has dreadfully increased that Knot: That these Witches have driven a Trade of Commissioning their Confederate Spirits, to do all sorts of Mischiefs to the Neighbours, whereupon there have ensued such Mischievous consequences upon the Bodies and Estates of the Neighbourhood, as could not otherwise be accounted for: yea, That at prodigious Witch-Meetings, the Wretches have proceeded so far, as to Concert and Consult the Methods of Rooting out the Christian Religion from this Country, and setting up instead of it, perhaps a more gross Diabolesm, than ever the World saw before.
And yet it will be a thing little short of Miracle, if in so spread a Business as this, the Devil should not get in some of his Juggles, to confound the Discovery of all the rest.
PG - Project Gutenberg: The Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather, 1693 - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28513/28513-h/28513-h.htm
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| Petition to Free Rebecca Nurse, accused of Witchcraft, signed by 39 Salem residents source |
Summary of Examinations of Tituba , Sarah Good , and Sarah OsborneSalem Village March 1'st 1691 [emphasis mine]
Titiba an Indian Woman brought before us by Const' Jos Herrick of Salem upon Suspition of Witchcraft by her Commited according to the Compl't of Jos. Hutcheson & Thomas putnam &c of Salem Village as appeares p Warrant granted Salem 29 febr'y 1691/2 Titiba upon Examination and after some denyall acknowledged the matter of fact according to her Examination given in more fully will appeare and who also charged Sarah Good and Sarah Osburne with the same Salem Village March the 1'th 1691/2
Sarah Good Sarah Osborne and Titiba an Indian Woman all of Salem Village Being this day brought before us upon Suspition of Witchcraft &c by them and Every one of them Committed. Titiba an Indian Woman acknowledging the matter of fact. and Sarah Osburne and Sarah Good denying the same before us: but there appeareing in all theire Examinations sufficient Ground to secure them all. And in order to further Examination they Ware all p mittimus sent to the Goales in the County of Essex.
(H) why did you goe to thomas putnams Last night and hurt his child(T) they pull and hall me and make goe(H) and what would have you doe Kill her with a knif Left. fuller and others said at this time when the child saw these persons and was tormented by them that she did complain of a knif that they would have her cut her head off with a knife(H) how did you go(T) we ride upon stickes and are there presently(H) doe you goe through the trees or over them(T) we see no thing but are there presently(H) why did you not tell your master(T) I was a fraid they said they would cut off my head if I told(H) would not you have hurt others if you could(T) they said they would hurt others but they could not(H) what attendants hath Sarah good(T) a yellow bird and shee would have given me one(H) what meate did she give it(T) it did suck her between her fingers(H) Did not you hurt mr Currins child(T) goode good and goode Osburn told that they did hurt mr Currens child and would have had me hurt him two but I did not(H) what hath Sarah Osburn(T) yesterday shee had a thing with a head like a woman with 2 leggs and wings Abigail williams that lives with her uncle mr Parris said that shee did see this same creature and it turned into the shape of goode osburn(H) what else have you seen with g osburn(T) an other thing hairy it goes upright like a man it hath only 2 leggs(H) did you not see Sarah good upon elisebeth Hubbar last Saturday(T) I did see her set a wolfe upon her to afflict her the persons with this maid did say that shee did complain of a wolf(T) shee furder said that shee saw a cat with good at another time(H) what cloathes doth the man go in(T) he goes in black clouthes a tal man with white hair I thinke(H) how doth the woman go(T) in a white whood and a black whood with a tup knot(H) doe you see who it is that torments these children now(T) yes it is goode good she hurts them in her own shape(H) & who is it that hurts them now(T) I am blind noe I cannot see
Salem VillageMarch the 1st 1691/2written byEzekiell Chevers Salem Village March the 1't 1691/2 ( Essex County Archives, Salem -- Witchcraft Vol. 1 Page 6 )
UV - University of Virginia: Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html
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“Death reached into all corners of life, striking people of all ages, not just the old. In the healthiest regions, one child in ten died during the first year of life. In less healthy areas, like Boston, the figure was three in ten. Cotton Mather, the famous Boston minister, had 14 children. Seven died in infancy and just one lived to the age of thirty. Bacterial stomach infections, intestinal worms, epidemic diseases, contaminated food and water, and neglect and carelessness all contributed to a society in which 40 percent of children failed to reached adulthood in the seventeenth century.”
“Epidemics accounted for a large proportion of deaths--sweeping thousands of people away in the course of a few months. Diphtheria, influenza, measles, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and smallpox ravaged the population, producing death rates as high as 30 per thousand. A smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1677-78 killed one-fifth of the town's population. Many of the individuals who survived a smallpox epidemic were left blind or pockmarked for life. Conflict with Indians also took many lives. One Indian war, the Pequot War of 1675, killed a larger percentage of the population than any later war in American history.”
[DH] http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/usdeath.cfm
In Europe, it is the beginning of the Enlightenment. In the previous century, discoveries by Gallileo and Kepler are watering the seeds of Humanism, the movement away from Faith and the birth of observational science. Descartes publishes his Meditations in 1641, setting up the dialectic between rationalism and empiricism and giving rise to what we know as Modern Philosophy. In 1686, Newton’s Principia is published. In 1703, Bach becomes the organist at St Boniface’s.
FAMILY ROOTS: HIS FATHER'S SERMON NOTES
Timothy Edwards (1669-1758) was a Congregational (Puritan) minister in East Windsor, Connecticut. Edwards was the son of a wealthy merchant and graduated Harvard College in 1691. He was assigned to his East Windsor parish in 1694, where he remained for the rest of his life. He married Esther Stoddard, the daughter of a famous Northampton, Massachusetts, minister and they had eleven children. Timothy was famous for delivering his sermons from small notes, rather than from fully written-out scripts. This example is typical: it mainly cites Biblical verses which he would recite from memory and use as centerpieces of his sermon's points. This sermon was delivered on the Sunday after the Deerfield Raid. The Raid was traumatic for Puritan New England: for many this disaster meant that God's favor had deserted them, and they turned to their ministers for guidance. Edwards ran a school in his home, as was typical for the time. Here he educated the most famous of his eleven children, his only son, Jonathan (1703-1758), who would become one of the leading ministers of his day, a leader of the First Great Awakening.
D2 Read &c Rom.12.12 (13.) 14
D3 Considr &c Ps.119.89 1.Kings 8.47. Deut. 32/29/Ecc.11.8.
D4 Pray &c. Zach.12.10.
D5 Watch. &c. Mat 26.41
D6 Deny yr Corrin. &c-5.Mat.29.30.
Windsor Eastside of ye River March/5.1703/4 ye next Sabbath after Deerfield was taken by ye Fr & I being about 2 hours before day, or at least early In ye morning on Tuesday ye Last of Febry
1, Samll.3.11.and the Lord said to Samll: behold I will do a thing in Israel, at wch: both ye ears of Eve= ry one ye heareth, shall tingle.
Doc. The Sins of a Professing People do Sometimes Provoke God to do such things amongst ym as are very dreadfull.
This is very clear fro our text and [ ] ffollows in ye next Chapter
PR Sometimes not only percular persons but a people Pl in Genll: made a profession of Christianity or sometimes a people may be said to be a pro= fessing people Deut. 26.16.14.
PR sometimes a professing people are a Sinfull People. &c Lam.,.8. Jr.1.4.
P2 As sometimes a professing People are A Sinfull
P3 Peoples so y yr Sins do provoke God to do very dreadfull things amongst (y)m.
4. Sometimes ye Sins of a professing people do provoke God do provoke God to send every son and m. sicknesses amongst em. Ps.78.50.58
- Memorial Hall Museum: Timothy Edwards
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HIS "CRAZY" GRANDMOTHER: "THE FLESHY PARTICULARS"
Elizabeth Tuttle, b. 9 Nov 1645, New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut, d. 1679, Milford, New Haven County, Connecticut. Lived only 34 years.
Elizabeth Tuttle plays but a small role in this idealized construction of Jonathan Edwards. His is a large-and very male-story of powerful intellects and clashing theological ideas. The women who inhabit its periphery, like Elizabeth Tuttle, have not received sustained attention, for their inarticulate, thinly documented lives appear insignificant to the intellectual historians and theologians who regularly write about Edwards. This project came into focus only when I shifted my gaze from the central story to its margins. From this perspective, my attention was quickly drawn to the figure of ElizabethTuttle. Modern biographers of Edwards have routinely depicted his paternal grandmother as a rebellious woman who by her mad threats and promiscuous behavior drove her long suffering husband to petition for a divorce. Ola Elizabeth Winslow-s Pulitzer Prizewinning study, which appeared in 1940, established this crazy-grandmother story as a standard feature of the Edwards myth. Subsequent biographers from Perry Miller to George Marsden have invariably followed Winslows lead, portraying her as the antithesis of the puritan goodwife. This misbehaving woman added a pinch of spice, a whiff of scandal, to Edwards's pious moralism, but she also seemed a bit too convenient, a straw man dressed in cap and petticoats. Her gendered identity aroused my curiosity and led me again to ask, Just who was ElizabethTuttle?
The historical answer to this question consists of a series of dates: Elizabeth Tuttle was an ordinary puritan woman who was born in the New Haven colony in 1645. In 1667 she married a cooper named Richard Edwards and moved to Hartford, where her new husband lived. Less than seven months after the marriage she gave birth to an early baby, the first in the expected succession of children. In 1691, she separated from her family when the Connecticut General Court granted her husbands petition for a divorce. After this date she disappears; no record even notes the date of her death. [...]
The bodies of Edwards's seventeenth century ancestors are impossible to ignore. Some had sex with unsanctioned partners and neglected their marital duties. Others defaulted on their creditors because they could not manage their money. And two committed brutal murders in fits of violent rage or uncontrolled madness. These all-too-physical acts forcibly situate Edwards in the social history of colonial New England. They embed his mind in the fleshy particulars that constituted the daily lives of the colonists. That he was a product of this world, and that he engaged this world throughout his ministry, does not, as Miller believed, trap his thought in the eighteenth century, nor does it negate his literary and philosophical accomplishments. But it docs challenge us to integrate his mind with his body and attend to how images of the ordinary people who inhabited his physical world have been constructed.
The women who played supporting characters in the drama of Edwards's ideas have predictably been represented by two sharply contrasting figures. His wife is depicted as the model mate for a great theologian, while his grandmother is cast as her opposite. By flaunting her infidelities and delighting in her disobedience, she appears just the sort of woman to make a man miserable. This representation of ElizabethTuttle, however, itself has a history. Tracing the construction of this image forms the sequel to our reconstruction of the divorce. This narrative of remembrance and forgetting begins in the years following the divorce. Like most voiceless women of the past, Elizabeth quickly disappears, taking with her all traces of the divorce. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this unpleasant episode had been so effectively forgotten that Edwards's early biographers claimed his grandfather had remarried following his wife's death, not a messy divorce. Only as America began fashioning a new relation to its puritan past did the memory of Elizabeth Tuttle return.
Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards
Esther was the daughter of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard. A large, imposing man, Stoddard was called “the Pope of the Valley” by his critics, meaning that he believed himself to be greater than he truly was. Stoddard’s Northampton parishioners did not agree with these criticisms. They admired and even adored Stoddard, who had been their pastor since 1669.
Esther Stoddard must have been pleased with Timothy Edwards; as the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, she could have had her pick of the community’s unmarried ministers. Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard married in Northampton,Massachusetts, in 1694, the same year Timothy was awarded his degrees. The young couple moved about 50 miles down the Connecticut River and settled 10 JONATHAN EDWARDS at East Windsor, Connecticut, on the river’s eastern side. There, Timothy Edwards became “the Reverend” Edwards and Esther Stoddard became “Goodwife” Edwards.
The couple started their family at once. Esther, the eldest child, was born in 1695; Elizabeth came in 1697; Anne was born in 1699; Mary arrived in 1701; and Jonathan, the only boy in the family, was born on October 5, 1703. The Edwardses went on to have six more daughters: Eunice, Abigail, Jerusha, Hannah, Lucy, and Martha. The total count of Edwards children was 11, 10 of them daughters.
SLT - Spiritual Leaders and Thinkers: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton, Chelsea House, 2005
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Johann Pachelbel (1653 – 1706)
JONATHAN EDWARDS BORN IN EAST WINDSOR, CT
1703 - In East Windsor, Connecticut, Edwards is born into what would become a large family. He is the only son, grows up surrounded by 10 sisters. His father is a Reverend. His mother the daughter of Solomon Stoddard, a well-respected Reverend from Northampton. The only other male presence in his early life is that of a slave named, Tim. [SLT] Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Willard Crompton, Chelsea House, 2005
1706 - Benjamin Franklin is born in Boston on 17 January 1706.
1707 - United Kingdom of Great Britain formed—England, Wales, and Scotland joined by parliamentary Act of Union.
1712 - In Massachusetts, the first sperm whale is captured at sea by an American from Nantucket.
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| The Sperm Whale in a Flurry, Garneray - source |
The first Spermaceti whale taken by the Nantucket whaler was killed by Christopher Hussey. He was cruising near the shore for Right whales, and was blown off some distance from the land by a strong northerly wind, when he fell in with a school of that species of whales, and killed one and brought it home. At what date this adventure took place is not fully ascertained, but it is supposed to be not far from 1712.
Obed Macy, History of Nantucket (First Edition, Nantucket: 1835), p. 32.
There is little doubt that Nantucketers began to encounter sperm whales at some time near Macy's "not fully ascertained" date of 1712. A far more believable story in Macy's History, also dated to 1712, describes a sperm whale "found dead and ashore, on the southwest part of the island." After a bitter dispute with "many claimants," including a representative of the British Crown, and the "natives" [Macy] who first found it, the proprietors disingenuously asserted their claim to the carcass due to a retroactive right "comprehended in their purchase of the island." The excited populace considered the teeth, spermaceti, and blubber of the sperm whale "worth their weight in silver.” NHA - Nantucket Historical Association: Christopher Hussey Blown Out (Up) to Sea by Ben Simons - http://www.nha.org/history/hn/HNsimons-hussey.htm
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“In Waymouth's journal of his voyage to America in 1605, in describing the Indians on the coast, he says: "One especial thing is their manner of killing the whale, which they call powdawe; and will describe his form; how he bloweth up the water; and that he is twelve fathoms long and that they go in company of their king with a multitude of their boats; and strike him with a bone made in fashion of a harping iron fastened to a rope, which they make great and strong of the bark of trees, which they veer out after him; then all their boats come about him as he riseth above water, with their arrows they shoot him to death; when they have killed him and dragged him to shore, they call all their chief lords together, and sing a song of joy: and those chief lords, whom they call sagamores, divide the spoil and give to every man a share, which pieces so distributed, they hang up about their houses for provisions; and when they boil them they blow off the fat and put to their pease, maize, and other pulse which they eat.” […]
“The first sperm whale taken by Nantucket whalemen was captured by Christopher Hussey, about the year 1712, and the capture, destined to effect a radical change in the pursuit of this business, was the result of an accident. "He was cruising," says Macy,58 "near the shore for Right whales, and was blown off some distance from the land by a strong northerly wind, where he fell in with a school of that species of whales, and killed one and brought it home. * * * * This event gave new life to the business, for they immediately began with vessels of about thirty tons to whale out in the 'deep,' as it was then called, to distinguish it from shore whaling. They fitted out for cruises of about six weeks, carried a few hogsheads, enough probably to contain the blubber of one whale, with which, after obtaining it, they returned home. The owners then took charge of the blubber, and tried out the oil, and immediately sent the vessels out again."59 In 1715 Nantucket had six sloops engaged in this fishery, producing oil to the value of 1,100 sterling, the shore fishery being, in the mean time, still continued. There was no perceptible diminution in the number of whales taken from along the coast for quite a number of years after the establishment of the fishery. - http://mysite.du.edu/~ttyler/ploughboy/starbuck.htm#sectionb - History of the American Whale Fishery From its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 by Alexander Starbuck
1714 - Tea is introduced for the first time into the American Colonies.
During the early eighteenth century the tea habit in England moved beyond the home and the coffeehouses to the pleasantly situated “Tea Gardens,” and the newly conceived teahouses, the first of which was established by Thomas Twining, who opened the “Golden Lyon” in London in 1717. Whereas the coffeehouses were a man’s domain, the tea gardens and teahouses catered to both sexes, further cementing tea’s grip on society. Within a little more than a century of tea’s introduction, British imports from China had risen from hundreds of pounds per year to roughly nine million pounds in 1770. That was only the official tally, to which had to be added the millions of pounds of tea that were smuggled into England, mainly by the Dutch, to avoid the onerous taxes the government levied on the tea imported legally by the British East India Company. - Dolin, Eric Jay, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail
Thus when England took over New Netherland in 1664, transforming it into the colony of New York, the English inherited a community of tea drinkers. From that point forward the consumption of tea spread throughout the American colonies in much the same way as it had throughout England. Coffeehouses and tea gardens patterned after the British model sprang up in many cities, and thousands of newspaper advertisements trumpeted the availability of high-quality imported tea at local shops. Initially a habit of the well-to-do, tea drinking filtered down to the rest of society as tea imports increased and prices fell. “Tea, coffee, and chocolate,” wrote a clergyman from Delaware in 1759, “are so general as to be found in the most remote cabins, if not for daily use yet for visitors, mixed with muscovado or raw sugar.” - Dolin, Eric Jay, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail
1720 - Edwards completes his baccalaureate degree at the newly founded Yale College. He is 17 years old. He gives his oration entirely in Latin on the subject, “A Sinner Is Not Justified in the Sight of God Except Through the Righteousness of Christ Obtained by Faith.”
1720 - The population of American colonists reaches 475,000. Boston (pop. 12,000) is the largest city, followed by Philadelphia (pop. 10,000) and New York (pop. 7000) [WU]
)
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741)
1723 - October: writes "Spider Letter," begins "Notes on the Apocalypse"
He writes his “Spider Letter,” detailing his study of the behavior of flying spiders.
He writes his “Spider Letter,” detailing his study of the behavior of flying spiders.
“Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity admirable way of working. These spiders, for the present, shall be distinguished into those that keep in houses and those that keep in forests, upon trees, bushes, shrubs, etc. for I take ’em to be of very different kinds and natures (there are also other sorts, some of which keep in rotten logs, hollow trees, swamps and grass).
Of these last, everyone knows the truth of their marching in the air from tree to tree, and these sometimes at five or six rods distance sometimes. Nor can anyone go out amongst the trees in a dewy morning towards the latter end of August or the beginning of September, but that he shall see hundreds of webs, made conspicuous by the dew that is lodged upon them, reaching from one tree and shrub to another that stands at a considerable distance, and they may be seen well enough by an observing eye at noonday by their glistening against the sun. And what is still more wonderful, I know I have several times seen, in a very calm and serene day at that time of year, standing behind some opaque body that shall just hide the disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays from my eye, multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings of a great length, and at such a height as (that one would think they were tacked to the sky by one end, were it not that they were moving and floating. And there often appears at the end of these webs a spider floating and sailing in the air with them, which I have plainly discerned in those webs that were nearer to my eye. And once [I] saw a very large spider, to my surprise, swimming in the air in this manner, and others have assured me that they often have seen spiders fly. The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing, and it was so pleasing, as well as surprising, to me, that I resolved to endeavor to satisfy my curiosity about it, by finding out the way and of their doing it, being also persuaded that, if I could find out how they flew, I could easily find out how they made webs from tree to tree.” [PM] http://www.apuritansmind.com/puritan-favorites/jonathan-edwards/scientific-writings/of-insects/
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Now, in 1723, Edwards made a vow to place God first in all matters:
And solemnly [I] vowed to take God for my whole portion and felicity; looking on nothing else as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were; and his law for the constant rule of my obedience; engaging to fight with all my might, against the world, the flesh and the devil, to the end of my life.
God and the devil both were very real presences for the people of colonial America. The Salem Witch Trials had taken place only 30 years earlier, and many, if not most, Americans believed in the power of the devil as well as that of God” [SLT]
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1725 - The population of black slaves in the American colonies reaches 75,000. [UW]
He marries Sarah Pierpont in 1727.
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1729
February: Solomon Stoddard (Grandfather and Spiritual Mentor) dies; Edwards becomes senior pastor
June: suffers physical collapse
July: resumes preaching
December: sister Jerusha dies of "malignant fever”
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In his Narrative of Many Surprising Conversions, Jonathan Edwards alluded to the difficulties that the Puritan church experienced after about the year 1700. It seemed that the younger members of the church were behaving in a way that Edwards considered immoral:
“After the last of these [ingatherings], came a far more degenerate time, (at least among young people) I suppose, than ever before. . . . Just after my grandfather’s death, it seemed to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion: Licentiousness for some years greatly prevailed among the youth of the town; they were many of them very much addicted to night walking, and frequenting the tavern, and lewd practices, wherein some by their example exceedingly corrupted others. It was their manner very frequently to get together in conventions of both sexes, for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would often spend the greater part of the night in them, without any regard to order in the families they belonged to: And indeed family government did too much fail in the town.” [SLT]
1729 - Benjamin Franklin begins publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette, which eventually becomes the most popular colonial newspaper.
Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
St Matthew Passion - Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P21qlB0K-Bs
Isaac Newton's Principia translated from Latin into English.
1731 - May 7: purchases "Negro girl named Venus" for £80 in Newport, R.I. [JEC]
ON JUNE 7, 1731, four men gathered around a table in a southern New England seaport, possibly at a tavern, to transact some business. Three of them—one of advanced middle age, the other two about a decade younger, wearing fashionable suits and having by them on the table, or balanced on a crossed knee, fine hats—had the look of experienced sailors. Beneath the coats of at least two of them could be seen what might, in the low light, have been the glint off of a sword hilt or the lock plate of a pistol.1 The fourth was an apparently fragile man in his late twenties, so thin as to look "emaciated, and impair'd in his Health."2 He was dressed in the wig, black suit, and Geneva tabs that he always made a point of wearing in public. To see this fourth man, with all the distinguishing marks of a clergyman, in such company must have struck onlookers as odd, and perhaps the other three men covertly shared bemused looks over the serious, thin-lipped minister as he watched one of his companions take up a quill, dip it into a well, and fill out a bill of sale—a receipt for a slave, "a Negro Girle named Venus," whom this man of God was buying.
Kenneth P. Minkema, Jonathan Edwards's Defense of Slavery [doc] From The Massachusetts Historical Review Vol. 4, Issue NA.
1732 - September 5: earthquake at noon
On earthquakes in New England:
Near Moodus, Middlesex County, Connecticut - 1791 - Intensity VII
Largest Earthquake in Connecticut
The region around East Haddam, on the Connecticut River northeast of New Haven, has been the scene of a series of local disturbances since this country was settled. The region southeast of Middletown has been referred to in Indian tradition as Morehemoodus, or "place of noises." The first reported earthquake began on May 16 with two heavy shocks in quick succession. Stone walls were shaken down, tops of chimneys were knocked off, and latched doors were thrown open. A fissure several meters long formed in the ground. In a short time, 30 lighter shocks occurred, and more than 100 continued during the night. Reported felt at Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, New York.
Condensed from A Brief History of East Haddam, Connecticut, written by Dr. Karl Stofko and Rachel Gibbs.
Before 1650
Until 1650, the area of East Haddam was inhabited by at least three tribes of Indians: the Wangunks, the Mohegans and the Nehantics. The Indians called the area “Machimoodus,” the place of noises, because of numerous earthquakes that were recorded between 1638 and 1899. Loud rumblings, the “Moodus Noises,” could be heard for miles surrounding the epicenter of the quakes near Mt. Tom. The land, which is now Haddam and East Haddam, was purchased from the Indians in 1662 for thirty coats – worth about $100.
1732 Benjamin Franklin begins publishing Poor Richard's Almanack.
1732 - February 22, George Washington is born in Virginia.
Also in February, the first mass is celebrated in the only Catholic church in colonial America, in Philadelphia.
In June, Georgia, the 13th English colony, is founded.
***
Edwards described a change that took place in the winter of 1733–1734:
There began to appear a remarkable religious concern at a little village belonging to the congregation, called Pascommuck . . . , where a few families were settled, at about three miles distance from the main body of the town. At this place a number of persons seemed to be savingly wrought upon.
In the April following, Anno 1734, there happened a very sudden and awful death of a . . . youth; who being violently seized with a pleurisy, and taken immediately very delirious, died in about two days; which . . . much affected many young people. This was followed with another death of a young married woman,who had been considerably exercised in mind, about the salvation of her soul, before she was ill, and was in great distress in the beginning of her illness, but seemed to havesatisfying evidences of God’s saving mercy to her, before her death; so that she died very full of comfort, in a most earnest and moving manner, warning and counseling others.
Although almost every New Englander at the time had had brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, or cousins who had died, these two deaths in 1734 invaded the minds of the people of Northampton. As a result, they became more receptive to hearing God’s word. Edwards wrote of this time:
In the fall of the year, I proposed it to the young people, that they should agree among themselves to spend the evenings after lectures, in social religion, and to that end to divide themselves into several companies to meet in various parts of the town; which was accordingly done, and those meetings have been since continued, and the example imitated by elder people. [SLT]
1734 - In December, the Great Awakening religious revival movement begins in Massachusetts. The movement will last ten years and spread to all of the American colonies.
Wikipedia: The First Great Awakening began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1743, though pockets of revivalism had occurred in years prior especially amongst the ministry of Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards's grandfather.
Edwards's congregation was involved in a revival later called the "Frontier Revivals" in the mid-1730s, though this was on the wane by 1737.
But as American religious historian Sydney Sydney E. Ahlstrom noted the Great Awakening "was still to come, ushered in by the Grand Itinerant", the great British Evangelist George Whitefield. Whitefield arrived in Georgia in 1738, and returned in 1739 for a second visit of the Colonies, making a "triumphant campaign north from Philadelphia to New York, and back to the South.”
***
In the letter, Edwards described the wonderful workings of God in Northampton:
People are brought off from inordinate engagedness after the world, & have been ready to run into the other extreme of too much neglecting their worldly business & to mind nothing but religion. Those that are under convictions are put upon it earnestly to enquire what they shall do to be saved, & diligently to use appointed means of Grace, and apply themselves to all known duty.
Edwards almost seems to complain about the involvement in the Spirit rather than the things of the flesh! He went on:
There is an alteration made in the town in a few months that strangers can scarcely [be] conscious of; our Church I believe was the largest in New England before, but persons lately have thronged in, so that there are very few adult persons left out. There have been a great multitude hopefully converted, too many, I find, for me to declare abroad with credit to my judgment.
When Edwards wrote that his church had been the largest in New England, he meant in terms of members who were admitted to the Lord’s Supper (because of the relaxed policy of Solomon Stoddard). This should have been judged a major success, but Edwards already was expressing uneasiness that the new conversions had taken place too rapidly. He feared there had not been time enough for him to properly judge each and every case. [SLT]
***
The leaders of the Great Awakening, such as James Davenport, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tenant and George Whitefield, had little interest in merely engaging parishioners' intellects; rather, they sought a strong emotional response from their congregations that might yield the workings and experiential evidence of saving grace.
Joseph Tracy, the minister, historian, and preacher who gave this religious phenomenon its name in his influential 1842 book The Great Awakening, saw the First Great Awakening as a precursor to the American Revolution.
The evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic thought, as well as the belief of the free press and the belief that information should be shared and completely unbiased and uncontrolled. These concepts ushered in the period of the American Revolution. This contributed to create a demand for religious freedom.
Although the Great Awakening represented the first time African Americans embraced Christianity in large numbers, Anglican missionaries had long sought to convert blacks, again with the printed as well as the spoken word.
From US history.org
The Great Awakening
Not all American ministers were swept up by the Age of Reason. In the 1730s, a religious revival swept through the British American colonies. JONATHAN EDWARDS, the Yale minister who refused to convert to the Church of England, became concerned that New Englanders were becoming far too concerned with worldly matters. It seemed to him that people found the pursuit of wealth to be more important than John Calvin's religious principles. Some were even beginning to suggest that predestination was wrong and that good works might save a soul. Edwards barked out from the pulpit against these notions. "God was an angry judge, and humans were sinners!" he declared. He spoke with such fury and conviction that people flocked to listen. This sparked what became known as the GREAT AWAKENING in the American colonies.
Soon much of America became divided. Awakening, or NEW LIGHT, preachers set up their own schools and churches throughout the colonies. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY was one such school. The OLD LIGHT ministers refused to accept this new style of worship. Despite the conflict, one surprising result was greater religious toleration. With so many new denominations, it was clear that no one religion would dominate any region.
Although the Great Awakening was a reaction against the Enlightenment, it was also a long term cause of the Revolution. Before, ministers represented an upper class of sorts. Awakening ministers were not always ordained, breaking down respect for betters. The new faiths that emerged were much more democratic in their approach. The overall message was one of greater equality. The Great Awakening was also a "national" occurrence. It was the first major event that all the colonies could share, helping to break down differences between them. There was no such episode in England, further highlighting variances between Americans and their cousins across the sea. Indeed this religious upheaval had marked political consequences.
What historians call “the first Great Awakening” can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.
The earliest manifestations of the American phase of this phenomenon—the beginnings of the First Great Awakening—appeared among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Led by the Tennent family—Reverend William Tennent, a Scots-Irish immigrant, and his four sons, all clergymen—the Presbyterians not only initiated religious revivals in those colonies during the 1730s but also established a seminary to train clergymen whose fervid, heartfelt preaching would bring sinners to experience evangelical conversion. Originally known as “the Log College,” it is better known today as Princeton University.
Religious enthusiasm quickly spread from the Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies to the Congregationalists (Puritans) and Baptists of New England.
By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents.
In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were delivered extemporaneously, preachers like Jonathan Edwards evoked vivid, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell. Hence Edwards’s famous description of the sinner as a loathsome spider suspended by a slender thread over a pit of seething brimstone in his best known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
1735
March 25: Thomas Stebbins unsuccessfully attempts suicide by cutting his throat
April 8: attends Hampshire Association meeting at Springfield
June 1: Joseph Hawley, Sr., commits suicide by slitting his throat
Edwards signed the letter on May 30, 1735. Four days later, he wrote a postscript:
Since I wrote the following letter, there has happened a thing of a very awful nature in the town; My uncle Hawley, the last Sabbath morning, laid violent hands on himself, & put an end to his life, by cutting his own throat. He had been for a considerable time greatly concerned about the condition of his soul; till, by the ordering of a sovereign Providence he was suffered to fall into deep melancholy, a distemper that the family are very prone to.
Joseph Hawley was Edwards’s uncle by marriage. He was the most successful merchant in Northampton and had been highly esteemed by his fellow parishioners. No matter what gloss Edwards attempted to put on it, Hawley’s suicide was a grave loss to the town and to the revival movement occurring within it. [SLT]
***
A remarkable event took place on March 13, 1737, however— an event that appeared to boost both Edwards’s spirits and the energy of his congregation:
We in this town were, the last Lord’s day, (March 13th) the spectators, and many of us the subjects, of one of the most amazing instances of Divine preservation, that perhaps was ever known in the world. Our meeting-house is old and decayed, so that we have been for some time building a new one, which is yet unfinished. It has been observed of late, that the house we have hitherto met in, has gradually spread at the bottom; the sills and walls giving way . . . . So that in the midst of the public exercise in the forenoon, soon after the beginning of the sermon, the whole gallery—full of people, with all the seats and timbers, suddenly and without any warning— sunk, and fell down, with the most amazing noise, upon the heads of those that sat under, to the astonishment of the congregation. The house was filled with dolorous shrieking and crying; and nothing else was expected than to find many people dead, or dashed to pieces.
Edwards explained that although many people were injured, none of the injuries were serious, and not a single person had been killed. He went on:
It seems unreasonable to ascribe it to any thing else but the care of Providence, in disposing the motions of every piece of timber, and the precise place of safety where every one should sit and fall.
While this event should have brought Edwards and his congregants closer, however, Edwards still despaired of them. [SLT]
***
1738 - September 19: Ebenezer Hunt's hatshop burglarized by Samuel West, who is caught and branded [JEC]
1739 - July 22: Mrs. Bridgman excommunicated for drunkenness
1739 - England declares war on Spain. As a result, in America, hostilities break out between Florida Spaniards and Georgia and South Carolina colonists. Also in 1739, three separate violent uprisings by black slaves occur in South Carolina. [WU]
1740 - Capt. Vitus Bering, Dane employed by Russia, discovers Alaska. Frederick II “the Great” crowned king of Prussia.
1740 - Fifty black slaves are hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, after plans for another revolt are revealed. Also in 1740, in Europe, the War of the Austrian Succession begins after the death of Emperor Charles VI and eventually results in France and Spain allied against England. The conflict is known in the American colonies as King George's War and lasts until 1748.. [WU]
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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710 – 16 March 1736)
1741
January 20: voted salary of £280 for previous year
January 21: preaches ordination sermon of Chester Williams at Hadley
April 7: attends Hampshire Association meeting at Deerfield
April 14: preaches at Suffield
April 15: preaches at Second Church, Hartford
May: "Miscellanies" 862
July 1: preaches at Longmeadow
July 8: preaches Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at Enfield, published shortly thereafter [JEC]
***
Where did this harsh language come from? Was this the same Edwards renowned for his goodness toward his family and his faithful service to his Northampton community?One of the best clues to this comes from the work of George Marsden, whose monumental biography of Edwards was published in 2003. Marsden, like many other writers, acknowledged that Edwards was a man of calmness, dignity, and compassionbut also that Edwards knew plenty of woe in his family growing up. Timothy Edwards had been an exemplary father and the immediate family had known peace and prosperity, but Edwards’s grandmother had been a nymphomaniac, his great uncle had killed one of his great-aunts with an axe, and another great-aunt had killed one of her children. Thus, Jonathan Edwards had plenty of material in the back of his mind withwhich to create the horrible scenes of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” [SLT]
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On March 18, 1741, the first of a series of suspicious fires broke out in New York’s Fort George. When a few weeks later a black man was seen running from the scene of one of these fires the cry went up: “The negroes are rising!” The extent of the plot, or even if there really was a plot, has never been absolutely proven. What is true is that the threat of a slave uprising was enough to send the city’s white population into hysteria. Of the 181 people arrested during the “Great Negro Plot,” 34 were sentenced to death and 72 were transported from New York. In this excerpt from the trials, several important witnesses provided evidence. Peggy was a white prostitute who lived in the home of John Hughson, a riverfront tavenkeeper and, like shoemaker John Romme, a receiver of stolen goods. Peggy’s room was paid for by Caesar, a slave with whom she had a child. Today the trial transcripts are valuable for what they reveal about the shady, waterfront world shared by slaves, free blacks, and poor whites in 18th-century New York.
Daniel Horsmanden, The New-York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings Against the Conspirators at New-York in the Years 1741–2. From History Matters.
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Giuseppe Tartini (1692 – 1770) Wikipedia:
Today, Tartini's most famous work is the "Devil's Trill Sonata," a solo violin sonata that requires a number of technically demanding double stop trills and is difficult even by modern standards. (One 19th-century myth had it that Tartini had six digits on his left hand, making these trills easier for him to play.) According to a legend embroidered upon by Madame Blavatsky, Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a dream in which the Devil appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin.***
Rev. Jonathan Edwards delivered the execution sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741. This execution sermon is a lurid and bitter jeremiad against the "New York Negro rebels" who were then being hanged and burned at the stake for a suspected plot to destroy the village of New York by arson fire.
From May to August in 1741, at a market place described as lying in "a grassy valley", thirteen slaves were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. The executed were interred within a six-acre burial ground lying a long stone's throw southwest to a "marshy ravine". Hundreds were jailed, and seventy two were transported to certain death in the West Indies. Contemporaries compared these events to the 1692 Salem witch hysteria.
When Jonathan Edwards preached during July, twelve slaves had already been burned and nine were hanged, and the minister had no way of knowing how the horror would end. [...]
Edwards plays on the racial fears of the Connecticut settlers and their memories of Indian uprisings with two Deuteronomy verses: "I will spend mine arrows upon them," and "I will make mine arrows drunk with blood". Enfield is reminded that "the arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them".
"The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood."
Jonathan Edwards did not create terrifying visions of torture in order to hurl his people into despair. The congregation, unwilling to accept any responsibility for slavery and its trade, needed "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" to ease the intolerable pangs of conscience that were provoked by the events in New York.
The people in Enfield "yelled and shrieked, they rolled in the aisles, they crowded up into the pulpit and begged him to stop," forcing Edwards at one point to "speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard". There was "great moaning & crying out through ye whole House. . .ye shrieks & crys were piercing & Amazing. . ." And yet the congregation knew its desire for a dead conscience.
Seizing the congregation with terror and working them to the pitch of panic, Edwards reassures the Elect and glides to a composed and hopeful conclusion. The skilled revivalist preacher makes a direct and moving appeal to the unrepentant sinner, to seek again the better way: "Now God stands ready to pity you; this is a day of mercy; you may cry now with some encouragement of obtaining mercy."
BH - Brattleboro History: "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God" by Thomas St. John
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George Frideric Handel (1685 – 1759)
Mr. Edwards was over six feet tall, with a high forehead and a long narrow face; his expression was sweet and rather feminine; he was very thin, from continuous study; he wore, as was customary, a white wig, and a black gown, and was clothed beneath his gown in a coat and breeches of black broadcloth. He used no gestures, but stood motionless, with his eyes fixed on the bell-rope straight in front of him, his left elbow leaning on the cushion and his left hand holding his notes; his voice was low and a little monotonous, but well-cadenced, precise, and distinct; it went on pitilessly, like the voice of God Himself. He took as his text a passage from Deuteronomy-"Their foot shall slide in due time."
Having explained the text, he went on to say that nothing kept wicked men out of hell for a single moment but the arbitrary pleasure of God; God was more angry with many men still alive-doubtless with many that were sitting at ease in that congregation-than with many who were already in hell; the devil stood ready to seize them, and their own sin was a pent-up fire which, when God permitted, would immediately turn their souls into fiery ovens or furnaces of brimstone; nothing but the pleasure of a God who hated them saved them from a sudden death at any moment of the day. . . .
This sermon was interrupted by outcries from the congregation; the details have not been recorded; but . . . pandemonium broke loose. All over the meeting house men and women stood up and rolled on the floor, shrieking and screaming; it was like a forest smitten by a hurricane. "Oh, I am going to hell," they cried; "alas for our frolicks and our dances; how shall we remember them in hell." For many minutes the building was filled with the fearful wail of condemned souls; then they secured quiet, and Mr. Wheelock prayed, and the ministers climbed down from the pulpit. But long past sunset and through the night Enfield was like a beleaguered city; in almost every house men and women could be heard crying out for God to save them; they fancied that at any moment Christ might descend in judgment from the sky with the archangels and the apostles at this side, and the graves would give up their dead; and the little children were afraid to play, and pleaded with the Almighty to save them.
This Enfield sermon has become notorious. Many people think of Edwards only as the preacher of the most terrific hellfire sermons of which we have record.
Henry Bamford Parkes on The Fiery Puritan (1930)
***
MR. EDWARDS AND THE SPIDER
I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;
What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
A very little thing, a little worm,
Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It's well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy
On Windsor March, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There's no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly--
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner's last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.
But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?
Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast
Into a brick-kiln where the blast
Fans your quick vitals to a coal--
If measured by a glass,
How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.
Robert Lowell - Harvard Square Library
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Domenico Scarlatti - (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757)
Sonata in F Minor K. 69
1742 - January 19-February 4: Sarah Pierpont Edwards experiences series of religious ecstasies, afterwards undergoes treatment for "hysterical original” [JEC]
1743 - June 12: Samuel Danks excommunicated for fornication
1744 - June 3: "Bad Book" culprits Oliver Warner and Timothy and Simeon Root make public confession before church
March: King George's War begins [JEC]
1747 - October 9: David Brainerd dies at Edwards parsonage
October 12: preaches Brainerd's funeral sermon, published as True Saints, When Absent From the Body, Are Present With the Lord
1748 - February 14: daughter Jerusha dies
March: voted permanent salary of £700 plus wood and improvement of half of sequestered land
May-August: numerous Indian raids on frontier
Mid-June: Sarah Pierpont Edwards goes to Boston to care for ailing John Stoddard, stays at Edward Bromfield's
June 19: John Stoddard dies at Boston
June 26: preaches funeral sermon of John Stoddard at Northampton, published as A Strong Rod Broken and Withered
December: completes An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd; young man from Northampton asks to be admitted to church, but declines after seeing profession Edwards writes for him
1750 - June 22: dismissed as pastor of Northampton
July 2: preaches Farewell Sermon (published 1751)
1750 - The Iron Act is passed by the English Parliament, limiting the growth of the iron industry in the American colonies to protect the English Iron industry.
1751 - August 8: formally installed as pastor to English and Indian congregations at Stockbridge
August 16: preaches at meeting of members of Massachusetts General Assembly with Mohawks at Albany, New York
October 18: family moves to Stockbridge [JEC]
1751
Publication of the Encyclopédie begins in France, the “bible” of the Enlightenment.
1751 - The Currency Act is passed by the English Parliament, banning the issuing of paper money by the New England colonies. [JEC]
1752
June 15: Thomas Stebbins of Northampton commits suicide by throwing himself down a well
June 29: daughter Esther marries Rev. Aaron Burr of Newark, N.J.
November 22: Col. Joseph Dwight of Stockbridge submits report to Mass. General Assembly aiming to turn Edwards out of post
1753 - February: Indian boys' schoolhouse burns
March 14: writes last will and testament
Spring: son Timothy journeys to Newark, N.J. to prepare to matriculate at College of New Jersey; contracts smallpox in April
1754 - February: Seven Years' War begins; Edwards given sole charge (by chief donor Isaac Hollis) of Indian schools at Stockbridge
Spring: Waumpaumcorse, a Schaghticoke Indian, is murdered at Stockbridge by two English horse thieves
July: long period of ill health, lasting about a year, including "fits," "agues," and "scorbutic maladies”
Summer: Edwards parsonage fortified and quartered with soldiers against fears of Indian attacks
September 1: Schaghticokes kill four in a raid on Stockbridge
December: Freedom of the Will published; two Englishmen whipped at Stockbridge for desecrating Indian grave
1754 - The French and Indian War erupts as a result of disputes over land in the Ohio River Valley. In May, George Washington leads a small group of American colonists to victory over the French, then builds Fort Necessity in the Ohio territory. In July, after being attacked by numerically superior French forces, Washington surrenders the fort and retreats. [WU]
1755 - April 22: lodges at Ballentine's of Westfield en route to East Windsor to visit sisters; suffers fall from horse
1755
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary first published.
Great earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal—over 60,000 die.
U.S. postal service established.
1755 - In February, English General Edward Braddock arrives in Virginia with two regiments of English troops. Gen. Braddock assumes the post of commander in chief of all English forces in America. In April, Gen. Braddock and Lt. Col. George Washington set out with nearly 2000 men to battle the French in the Ohio territory. In July, a force of about 900 French and Indians defeat those English forces. Braddock is mortally wounded. Massachusetts Governor William Shirley then becomes the new commander in chief. [WU]
1756
Seven Years' War (French and Indian Wars in America) (to 1763), in which Britain and Prussia defeat France, Spain, Austria, and Russia. France loses North American colonies; Spain cedes Florida to Britain in exchange for Cuba.
In India, over 100 British prisoners die in “Black Hole of Calcutta.”
1757
September 24: Rev. Aaron Burr dies
September 29: trustees of College of New Jersey write to offer presidency
I have a constitution, in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids, vapid, sizy and scarce fluids, and a low tide of spirits. . . . This makes me shrink at the thoughts of taking upon me, in the decline of life, such a new and great business, attended with such a multiplicity of cares, and requiring such a degree of activity, alertness, and spirit of government; especially as succeeding one so remarkably well qualified in these respects. [SLT]
1757 - In June, William Pitt becomes England's Secretary of State and escalates the French and Indian War in the colonies by establishing a policy of unlimited warfare.
In July, Benjamin Franklin begins a five year stay in London. [WU]
1758
January 4: council convened at Stockbridge releases Edwards from Stockbridge post
January 27: father dies
Jonathan Edwards arrived at Princeton early in 1758. He had hardly set up his first meeting with the trustees when he received the news of his father’s death. Timothy Edwards had been in good health throughout most of his 89 years. Jonathan Edwards accepted this loss as one of the worst in a decade in which he had known plenty of sorrow. His daughter Jerusha, his friend David Brainerd, his son-in-law Aaron Burr, and now his father were all dead. Edwards was preoccupied with thoughts of his own death. He often wrote to his children to this effect, reminding them of how fleeting life was and of the great need to find safety in the Lord before their demise. [SLT]
February 16: assumes office as president of College of New Jersey
February 23: inoculated for smallpox
March 22: dies of complications from inoculation [JEC]
April 7: daughter Esther Burr dies
October 2: Sarah Pierpont Edwards dies of dysentery in Philadelphia
1759
July 25: estate inventoried and probated
August 4: slaves Joseph and Sue, "lately the proper goods of . . . Jonathan Edwards, deceased," sold to John Owen of Simsbury, Conn., for £23, by executors Timothy Edwards and Timothy Dwight [JEC]
1759
Voltaire's Candide.
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1760 - The population of colonists in America reaches 1,500,000. In March, much of Boston is destroyed by a raging fire. In September, Quebec surrenders to the English. In October, George III becomes the new English King. [WU]
1762
Catherine II (“the Great”) becomes czarina of Russia.
Jean Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract.
Mozart tours Europe as six-year-old prodigy.
1763 - The French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Year's War, ends with the Treaty of Paris. Under the treaty, France gives England all French territory east of the Mississippi River, except New Orleans. The Spanish give up east and west Florida to the English in return for Cuba. [WU]
1763 - The Proclamation of 1763, signed by King George III of England, prohibits any English settlement west of the Appalachian mountains and requires those already settled in those regions to return east in an attempt to ease tensions with Native Americans. [WU]
1764 - The Sugar Act. The Currency Act. The Stamp Act.
1765 - The Quartering Act.
Patrick Henry: "If this be treason, make the most of it."
Sons of Liberty are formed.
The Stamp Act Congress.
James Watt invents the steam engine.
1766 - In March, King George III signs a bill repealing the Stamp Act after much debate in the English Parliament, which included an appearance by Ben Franklin arguing for repeal and warning of a possible revolution in the American colonies if the Stamp Act was enforced by the British military. [WU]
On the same day it repealed the Stamp Act, the English Parliament passes the Declaratory Act stating that the British government has total power to legislate any laws governing the American colonies in all cases whatsoever. [WU]
1767 - The Townshend Revenue Acts.
1770 - The population of the American colonies reaches 2,210,000 persons.
March 5, 1770 - The Boston Massacre occurs as a mob harasses British soldiers who then fire their muskets pointblank into the crowd, killing three instantly, mortally wounding two others and injuring six. After the incident, the new Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, at the insistence of Sam Adams, withdraws British troops out of Boston to nearby harbor islands. The captain of the British soldiers, Thomas Preston, is then arrested along with eight of his men and charged with murder. [WU]
1770 - The Townshend Acts are repealed.
1773 - May 10, the Tea Act takes effect. It maintains a threepenny per pound import tax on tea arriving in the colonies, which had already been in effect for six years. It also gives the near bankrupt British East India Company a virtual tea monopoly by allowing it to sell directly to colonial agents, bypassing any middlemen, thus underselling American merchants. The East India Company had successfully lobbied Parliament for such a measure. In September, Parliament authorizes the company to ship half a million pounds of tea to a group of chosen tea agents. [WU]
December 16, 1773 - About 8000 Bostonians gather to hear Sam Adams tell them Royal Governor Hutchinson has repeated his command not to allow the ships out of the harbor until the tea taxes are paid. That night, the Boston Tea Party occurs as colonial activists disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians then board the ships and dump all 342 containers of tea into the harbor. [WU]
1774 - September 5 to October 26, the First Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia with 56 delegates, representing every colony, except Georgia. Attendants include Patrick Henry, George Washington, Sam Adams and John Hancock.
1775
The American Revolution begins with battle of Lexington and Concord. Second Continental Congress.
1775 - February 1, in Cambridge, Mass., a provincial congress is held during which John Hancock and Joseph Warren begin defensive preparations for a state of war. February 9, the English Parliament declares Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. March 23, in Virginia, Patrick Henry delivers a speech against British rule, stating, "Give me liberty or give me death!" March 30, the New England Restraining Act is endorsed by King George III, requiring New England colonies to trade exclusively with England and also bans fishing in the North Atlantic.
1775 - In April, Massachusetts Governor Gage is ordered to enforce the Coercive Acts and suppress "open rebellion" among the colonists by all necessary force.
April 18, 1775 - General Gage orders 700 British soldiers to Concord to destroy the colonists' weapons depot. That night, Paul Revere and William Dawes are sent from Boston to warn colonists. Revere reaches Lexington about midnight and warns Sam Adams and John Hancock who are hiding out there.
At dawn on April 19 about 70 armed Massachusetts militiamen stand face to face on Lexington Green with the British advance guard. An unordered 'shot heard around the world' begins the American Revolution. A volley of British rifle fire followed by a charge with bayonets leaves eight Americans dead and ten wounded. The British regroup and head for the depot in Concord, destroying the colonists' weapons and supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, a British platoon is attacked by militiamen, with 14 casualties. 2 Colonists killed.
British forces then begin a long retreat from Lexington back to Boston and are harassed and shot at all along the way by farmers and rebels and suffer over 250 casualties. News of the events at Lexington and Concord spreads like wildfire throughout the Colonies.
April 23, 1775 - The Provincial Congress in Massachusetts orders 13,600 American soldiers to be mobilized. Colonial volunteers from all over New England assemble and head for Boston, then establish camps around the city and begin a year long siege of British-held Boston.
1776
Declaration of Independence. Gen. George Washington crosses the Delaware Christmas night. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Fragonard's Washerwoman. Mozart's Haffner Serenade.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, // Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
et lux perpetua luceat eis. // and let perpetual light shine on them.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, // You are praised, God, in Zion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem. // and homage will be paid to You in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam, // Hear my prayer,
ad te omnis care veniet. // to You all flesh will come.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, // Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
et lux perpetua luceat eis. // and let perpetual light shine on them.
Kyrie
Kyrie, eleison. // Lord, have mercy on us.
Christe, eleison. // Christ, have mercy on us.
Kyrie, eleison. // Lord, have mercy on us.
Dies irae, dies illa // Day of wrath, day of anger
Solvet saeclum in favilla, // will dissolve the world in ashes,
teste David cum Sibylla. // as foretold by David and the Sibyl.
Quantus tremor est futurus, // Great trembling there will be
quando judex est venturus, // when the Judge descends from heaven
cuncta stricte discussurus! // to examine all things closely.
English Translation of Mozart's Requiem
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