PEOPLE MENTIONED OR ALMOST MENTIONED IN CAPE COD:

THE REVEREND COTTON MATHER

COTTON MATHER

CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who GRAHAM has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of JOHN SMITH Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

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“I was emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there came a Dog, who did so too before me.” — The Reverend Cotton Mather

1635

April 13: At the urging of the Reverend John Cotton, the Boston town meeting approved creation of a tax-supported

academy. (This Boston Latin School, which now is the oldest public school in America with a continuous existence, antedates not only Salem Latin School but even Harvard College.) What the reverend had in mind was a school similar to the Free Grammar School of Boston, England, at which Latin and Greek were being taught. The town records have it that: On the 13th of the second month, 1635, Att a Generall meeting upon publique notice … it was … generally agreed upon that our brother Philemon Pormort shall be intreated to become scholemaster for the teaching and nourtering of children with us.

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Thus the 1st public school in America, with its braggadocio motto:

SVMMVS PRIMI

During this month “our brother Philemon Pormont” became school master “for the teaching and nurturing the children among us.” Initially the classes would be held in his home, although within a few months our brother Philemon relocated to another settlement. Eventually the Town of Boston would vote “to allow forever fifty pounds to the Master, and a house, and thirty pounds to an usher” (assistant to the Master). Matriculating at Boston Latin School during this first century of its existence would be:1 • 1635: John Hull who would become Mint Master • 1635: John Leverett who would become governor of the Bay Colony • 1640: William Stoughton who would become the colony’s Lieutenant Governor and Chief Justice • 1648: Elisha Hutchinson who would become Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas • 1669: John Leverett who would be president of Harvard College from 1707 to 1724 • 1669: Cotton Mather who would become a minister and a theologian

• 1680: Benjamin Lynde who would become Chief Justice of Massachusetts • 1684: Samuel Mather who would in England become a minister and a theologian • 1689: Jonathan Belcher who would be governor of Massachusetts / New Hampshire / New Jersey

1. You are undoubtedly presuming on the basis of this plausible story of continuities, that the school in question was known at that time as the Boston Latin School. No, in fact in this complex world of ours, continuity is no such simple matter: that name would only come later. If during the next century you had been able to inquire of Benjamin Franklin, say, what school he had attended in Boston as a child, he would not have been able to recall such a name as Boston Latin School. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1637

May: The General Court granted to Concord “liberty to purchase lande within their Limits of the Indians ; to wit : Attawan and Squaw Sachem.”

This was the “marke of the Squa [Squaw] Sachem Awashunckes [Awashonks]”2:

It was the beginning of the fighting season: having found that their new homeland was “then covered with nations of barbarous Indians and infidels, in whom the ‘prince of the power of the air’ did ‘work in a spirit’,” a few hundred miles to the southwest, in Connecticut, the Puritan fathers were surrounding and putting to the torch a Pequot fort in a swamp containing not only warriors but their wives and their children. The doleful, ghostly, ghastly Reverend Cotton Mather would later report, in MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, that:

In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them. MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II Another white historian has commented that the proximate cause of this sad slaughter could only have been the sin of pride:

Thus by their horrible pride they fitted themselves for destruction.

“As the star of the Indian descended, that of the Puritans rose ever higher.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 63

2. The “shonks” or “shunks” or “suncks” portion of this name was an honorific, signifying leadership. Her intimates would have called her Awa. 4 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This being the race politics which was going down only a few hundred miles to the southwest, there was no reason to anticipate that Attawan and Squaw Sachem would be anything other than very very polite and very very cooperative when approached alongside the gently flowing Musketaquid by groups of courteous armed men bearing sackfulls of hostess gifts.

Here is Doctor Lemuel Shattuck’s rendition of the course of events:

A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;...: Musketaquid, the original Indian name of Concord and Concord River, for a long time before it was settled by our fathers, had been one of the principal villages of the Massachusett tribe. Nanepashemet was the great king or sachem of these Indians. His principal place of residence was in Medford MA near Mystic pond. “His house was built on a large scaffold six feet high, and on the top of a hill. Not far off, he built a fort with palisadoes 30 or 40 feet high, having but one entrance, over a bridge. This also served as the place of his burial, he having been killed about the year 1619, by the Tarrantines, a warlike tribe of eastern Indians, at another fort which he had built about a mile off.” He left a widow — Squaw Sachem, and five children. Squaw Sachem succeeded to all the power and influence of her husband, as the great queen of the tribe. Her power was so much dreaded, when she was first visited by the Plymouth people in 1621, that her enemies, the sachems of Boston and Neponset, desired protection against her, as one condition of submission to the English. She married Wibbacowitts, “the powwaw, priest, witch, sorcerer, or chirurgeon” of the tribe. This officer was highest in esteem next to the sachem ; and he claimed as a right the hand of a widowed sachem in marriage ; and by this connexion became a king in the right of his wife, clothed with such authority as was possessed by her squawship.1 Both assented to the sale of Musketaquid, though Tahattawan, hereafter to be noticed, was the principal sachem of the place. This tribe was once powerful. Before the great sickness already mentioned, it could number 3,000 warriors. That calamity, and the small-pox, which prevailed among them with great mortality in 1633, reduced it to nearly one tenth of that number. The Musketaquid Indians suffered in common with the brethren of their tribe elsewhere. When first visited by the English, their number was comparatively very small.... The place where the principal sachem lived was near Nahshawtuck (Lee’s) hill. Other lodges were south of the Great Meadows, above the South Bridge, and in various places along the borders of the rivers, where planting, hunting, or fishing ground was most easily obtained. From these sources the Indians derived their subsistence ; and few places produced a supply more easily than Musketaquid. South of Mr. Samuel Dennis’s are now seen large quantities of clamshells, which are supposed to have been collected by the Indians, as they feasted on that then much frequented spot. Across the vale, south of Capt. Anthony Wright’s, a long mound, or breast-work, is now visible, which might have been built to aid the hunter, though its object is unknown. Many hatchets, pipes, chisels, arrow-heads, and other rude specimens of their art, curiously wrought from stone, are still frequently discovered near these spots, an evidence of the existence and skill of the original inhabitants.

1. Letchford.

(One wonders what the Algonkian translations for English-language terms such as “in fee simple” and “in perpetuity” and “exclusive possession and dominion” might have been, that made it clear to the natives being visited that this was not a house party, but a real estate transaction, and that these were not graciously offered hostess presents for a hostess-with-the-mostess, but instead constituted full payment and were to be followed by eviction, and by keep-off-the-grass signs and vagrancy laws.)

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1638

The Reverend Cotton Mather, writing in a later timeframe of the Reverend Rogers’s ordination in Ipswich, would offer that “Here was a renowned church, consisting mostly of such illuminated Christians, that their pastors, in the exercise of their ministry, might, in the language of Jerome, perceive that they had not disciples so much as judges.”

1639

In Plymouth Colony a divorce law was enacted that instanced bestiality as among the grounds for divorce.3

1642

May 24: A letter addressed to the Puritan elders of the Church at Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, requested that they send some ministers to Virginia, where holiness was in great demand. The letter, now known as the “Nansemond petition,” would arrive in Boston harbor on a small coasting vessel early in September. After two ministers who had been asked to go had declined, the Reverends William Tompson of Braintree, a graduate of Oxford, John Knowles of Watertown, a graduate of Emmanuel College, and Thomas James of Charlestown and after that of New Haven, would respond. At Hell Gate they almost drowned, but then they would be able to obtain another boat from the Dutch at Manhattan. The voyage of their small pinnacle would consume eleven weeks. The planter Daniel Gookin would be among those welcoming them there, and would become closely associated with the Reverend William Thompson.4 However, the new Governor of the Virginia Colony, Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677), an adherent of the Church of England, would give them a frigid reception and during March 1642/1643 at the next meeting of the Virginia General Assembly (this would be its final meeting, since Virginia was then coming under the direct administration of the Crown), an act of conformity would be passed.

3. The Reverend Cotton Mather in THE HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND, writing at the end of the 17th Century, would describe how a Weymouth MA man had been made, during this timeframe, to attend as 3 sheep, 2 sows, 2 heifers, and a cow were hanged, before he was himself hanged.

John Winthrop would recount how a man had been observed “in buggery with a cow upon the Lord’s day,” and how “The cow being brought forth and slain before him, he brake out into a loud and doleful complaint against himself.” Winthrop inferred from the obvious sincerity of the man’s self-reproof before being hanged, that without doubt “the Lord has received his soul to his mercy.” 4. “A constellation of great converts there, Shone round him, and his heavenly glory were. GOOKINS was one of these; by Tompson’s pains, CHRIST and NEW ENGLAND a dear GOOKINS gains.” — The Reverend Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (I:440). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1663

February 12, Thursday: The Reverend Increase Mather’s and Mistress Maria Cotton Mather’s eldest son, Cotton Mather, was born.

1668

November: Was a volcanic eruption observed to be occurring on the moon?5

AN ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-EN to the year of Christ 1673.

In November following appeared a Star between the horns of the Moon in the midst. From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.

SKY EVENT

5. The Reverend Cotton Mather would communicate this observation to the Royal Society, and in 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge would take note of the strange event in “The RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”:

The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip— Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. 8 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1671

February 2: Harvard College was given a “3 foote and a halfe with a concave ey-glasse” reflecting telescope. This would be the instrument with which the Reverends Increase and Cotton Mather would observe a bright comet of the year 1682. ASTRONOMY HALLEY’S COMET HARVARD OBSERVATORY

Fall: We have a letter by the Reverend Samuel Symon Willard, to the Reverend Cotton Mather, about a witchcraft that was being practiced upon, or by, Elizabeth Knap or Knapp of Groton, Massachusetts, nowadays to be described as a hysteric, the 16-year-old daughter of James Knapp and Elizabeth Warren Knapp, in part because the Reverend Mather would save the letter for his MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA (Book VI, Chapter VII, page 67), and in part because a couple of years later the Reverend Willard would put out a volume consisting of three of his sermons, USEFUL INSTRUCTIONS FOR A PROFESSING PEOPLE IN TIMES OF GREAT SECURITY AND DEGENERACY: DELIVERED IN SEVERAL SERMONS ON SOLEMN OCCASIONS, and one of the three had been preached in consequence of this supposed manifestation of the Devil: There is a voice in it to the whole Land, but in a more especial manner to poor Groton: it is not a Judgement afar off, but it is near us, yea among us, God hath in his wisdome singled out this poor Town out of all others in this Wilderness, to dispense such an amazing Providence in, and therefore let us make a more near and special use of it: Let us look upon our selves to be set up as a Beacon upon a Hill by this Providence, and let those that hear what hath been done among us, hear also of the good effects, and reformation it hath wrought among us.

Here is the Reverend Willard’s account: A briefe account of a strange & unusuall Providence of God befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton, p me Samuel Willard. This poore & miserable object, about a fortnight before shee was taken, wee observed to carry herselfe in a strange & unwonted manner, sometimes shee would give sudden shriekes, & if wee enquired a Reason, would alwayes put it off with some excuse, & then would burst forth into immoderate & extravagant laughter, in such wise, as some times shee fell onto the ground with it: I my selfe observed oftentimes a strange change in here countenance, but could not suspect the true reason, but coneived shee might bee ill, & therefore divers times enquired how shee did, & shee alwayes answered well; which made mee wonder: but the tragedye began to unfold itselfe upon Munday, Octob. 30. 71, after this manner (as I received by credible information, being that day my selfe gon from home). In the evening, a little before shee went to bed, sitting by the fire, shee cryed out, oh my legs! & clapt her hand on them, immediately oh my breast! & removed her hands thither; & forthwith, oh I am strangled, & put her hands on her throat: those that observed her could not see what to make of it; whither shee was in earnest or dissembled, & in this manner they left her (excepting the person that lay

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with her) complaining of her breath being stopt: The next day shee was in a strange frame, (as was observed by divers) sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing, & many foolish & apish gestures. In the evening, going into the cellar, shee shrieked suddenly, & being enquired of the cause, shee answered, that shee saw 2 persons in the cellar; whereupon some went downe with her to search, but found none; shee also looking with them; at last shee turned her head, & looking one way stedfastly, used the expression, what cheere old man? which, they that were with her tooke for a fansye, & soe ceased; afterwards (the same evening,) the rest of the family being in bed, shee was (as one lying in the roome saw, & shee herselfe also afterwards related) suddenly throwne downe into the midst of the floore with violence, & taken with a violent fit, whereupon the whole family was raised, & with much adoe was shee kept out of the fire from destroying herselfe after which time she was followed with fits from thence till the sabbath day; in which shee was violent in bodily motions, leapings, strainings & strange agitations, scarce to bee held in bounds by the strength of 3 or 4: violent alsoe in roarings & screamings, representing a dark resemblance of hellish torments, & frequently using in these fits divers words, sometimes crying out money, money, sometimes, sin & misery with other words. On wednesday, being in the time of intermission questioned about the case shee was in, with reference to the cause or occasion of it, shee seemed to impeach one of the neighbors, a person (I doubt not) of sincere uprightnesse before God, as though either shee, or the devill in her likenesse & habit, particularly her riding hood, had come downe the chimney, stricken her that night shee was first taken violently, which was the occasion of her being cast into the floore; whereupon those about her sent to request the person to come to her, who coming unwittingly, was at the first assaulted by her stranglye, for though her eyes were (as it were) sealed up (as they were alwayes, or for the most part, in those fits, & soe continue in them all to this day) shee yet knew her very touch from any other, though no voice were uttered, & discovered it evidently by her gestures, soe powerfull were Satans suggestions in her, yet afterward God was pleased to vindicate the case & justifye the innocent, even to remove jealousyes from the spirits of the party concerned, & satisfaction of the by standers; for after shee had gon to prayer with her, shee confessed that she beleeved Satan had deluded her, & hath never since complained of any such apparition or disturbance from the person. These fits continuing, (though with intermission) divers, (when they had opportunity) pressed upon her to declare what might bee the true & real occasion of these amazing fits. Shee used many tergiversations & excuses, pretending shee would to this & that young person, who coming, she put it off to another, till at the last, on thurdsday night, shee brake forth into a large confession in the presence of many, the substance whereof amounted to thus much: That the devill had oftentimes appeared to her, presenting the treaty of a Covenant, & preffering largely to her: viz, such things as suted her youthfull fancye, money, silkes, fine cloaths, ease from labor to show her the whole world, &c: that it had bin then 3 yeers since his first appearance, occasioned by her discontent: That

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at first his apparitions had bin more rare, but lately more frequent; yea those few weekes that shee had dwelt with us almost constant, that shee seldome went out of one roome into another, but hee appeared to her urging of her: & that hee had presented her a booke written with blood of covenants made by others with him, & told her such & such (of some wherof we hope better things) had a name there; that hee urged upon her constant temptations to murder her parents, her neighbors, our children, especially the youngest, tempting her to throw it into the fire, on the hearth, into the oven; & that once hee put a bill hooke into her hand, to murder my selfe, persuading her I was asleep, but coming about it, shee met me on the staires at which shee was affrighted,the time I remember well, & observd a strange frame in her countenance & saw she endeavered to hide something, but I knew not what, neither did I at all suspect any such matter; & that often he persuaded her to make away with herselfe & once she was going to drowne herselfe in the well, for, looking into it, shee saw such sights as allured her, & was gotten within the curbe, & was by God’s providence prevented, many other like things shee related, too tedious to recollect: but being pressed to declare whither she had not consented to a covenant with the Devill, shee with solemne assertions denyed it, yea asserted that shee had never soe much as consented to discorse with him, nor had ever but once before that night used the expession, What cheere, old man? & this argument shee used, that the providence of God had ordered it soe, that all his apparitions had bin frightfull to her; yet this shee acknowledged, (which seemed contradictorye, viz :) that when shee came to our house to schoole, before such time as shee dwelt with us, shee delayed her going home in the evening, till it was darke, (which wee observed) upon his persuasion to have his company home, & that shee could not, when hee appeared, but goe to him; one evident testimony wherof wee can say somthing to, viz. the night before the Thanksgiving, Octob. 19. shee was with another maid that boarded in the house, where both of them saw the appearance of a mans head & shoulders, with a great white neckcloath, looking in at the window, at which they came up affrighted both into the chamber, where the rest of us were, they declaring the case, one of us went downe to see who it might bee, but shee ran immediately out of the doore before him, which shee hath since confessed, was the Devill coming to her; shee also acknowledged the reason of her former sudden shriekings, was from a sudden apparition, & that the devill put these excuses into her mouth, & bit her soe to say, & hurried her into those violent (but shee saith feigned & forced) laughters: shee then also complained against herselfe of many sins, disobedience to parents, neglect of attendance upon ordinances, attempts to murder herselfe & others; but this particular of a covenant shee utterly disclaimed: which relation seemed faire, especially in that it was attended with bitter teares, selfe condemnations, good counsells given to all about her, especially the youth then present, & an earnest desire of prayers: shee sent to Lancaster for Mr. Rowlandson, who came & prayed with her, & gave her serious counsells; but shee was still followed, all this notwithstanding, with these fits: & in this state (coming home on fryday) I found her; but could get nothing from her, whenever

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I came in presence shee fell into those fits, concerning which fits, I find this noteworthy, shee knew & understood what was spoken to her, but could not answer, nor use any other words but the forementioned, money, &c: as long as the fit continued, for when shee came out of it, shee could give a relation of all that had been spoken to her: shee was demanded a reason why shee used those words in her fits, & signifyed that the Devill presented her with such things, to tempt her, & with sin & miserye, to terrifye her; shee also declared that shee had seene the Devills in their hellish shapes, & more Devills then any one there ever saw men in the world. Many of these things I heard her declare on Saturday at night: On the Sabbath the Physitian came, who judged a maine point of her distempr to be naturall, arising from the foulnesse of her stomacke, & corruptnesse of her blood, occasioning fumes in her braine, & strange fansyes; whereupon (in order to further tryall & administration) shee was removed home, & the succeeding weeke shee tooke physicke, & was not in such violence handled in her fits as before; but enjoyed an intermission, & gave some hopes of recovery; in which intermission shee was altogether sencelesse (as to our discoverye) of her state, held under securitye, & hardnesse of heart, professing shee had no trouble upon her spirits, shee cried satan had left her: A solemne day was kept with her, yet it had then, (as I apprehend,) little efficacy upon her; shee that day again expressed hopes that the Devill had left her, but there was little ground to thinke soe, because she remained under such extreame sencelessenesse of her owne estate: & thus shee continued, being exercised with some moderate fits, in which shee used none of the former expressions, but sometimes fainted away, sometimes used some struglings, yet not with extremitye, till the Wednesday following, which day was spent in prayer with her, when her fits something more encreased, & her tongue was for many houres together drawne into a semicircle up to the roofe of her mouth, & not to be remooved, for some tryed with the fingers to doe it: from thence till the sabbath seven night following: she continued alike, only shee added to former confessions, of her twise consenting to travell with the Devill in her company between Groton & Lancaster, who accompanied her in forme of a blacke dog with eyes in his backe, sometimes stopping her horse, sometimes leaping up behind, & keeping her (when she came home with company) 40 rod at least behind, leading her out of the way into a swampe, &c.: but still no conference would shee owne, but urged that the devills quarell with her was because shee would not seale a covenant with him, & that this was the ground of her first being taken. besides this nothing observable came from her, only one morning shee said God is a father, the next morning, God is my father, which words (it is to be feared) were words of presumption, put into her mouth by the adversary. I suspecting the truth of her former storye, pressed, whether shee never verbally promised to covenant with him, which shee stoutly denyed: only acknowledged that shee had had some thoughts soe to doe: but on the forenamed Nov. 26. shee was again with violence & extremity seized by her fits, in such wise that 6 persons could hardly hold her, but shee leaped & skipped about the house proforce roaring, & yelling extreamly, & fetching deadly sighs, as if her

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heartstrings would have broken, & looking wth a frightfull aspect, to the amazement & astonishment of all the beholders, of which I was an eye witnesse: The Physitian being then agen with her consented that the distemper was Diabolicall, refused further to administer, advised to extraordinary fasting; whereupon some of Gods ministers were sent for: shee meane while continued extreamly tormented night & day, till Tuesday about noon; having this added on Munday & Tuesday morning that shee barked like a dog, & bleated like a calfe, in which her organs were visibly made use of: yea, (as was carefully observed) on Munday night, & Tuesday morning, when ever any came neere the house, though they within heard nothing at all, yet would shee barke till they were come into the house, on Tuesday, about 12 of the clocke, she came out of the fit, which had held her from Sabbath day about the same time, at least 48 howers, with little or no intermission, & then her speech was restored to her, & shee expressed a great seeming sence of her state: many bitter teares, sighings, sobbings, complainings shee uttered, bewailing of many sins fore mentioned, begging prayers, & in the houre of prayer expressing much affection : I then pressed if there were anything behind in reference to the dealings between her & Satan, when she agen professed that shee had related all: & declared that in those fits the devill had assaulted her many wayes, that hee came downe the chimney, & shee essayed to escape him, but was siezed upon by him, that hee sat upon her breast, & used many arguments with her, & that hee urged here at one time with persuasions & promises, of ease, & great matters, told her that shee had done enough in what shee had already confessed, shee might henceforth serve him more securely; anon told hir her time was past, & there was no hopes unlesse shee would serve him; & it was observed in the time of her extremity, once when a little moments respite was granted her of speech, shee advised us to make our peace with God, & use our time better then shee had done, the party advised her also to bethinke herselfe of making her peace, shee replyed, it is too late for me : the next day was solemnized, when we had the presence of Mr. Bulkley, Mr. Rowlandson, & Mr. Estabrooke, whither coming, we found her returned to a sottish & stupid kind of frame, much was prest upon her, but no affection at all discovered; though shee was little or nothing exercised with any fits, & her speech also continued: though a day or two after shee was melancholye & being enquired of a reason, shee complained that shee was grieved that so much pains were taken wth her, & did her no good, but this held her not long: & thus shee remained till Munday, when to some neighbors there present, shee related something more of he converse with the devill, viz. That it had bin 5 yeers or therabouts, since shee first saw him, & declared methodically the sundry apparitions from time to time, till shee was thus dreadfully assaulted, in which, the principall was, that after many assaults, shee had resolved to seale a covenant with Satan, thinking shee had better doe it, then be thus followed by him, that once, when shee lived at Lancaster, he presented himselfe, & desired of her blood, & shee would have done it, but wanted a knife, in the parley shee was prevented by the providence of God interposing my father; a 2nd time in the house hee met her, & presented her a knife, & as she was going about it my father

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stept in agen & prevented, that when shee sought & enquired for the knife, it was not to bee found, & that afterward shee saw it sticking in the top of the barne, & some other like passages shee agen owned an observable passage which shee also had confessed in her first declaration, but is not there inserted, viz. that the devill had often proffered her his service, but shee accepted not; & once in ptic: to bring her in chips for the fire, shee refused, but when shee came in shee saw them lye by the fire side, & was affraid, & this I remarke, I sitting by the fire spake to her to lay them on, & she turned away in an unwonted manner: she then also declared against herselfe her unprofitable life she had led, & how justly God had thus permitted Satan to handle her, telling them, they little knew what a sad case shee was in. I after asked her concerning these passages, & shee owned the truth of them, & declared that now shee hoped the devill had left her, but being prest whether there were not a covenant, she earnestly professed, that by Gods goodnesse shee had bin prevented from doing that, which shee of herselfe had been ready enough to assent to; & shee thanked God there was no such thing: The same day shee was agen taken with a new kind of unwonted fitt in which after shee had bin awhile exercised with violence, shee got her a sticke, & went up and downe, thrusting, & pushing, here & there, & anon looking out at a window, & cryed out of a witch appearing in a strange manner in forme of a dog downward, with a womans head, & declared the person, other whiles that shee appeard in her whole likenesse, & described her shape and habit: signifyed that shee went up the chimney & went her way: what impression wee reade in the clay of the chimney, in similitude of a dogs paw, by the operation of Satan, & in the form of a dogs going in the same place she tould of, I shall not conclude, though something there was, as I myselfe saw in the chimney in the same place where shee declared the foot was set to goe up: In this manner was she handled that night, & the 2 next dayes, using strange gestures, complaining by signes, when shee could not speake explaining that shee was sometimes in the chamber, somet. in the chimney, & anon assaults her, sometimes scratching her breast, beating her sides, strangling her throat, & she did oftentimes seeme to our apprehension as if shee would forthwith bee strangled: She declared that if the party were apprehended shee should forthwith bee well, but never till then; whereupon her father went, & percured the coming of the woman impeached by her, who came downe to her on Thurdsday night, where (being desired to be present) I observed that she was violently handled, & lamentably tormented by the adversarye, & uttered unusual shriekes at the instant of the persons coming in, though her eyes were fast closed: but having experience of such former actings, wee made nothing of it, but waited the issue: God therefore was sought to, to signifye something. whereby the innocent might bee acquitted, or the guilty discovered, & ’hee Answered our prayers, for by 2 evident & cleere mistakes she was cleered, & then all prejudices ceased, & she never more to this day hath impeached her of any apparition: in the fore mentioned allegation of the person, shee also signifyed that somet. the devil alsoe in the likenesse of a little boy appeared together with the person: Fryday was a sad day with her, for shee was

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sorely handled with fits, which some perceiving pressed that there was something yet behind not discovered by her; & shee after a violent fit, holding her betweene two & 3 houres did first to one, & afterwards to many acknowledge that shee had given of her blood to the Devill, & made a covenant with him, whereupon I was sent for to her; & understanding how things had passed, I found that there was no roome for privacye, in another alredy made by her soe publicke, I therefore examined her concerning the matter; & found her not soe forward to confesse, as shee had bin to others, yet thus much I gathered from her confession: That after shee came to dwell with us, one day as shee was alone in a lower roome, all the rest of us being in the chamber, she looked out at the window, & saw the devill in the habit of an old man, coming over a great meadow lying neere the house; & suspecting his designe, shee had thoughts to have gon away; yet at length resolved to tarry it out, & heare what hee had to say to her; when hee came hee demanded of her some of her blood, which shee forthwith consented to, & with a knife cut her finger, hee caught the blood in his hand, & then told her she must write her name in his booke, shee answered, shee could not Write, but hee told her he would direct her hand, & then took a little sharpened sticke, & dipt in the blood, & put it into her hand, & guided it, & shee wrote her name with his helpe: what was the matter shee set her hand to, I could not learne from her; but thus much shee confessed, that the terme of time agreed upon with him was for 7 yeers; one yeere shee was to be faithfull in his service, & then the other six hee would serve her, & make her a witch: shee also related, that the ground of contest between her & the devill which was the occasion of this sad providence, was this, that after her covenant made the devill showed her hell & the damned, & told her if shee were not faithfull to him, shee should goe thither, & bee tormented there; shee desired of him to show her heaven, but hee told her that heaven was an ougly place, & that none went thither but a company of base roagues whom he hated; but if shee would obey him, it should be well with her: but afterward shee considered with herselfe, that the terme of her covenant, was but short, & would soone bee at an end, & shee doubted (for all the devills promises) shee must at last come to the place hee had showne her, & withall, feared, if shee were a witch, shee should bee discovered, & brought to a shamefull end: which was many times a trouble on her spirits; this the Devill perceiving, urged upon her to give him more of her blood, & set her hand agen to his booke, which shee refused to doe, but partly through promises, partly by threatnings, hee brought her at last to a promise that shee would sometime doe it: after which hee left not incessantly to urge her to the performance of it, once hee met her on the staires. & often elsewhere pressing her with vehemencye, but shee still put it off; till the first night shee was taken when the devill came to her, & told her he would not tarry any longer: shee told him shee would not doe it hee Answered shee had done it already, & what further damage would it bee to doe it agen, for shee was his sure enough: she rejoyned shee had done it already, & if shee were his sure enough, what need hee to desire

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any more of her: whereupon he strucke her the first night, agen more violently the 2nd as is above exprest : This is the sum of the Relation I then had from her: which at that time seemed to bee methodicall: These things she uttered with great affection, overflowing of teares, & seeming bitternesse: I asked of the Reason of her weeping & bitternesse, shee complained of her sinns, & some in particular, profanation of the sabbath &c: but nothing of this sin of renouncing the goverment of God. & giving herselfe up to the devill: I therfore, (as God helped) applied it to her & asked her whether shee desired not prayers with & for her, shee assented with earnestnesse, & in prayer seemed to bewaile the sin as God helped, then in the aggravation of it, & afterward declared a desire to rely on the power & mercy of God in Christ: shee then also declared, that the Devill had deceived her concerning those persons impeached by her, that hee had in their likenesse or resemblance tormented her, persuading her that it was they, that they bare her a spleen, but he loved her, & would free her from them, & pressed on her to endeavor to bring them forth to the censure of the law. In this case I left her; but (not being satisfied in some things) I promised to visit her agen the next day which accordingly I did, but coming to her, I found her (though her speech still remained) in a case sad enough, her teares dryed up, & sences stupifyed, & (as was observed) when I could get nothing from her, & therfore applyed myselfe in counsell to her, shee regarded it not, but fixed her eye steadfastly upon a place, as shee was wont when the Devill presented himselfe to her, which was a griefe to her parents, & brought mee to a stand; in the condition I left her: The next day, being the Sabbath, whither upon any hint given her, or any advantage Satan tooke by it upon her, shee sent for mee in hast at noone, coming to her, shee immediately with teares told me that shee had belied the Devill, in saying shee had given him of her blood: &c: professed that the most of the apparitions shee had spoken of were but fansyes, as images represented in a dreame; earnestly entreated me to beleeve her, called God to witnesse to her assertion, I told her I would willingly hope the best, & beleeve what I had any good grounds to apprehend; if therefore shee would tell a more methodicall relation than the former, it would be well, but if otherwise, she must bee content that every one should censure according to their apprehension, shee promised soe to doe, & expressed a desire that all that would might heare her; that as they had heard soe many lyes & untruths, they might now heare the truth, & engaged that in the evening shee would doe it; I then repaired to her, & divers more then went; shee then declared thus much, that the Devill had sometimes appeared to her; that the occasion of it was her discontent, that her condition displeased her, her labor was burdensome to her, shee was neither content to bee at home nor abroad; & had oftentime strong persuasions to practice in witchcraft, had often wished the Devill would come to her at such & such times, & resolved that if hee would, shee would give herselfe up to him soule & body: but (though hee had oft times appeared to her, yet) at such times hee had not discovered himselfe, and therfore shee had bin preserved from such a thing: I declared a suspicion of the truth of the relation, & gave her some Reasons; but by Reason of the company did not say much,

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neither could anything further be gotten from her: but the next day I went to her, & opened my mind to her alone, & left it with her, declared (among other things) that shee had used preposterous courses, & therfore it was no marvell that shee had bin led into such contradictions, & tendered her all the helpe I could, if shee would make use of me, & more privately relate any weighty & serious case of Conscience to me, shee promised me shee would if shee knew any thing, but said that then shee knew nothing at all; but stood to the story shee had told the foregoing evening: & indeed what to make of these things I at present know not, but am waiting till God (if hee see meet) wind up the story, & make a more cleere discoverye. It was not many dayes ere shee was hurried agen into violent fits after a different manner, being taken agen speechlesse, & using all endeavores to make away with herselfe, & doe mischiefe unto others; striking those that held her; spitting in their faces; & if at any time shee had done any harme or frightened them shee would laugh immediately; which fits held her sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, few occasions shee had of speech, but when shee could speake, shee complained of a hard heart, counselled some to beware of sin, for that had brought her to this, bewailed that soe many prayers had bin put up for her, & shee still so hard hearted, & no more good wrought upon her; but being asked whither shee were willing to repent, shaked her head, & said nothing. Thus shee continued till the next sabbath in the afternoone; on which day in the morning, being somthing better then at other times, shee had but little company tarryed with her in the afternoon; when the Devill began to make more full discoverye of himselfe: It had bin a question before, whither shee might properly bee called a Demoniacke, or person possessed of the Devill, but it was then put out of Question: hee began (as the persons with her testifye) by drawing her tongue out of her mouth most frightfully to an extraordinary length & greatnesse, & many amazing postures of her bodye; & then by speaking, vocally in her, whereupon her father, & another neighbor were called from the meeting, on whom, (as soon as they came in,) he railed, calling them roagues, charging them for folly in going to heare a blacke roague, who told them nothing but a parcell of lyes, & deceived them, & many like expressions. after exercise I was called, but understood not the occasion, till I came, & heard the same voice, a grum, low, yet audible voice it was, the first salutation I had was, oh ! you are a great roague, I was at the first somthing daunted & amazed, & many reluctances I had upon my spirits, which brought mee to a silence and amazement in my spirits, till at last God heard my groanes & gave me both refreshment in Christ, & courage: I then called for a light, to see whither it might not appeare a counterfiet, and observed not any of her organs to moove, the voice was hollow, as if it issued out of her throat; hee then agen called me great blacke roague, I challenged him to make it appear; but all the Answer was, you tell the people a company of lyes : I reflected on myselfe, & could not but magnifye the goodnesse of God not to suffer Satan to bespatter the names of his people, with those sins which hee himselfe hath pardoned in the blood of Christ. I Answered, Satan, thou art a lyar, and a deceiver, & God will vindicate his owne truth one day: hee

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Answered nothing directly, but said, I am not Satan, I am a pretty blacke boy; this is my pretty girle; I have bin here a great while, I sat still, and Answered nothing to these expressions; but when hee directed himselfe to mee agen, oh! you blacke roague, I doe not love you: I replyed through God’s grace, I hate thee; hee rejoyned, but you had better love mee; these manner of expressions filled some of the company there present with great consternation, others put on boldnesse to speake to him, at which I was displeased, & advised them to see their call cleere, fearing least by his policye, & many apish expressions hee used, hee might insinuate himselfe, & raise in them a fearlessenesse of spirit of him: I no sooner turned my backe to goe to the fire, but he called out agen, where is that blacke roague gon: I seeing little good to bee done by discorse, & questioning many things in my mind concerning it, I desired the company to joyne in prayer unto God; when wee went about that duty & were kneeled downe, with a voice louder then before something, hee cryed out, hold your tongue, hold your tongue, get you gon you blacke roague, what are you going to doe, you have nothing to doe with me, &c: but through Gods goodnesse was silenced, &, shee lay quiet during the time of prayer, but as soone as it was ended, began afresh, using the former expressions, at which some ventured to speake to him: Though I thinke imprudentlye: one told him, God had him in chaines, hee replyed, for all my chaine, I can knocke thee on the head when I please: hee said hee would carry her away that night. Another Answered, but God is stronger than thou, He presently rejoyned, that ’s a ly, I am stronger than God: at which blasphemy I agen advised them to bee wary of speaking, counselled them to get serious parsons to watch with her, & left her, commending her to God: On Tuesday following shee confessed that the Devill entred into her the 2nd night after her first taking, that when shee was going to bed, hee entred in (as shee conceived) at her mouth, & had bin in her ever since, & professed, that if there were ever a Devill in the world, there was one in her, but in what manner he spake in her she could not tell: On Wednesday night, shee must forthwith be carried downe to the bay in all hast, shee should never be well, till an assembly of ministers was met together to pray with & for her, & in particular Mr. Cobbet: her friends advised with me about it; I signifyed to them, that I apprehended, Satan never made any good motion, but it was out of season, & that it was not a thing now fiezable, the season being then extreame cold; & the snow deepe, that if shee had bin taken in the woods with her fits shee must needs perish: On friday in the evening shee was taken agen violently, & then the former voice (for the sound) was heard in her agen, not speaking, but imitating the crowing of a cocke, accompanied with many other gestures, some violent, some ridiculous, which occasioned my going to her, where by signes she signifyed that the Devill threatened to carry her away that night, God was agen then sought for her. & when in prayer, that expression was used, the God had prooved Satan a liar, in preserving her once when hee had threatned to carry her away that night, & was entreated soe to doe agen, the same voice, which had ceased 2 dayes before, was agen heard by the by-standers 5 times distinctly to cry out, oh you are a roague, and then ceased: but the whole time of

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prayer, sometimes by violence of fits sometimes by noises shee made, shee drouned her owne hearing from receiving our petition, as she afterwards confessed: Since that time shee hath continued for the most part speechlesse, her fits coming upon her sometimes often, sometimes with greater intermission, & with great varietyes in the manner of them, sometimes by violence, sometimes by making her sicke, but (through Gods goodnesse) soe abated in violence, that now one person can as well rule her, as formerly 4 or 5: She is observed alwayes to fall into her fits when any strangers goe to visit her, & the more goe the more violent are her fits: as to the frame of her spirits hee hath bin more averse lately to good counsell than heretofore, yet sometime shee signifyes a desire of the companye of ministers. On Thursday last, in the evening, shee came a season to her speech, & (as I received from them with her) agen disouned a Covenant with the Devill, disouned that relation about the knife fore mentioned, declared the occasion of her fits to bee discontent, owned the temptations to murder; declared that though the devill had power of her body, shee hoped hee should not of her soule, that she had rather continue soe speechlesse, then have her speech, & make no better use of it then formerly shee had, expressed that shee was sometimes disposed to doe mischiefe, & was as if some had laid hold of her to enforce her to it, & had double strength to her owne, that shee knew not whither the devill were in her or no if hee were shee knew not when or how he entered; that when shee was taken speechlesse, she fared as if a string was tyed about the roots of her tongue, & reached doune into her vitalls & pulled her tongue downe, & then most when shee strove to speake: On Fryday, in the evening shee was taken wth a passion of weeping, & sighing, which held her till late in the night, at length she sent for me; but then unseasonablenesse of the weather, & my owne bodily indisposednesse prevented: I went the next morning, when shee strove to speake somthing but could not, but was taken with her fits, which held her as long as I tarried, which was more then an houre, & I left her in them: & thus she continues speechlesse to this instant, Jan. 15. & followed with fits: concerning which state of hers I shall suspend my owne Judgment, & willingly leave it to the censure of those that are more learned, aged, & Judicious: only I shall leave my thoughts in resp. of 2 or 3 questions which have risen about her: viz. 1. Whither her distemper be reale or counterfiet: I shall say no more to that but this, the great strength appearing in them, & great weaknesse after them, will disclaime the contrary opinion: for tho a person may counterfiet much yet such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation: 2. Whither her distemper bee naturall or Diabolicall, I suppose the premises will strongly enough conclude the latter, yet I will adde these 2 further arguments: 1. the actings of convulsion, which these come nearest to, are (as parsons acquainted with them observe) in many, yea the most essentiall parts of them quite contrary to these actings: 2. Shee hath no wayes wasted in body, or strength by all these fits, though soe dreadfulle, but gathered flesh exceedinglye, & hath her naturall strength when her fits are off, for the most part:

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3. Whither the Devill did really speake in her: to that point which some have much doubted of, thus much I will say to countermand this apprehension: 1. The manner of expression I diligently observed, & could not perceive any organ, any instrument of speech (which the philosopher makes mention of) to have any motion at all, yea her mouth was sometimes shut without opening sometimes open without shutting or moving, & then both I & others saw her tongue (as it used to bee when shee was in some fits, when speechlesse) turned up circularly to the roofe of her mouth. 2. the labial letters, divers of which were used by her, viz. B.M.P. which cannot bee naturally expressed without motion of the lips, which must needs come within our ken, if observed, were uttered without any such motion, shee had used only Lingualls, Gutturalls &c: the matter might have bin more suspicious: 3. the reviling termes then used, were such as shee never used before nor since, in all this time of her being thus taken: yea, hath bin alwayes observed to speake respectively concerning mee; 4. They were expressions which the devill (by her confession) aspersed mee, & others withall, in the houre of temptation, particularly shee had freely acknowledged that the Devill was wont to appear to her in the house of God & divert her mind, & charge her shee should not give eare to what the Blacke coated roage spake: 5. wee observed when the voice spake, her throat was swelled formidably as big at least as ones fist: These arguments I shall leave to the censure of the Judicious: 4. whither shee have covenanted with the Devill or noe: I thinke this is a case unanswerable, her declarations have been soe contradictorye, one to another, that wee know not what to make of them & her condition is such as administers many doubts; charity would hope the best, love would alsoe feare the worst, but thus much is cleare, shee is an object of pitye, & I desire that all that heare of her would compassionate her forlorne state, Shee is (I question not) a subject of hope, & thererfore all meanes ought to bee used for her recoverye, Shee is a monument of divine severitye, & the Lord grant that all that see or heare, may feare & tremble: Amen. S.W.

Thomas Brattle of Boston, who would be active in 1692 in exposing the shortcomings of the witch cases in Salem, Massachusetts, has also filed a description of this case: I cannot but admire [wonder] that these afflicted persons should be so much countenanced and encouraged in their accusations as they are: I often think of the Groton woman, that was afflicted, an account of which we have in print [referring to the Reverend Willard’s sermon as printed in his USEFUL INSTRUCTIONS FOR A PROFESSING PEOPLE IN TIMES OF GREAT SECURITY AND DEGENERACY: DELIVERED IN SEVERAL SERMONS ON SOLEMN OCCASIONS], and is a most certain truth, not to be doubted of. I shall only say, that there was as much ground, in the hour of it, to countenance the said Groton woman, and to apprehend and imprison, on her accusations, as there is now to

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countenance these afflicted persons, and to apprehend and imprison on their accusations. But furthermore, it is worthy of our deepest consideration, that in the conclusion, (after multitudes have been imprisoned, and many have been put to death), these afflicted persons should own that all was a mere fancy and delusion of the devil’s, as the Groton woman did own and acknowledge with respect to herself; if, I say, in after times, this be acknowledged by them, how can the justices, judges, or any else concerned in these matters, look back upon these things without the greatest of sorrow and grief imaginable? I confess to you, it makes me tremble when I seriously consider of this thing. I have heard that the chief judge has expressed himself very hardly of the accused woman at Groton, as though he believed her to be a witch to this day: but by such as knew the said woman, this is judged a very uncharitable opinion of the said judge, and I do not understand that any are proselyted thereto.

Thomas Hutchinson’s HISTORY OF THE PROVINCE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY, published in Boston in 1767, would also comment on this case: In 1671, Elizabeth Knapp, another ventriloqua, alarmed the people of Groton in much the same manner as Ann Cole had done those of Hartford; but her daemon was not so cunning, for instead of confining himself to old women, he rail’d at the good minister of the town and other persons of good character, and the people could not then be prevailed on to believe him, but believed the girl, when she confessed she had been deluded, and that the devil had tormented her in the shape of good persons; and so she escaped the punishment due to her fraud and imposture.

Samuel G. Drake’s ANNALS OF WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND, published in Boston in 1869, would also comment on this case: This Story has been given to show how, in those Times, a tolerably severe Case of Hysterics could be magnified by those who had an exceedingly large Maggot of Credulity in their Brains. Groton is only thirty-three Miles from Boston, but the Story, in travelling even that short Distance, had no Doubt swollen into such Proportions, as to have but a faint Likeness to the Original. The Condition of Elizabeth Knap was probably very similar to that of Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent), who, for her Pretensions to Inspiration, “Convulsions and strange Motions of Body,” was put to Death in the Time of Henry the Eighth, 1584.

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1675

June 17: On this day Friend John Easton, a high government official of the Rhode Island Plantation who was also something of a mediator, this Quaker who only a few years before had had personal interaction with Friend George Fox during his visit to the New World, decided to try to prevent the coming race war in a traditional Quaker way “by removing the occasion for it.” He and four other unarmed white men rowed across Narragansett Bay to Metacom’s ceremonial center on the Mount Hope promontory, and walked up the path to the top of the hill. Metacom had put aside his arms although the approximately 40 other warriors who were present did not, and so they all sat around talking about how to arrange a conciliation of grievances by agreed impartial third parties, red and white. As Easton later reconstructed the conversation:6

We sat veri friendly together. We told him our bisness was to indever that they might not receve or do rong. ... We told them that our desire was that the quarrel might be rightly decided in the best way, not as dogs decide their quarrels. ... [The Native Americans] owned that fighting was the worst way, but they inquired how right might take place without fighting. We said by arbitration. They said that by arbitration the English agreed against them, and so by arbitration they had much rong. ... We said they might chuse a Indian King and the English might chuse the Governor of New Yorke, that neither had case to say that either wear parties to the difference. They said they had not heard of this way. We were persuaded that if this way had been tendered they would have accepted. ... [Metacom pointed out that his father the Massasoit,] when the English first came, was a great man and the English as a littill child. He constrained the other Indians from ronging the English, and gave them corn and shewed them how to plant it and was free to do them ani good. ... But their King’s brother [Metacom/Phillip’s brother “Allexander”], when he was King came miserably to dy, being forced to court, and as they judged poysoned. ... Another Greavance was, if 20 of their onest Indiands testified that an Englishman had dun them rong it was nothing, but if one of their worst Indians testified against any Indian, or their King, when it pleased the English, it was suficiant. ... [The English were so] eager to sell the Indians lickers that most Indians spent all in drynknes and then raved upon the sober Indians! ... I am persuaded of New England Prists they are so blinded by the spirit of Persecution and to maintain their hyer that they have been the case that the law of Nations and the Law of Arems have been violated in this war. The war would not have been if ther had not bine hyerlings.

“KING PHILLIP’S WAR” According to the Reverend Grindall Reynolds’s KING PHILIP’S WAR IN HISTORICAL SKETCHES: 6. Hough edition of Deputy-Governor John Easton’s NARRATIVE, pages 7-31 passim. 22 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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My ancestor, Captain Nathaniel Reynolds, was one of the original settlers, who after the war took possession of Mount Hope, the home of the Wampanoags, and named it Bristol.... The whole of Plymouth County was then [1681] settled, except this territory, which was the only spot left uncovered in the western march of English population.... Of this great tract all they [the Wampanoag] retained in 1675 was a little strip, called then Mount Hope, scarcely six miles long and two miles wide. The southern line of English possession had been drawn right across Bristol Neck, enclosing, and almost imprisoning, the tribe in a little peninsula, washed on all sides, except the north, by the waters of Narragansett and Mount Hope bays. As if to emphasize this fact, their neighbors, the people of Swanzey [sic], “set up a very substantial fence quite across the great neck.”

At this point Metacom had a little more than a year to live. Before the fall of the next year his wife and son would have been captured for sale into foreign slavery,

My heart breaks; now I am ready to die.

he would have been hunted down and shot in a nearby swamp, his body would have been cut in quarters and hung in a tree there, his withered hand would have been severed and carried around to be displayed as a curiosity in bars, his skull would have been installed for display atop a pole in Salem, and eventually his jawbone would wind up in the personal collection of the Reverend Cotton Mather (all in all, not a whole lot to

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look forward to, I suppose you’d agree). “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

December 19, Sunday: Forces of the United Colonies assaulted a sanctuary which the Narragansett tribespeople had set up in order to avoid turning over their wives and children to the whites as hostages, in the “Great Swamp,” a swamp in what is now South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In an attempt to assimilate this battle to the battle which ended the Pequot War, which had occurred in a swamp near Fairfield on July 13, 1637, both of these battles would come to be referred to as “The Great Swamp Fight.” This particular slaughter would excite a rather crude piece of doggerel: ’Tis fear’d a thousand Natives young and old, Went to a place in their opinion cold. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

The bloody-minded Reverend Cotton Mather would remember this Great Swamp Fight as the tailgate party at which the Narragansett tribe had been “Berbikew’d,” his spelling. (Get a clue: he was a Puritan and the land had been purified. –What could possibly be offensive about ethnic cleansing?)

It had been at 5 AM that the white soldiers had formed up after their night in the cold snow without blankets, and set out toward this Narragansett stronghold. They had arrived at the edge of the Great Swamp, an area around South Kingstown, at about 1 PM. The Massachusetts troops in the lead were fired upon by a small band of native Americans and pursued without waiting for orders. As the natives retreated they came along across the frozen swamp to the entrance of the fort, which was on an island of sorts standing above the swamp, and consisted of a triple palisade of logs twelve feet high. There were small blockhouses at intervals above this palisade. Inside, the main village sheltered about 3,000 men, women, and children. The Massachusetts troops had been enticed to arrive at precisely the strongest section of the palisade where, however, there was a gap

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for which no gate had yet been built. Across this gap the natives had placed a tree trunk breast height, as a barrier to check any charge, and just above the gap was a blockhouse. Without waiting for the Plymouth and Connecticut companies, the Massachusetts soldiers charged the opening and swarmed over the barrier. Five company commanders were killed in the charge but the troops managed to remain for a period inside the fort before falling back into the swamp. The Massachusetts men, now joined by Plymouth, gathered themselves for a 2d charge. Meanwhile, Major Treat led his Connecticut troops round to the back of the fort where the palisade had not been finished. Here and there the posts were spaced apart and protected only by a tangled mass of limbs and brush. The men charged up a bank under heavy fire and forced their way past the palisade. As they gained a foothold inside, the second charge at the gap also forced an entrance and the battle raged through the Indian village. It was a fight without quarter on either side, and was still raging at sunset when Winslow ordered the wooden lodges put to the torch. The flames, whipped by the winds of the driving

snowstorm, spread quickly. Winslow decided that the army had to fall back to the shelter of Smith’s Trading Post in Coccumscossoc (Wickford), where some resupply ships might have arrived. The English gathered their wounded, the worst being placed on horseback, and fell back toward Wickford. It would not be until 2 AM that the leading units would stumble into the town. Some, losing their way, would not get shelter until 7 AM. This three-hour battle was the end of the Narragansett Campaign. The English suffering 20 killed and 200 wounded (80 of whom who later die from their wounds, there being 40 English corpses interred in one common trench in Wickford) and the Narragansett likewise suffered high casualties although about a thousand did escape.

At least one armed white man who was killed while attempting to kill others was a Quaker and an officer: “The usual interpretation of the actions and inactions of the Rhode Island government has been that its members were inhibited by the pacifist scruples of the Quakers among them. Historians have not cited, nor have I found, evidence upon which to base this belief.... Such reading back of later Quaker understandings of the peace testimony obscures not only other wartime motives but the nature of the peace testimony as it was understood in that particular time and place. Third, in many respects the government activities do not appear to have been constrained. ... There were Quakers who bore arms during the war. Captain Weston Clarke, who was sent to relieve Warwick, Lieutenant Robert Westcott, who was killed in the Great Swamp Fight, and Abraham Mann of Providence, who was wounded are three examples.” — Meredith Baldwin Weddle, WALKING IN THE WAY OF PEACE: QUAKER PACIFISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. England: Oxford UP, 2001, pages 172-173, page 204 THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

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(Presumably Friend Robert Westcott, like the Reverend Roger Williams, had taken pains to consult with God and had been listening to the “mind and voice of the most high amongst us,” and had assured himself that Quakers who were “contrary” to war were simply mistaken as to God’s will! —You must lie in your blood, you “barbarous men of Bloud”!)

(Presumably, since Friend Abraham Mann of Providence who was wounded during the Great Swamp Fight was a white man, he was then tenderly cared for by the Quaker caretakers on Aquidneck Island, who tenderly cared for those who had been wounded in the fight, if they were white men!)

While the Narragansett were not completely crushed there can be no question that the Great Swamp Fight was the turning point in the war. If the tribe had been able to join the Wampanoag at full strength in the spring the war would have lasted much longer. The Narragansett would have a few more victories in 1676, would burn Rehoboth and Providence, and in March would ambush Captain Michael Pierce, but for all practical purposes they were out of the war.

In the course of this single race battle with the English, the Narragansett would lose almost 20% of its entire population, and massacre and starvation would soon be killing off most of the remainder. By 1682 fewer than 500 would remain of the original estimated 10,000 souls who had existed as of 1610. After 1682 this remnant would be allowed by the English to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown RI. The Narragansett tribal registry currently list over 2,400 members, most of whom reside in Rhode Island.7

7. In Rhode Island especially, after the population disaster of “King Phillip’s War”, many native women would form new households with black men. Rhode Island would be boasting the largest black population in New England and a significant proportion of these blacks would be free, so in many cases this was their best available option. These unions would result in a new category of person, the “mustee,” who was considered to be a native American by himself or herself but not by the “white people” who were de facto making all such distinctions. You may therefore run into some hot arguments if you cite these population statistics, from whites who will attempt to insist to you that “it’s all just a bunch of n-----s making pretenses,” quote unquote. (You’ll have to live in Rhode Island for awhile, and argue cases of land title and cases of casino gambling, to get the full flavor of this.) 26 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Most contemporary accounts of this second of the “great swamp fights” have been based upon a couple of letters by the white army’s chaplain, the Reverend Joseph Dudley, and one by Captain James Oliver, commander of the 3d Company of the Massachusetts regiment:

May it please your Honnr Mr Smiths 15, 10, 75

I am comanded by the Generall to give your Honnor account of our proceeding since our last frm Pautuxet in the Sabath evening we advanced the whole body from Mr Carpenters with Intent to surprise Ponham & his Party at about 10 or 12 Miles Distance having information by oue Warwick scouts of his seat but the darkness of ye Night Diffucutly of our Passage & unskillfulness of Pilots we passed the whole night & found ourselves at such Distance yet from ym yt we Diverted & Marched to Mr Smiths, found our sloops from Seaconck arrived since which by ye help of Indian Peter by whom your Honnor had the Information formerly of ye number & resolution of ye Naragansetts, we have burned two of their towns viz; Ahmus who is this summer come down amongst them & ye old Queens quarters consisting of about 150 Many of them large wigwams & seized or slayn 50 Persons in all our prisoners being about 40 Concerning whom the generall prayes your advice concerning their transportation and Disposall all which was performed without any loss save a slight wound by an Arrow in Lieut. Wayman’s face, the whole body of them we find removed into their great swamp at Canonicus his quarters where we hope with the addition of Connecticut, when arrived we hope to coop them up, this day we Intend the removall or spoyle of yr Corn & hope to Morrow a March toward them, our soldiers being very chearful are forward noywithstanding great Difficulty by weather & otherwise, abovsd Peter whom we have found very faithful will Make us believe yt yr are 3000 fighting Men many unarmed Many well fitted with lances we hope by cutting off their forage to force them to a fayre battle In ye Mean time I have only to present the Genralls humble service to your & to beg you Intense prayers for this so great Concern and remayn your

Honnors Humble Servant Jos: Dudley Goodale nor Moor arrived we fear want of shot My humble service to Madam Leveret Brother and Sister Hubbard & Dudley Amongst our Prisonrs & Slayn we find 10 or 12 Wampanoags

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Mr Smith’s, 21, 10, 1675

May it please your honour

The comming of the Connecticut force to Petaquamscott, and surprisal of six and slaughter of five on Friday night, Saturday we marched towards Petaquamscott, though in snow, and in conjunction about midnight or later, we advanced: Capt. Mosley led the van, after him Massachusetts, and Plimouth and Connecticut in the rear; a tedious march in the snow, without intermission, brought us about two of the clock afternoon, to the entrance of the swamp, by the help of Indian Peter, who dealt faithfully with us; our men, with great courage, entered the swamp about twenty rods; within the cedar swamp we found some hundreds of wigwams, forted in with a breastwork and flankered, and many small blockhouses up and down, round about; they entertained us with a fierce fight, and many thousand shot, for about an hour, when our men valiantly scaled the fort, beat them thence, and from the blockhouses. In which action we lost Capt. Johnson, Capt. Danforth, and Capt. Gardiner, and their lieutenants disabled, Capt. Marshall also slain; Capt Seely, Capt. Mason, disabled, and many other officers, insomuch that, by a fresh assault and recruit powder from their store, the Indians fell on again, recarried and beat us out of, the fort, but by the great resolution and courage of the General and Major, we reinforced, and very hardly entered the fort again, and fired the wigwams, with many living and dead persons in them, great piles of meat and heaps of corn, the ground not permitting burial of their store, were consumed; the number of their dead, we generally suppose the enemy lost at least two hundred men; Capt. Mosely counted in one corner of the fort sixty four men; Capt. Goram reckoned 150 at least; But, O! Sir, mine heart bleeds to give your honor an account of our lost men, but especially our resolute Captains, as by account inclosed, and yet not so many, but we admire there remained any to return, a captive women, well known to Mr. Smith, informing that there were three thousand five hundred men engaging us and about a mile distant a thousand in reserve, to whom if God had so pleased, we had but been a morsel, after so much disablement: she informeth, that one of their sagamores was slain and their powder spent, causing their retreat, and that they are in a distressed condition for food and houses, that one Joshua Tift, an Englishman, is their encourager and conducter. Philip was seen by one, credilbly informing us, under a strong guard.

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After our wounds were dressed, we drew up for a march, not able to abide the field in the storm, and weary, about two of the clock, obtained our quarters, with our dead and wounded, only the General, Ministers, and some other persons of the guard, going to head a small swamp, lost our way, and returned again to the evening quarters, a wonder we were not prey to them, and, after at least thirty miles marching up and down, in the morning, recovered our quarters, and had it not been for the arrival of Goodale next morning, the whole camp had perished; The whole army, especially Connecticut, is much disabled and unwilling to march, with tedious storms, and no lodgings, and frozen and swollen limbs, Major Treat importunate to return to at least Stonington; Our dead and wounded are about two hundred, disabled as many; the want of officers, the consideration whereof the Genreal commends to your honer, forbids any action at present, and we fear whether Connecticut will comply, at last, to any action. We are endeavoring, by good keeping and billetting oue men at several quarters, and, if possible removel of our wounded to Rhode Isalnd, to recover the spirit of our soldiers, and shall be diligent to find and understand the removals on other action of the enemy, if God please to give us advantage against them.

As we compleat the account of dead, now in doing, The Council is of the mind, without recruit of men we shall not be able to engage the main body.

I give your honor hearty thanks for your kind lines, of which I am not worthy I am Sir, your honors humble servant Joseph Dudley Since the writing of these lines, the General and Council have jointly concluded to abide on the place, notwithstanding the desire of Connecticut, only entreat that a supply of 200 may be sent us, with supply of commanders; and, whereas we are forced to garrison our quarters with at least one hundred, three hundred men, upon joint account of colonies, will serve, and no less, to effect the design. This is by order of the council. Blunderbusses, and hand grenadoes, and armour, if it may, and at least two armourers to mend arms.

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Narragansett 26th 11th month 1675

After a tedious march in a bitter cold that followed the Dec. 12th, we hoped our pilot would have led us to Ponham by break of day, but so it came to pass we were misled and so missed a good opportunity. Dec. 13th we came to Mr Smith’s, and that day took 35 prisoners. Dec 14th, our General went out with a horse and foot, I with my company was kept to garrison. I sent out 30 of my men to scout abroad, who killed two Indians and brought in 4 prisoners, one of which was beheaded. Our amy came home at night, killed 7 and brought in 9 more, young and old. Dec 15th, came in John, a rogue, with pretense of peace, and was dismissed with this errand, that we might speak with Sachems. That evening, ho not being gone a quarter of an hour, his company that lay hid behind a hill killed two Salem men within a mile from our quarters, and wounded a third that he is dead. And at a house three miles off where I had 10 men, they killed 2 of them. Instantly, Capt. Mosely, myself and Capt Gardner were sent to fetch in Major Appleton’s company that kept 3 miles and a half off, and coming, they lay behind a stone wall and fired on us in sight of the garrison. We killed the captain that killed one of the Salem men, and had his cap on. That night they burned Jerry Bull’s house, and killed 17. Dec. 16th came that news. Dec 17th came news that Connecticut forces were at Petasquamscot, and had killed 4 Indians and took 6 prisoners. That day we sold Capt. Davenport 47 Indians, young and old for 80l. in money. Dec 18th we marched to Petaquamscot with all our forces, only a garrison left; that night very stormy; we lay, one thousand, in the open field that long night. In the morning, Dec. 19th, Lord’s day, at 5 o’clock we marched. Between 12 and 1 we came up with the enemy, and had a sore fight three hours. We lost, that are now dead, about 68, and had 150 wounded, many of which recovered. That long snowy cold night we had about 18 miles to our quarters, with about 210 dead and wounded. We left 8 dead in the fort. We had but 12 dead when we came to the swamp, besides the 8 we left. Many died by the way, and as soon as they we brought in, so that Dec. 20th we buried in a grave 34, next day 4, next day 2, and none since. Eight died at Rhode Island, 1 at Petaquamscot, 2 lost in the woods and killed Dec. 20, as we heard since; some say two more died. By the best intelligence, we killed 300 fighting men; prisoners we took, say 350, and above 300 women and children. We burnt above 500 houses, left but 9, burnt all their corn, that was in baskets, great store. One signal mercy that night, not to be forgotten, viz. That when we drew off, with so many dead and wounded, they did not pursue us, which the young men would have done, but the sachems would not consent; they had but ten pounds of powder let.

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Our General, with about 40, lost our way, and wandered till 7 o’clock in the morning, before we came to our quarters. We thought we were within 2 miles of the enemy again, but God kept us; to him be the glory. We have killed now and then 1 since, and burnt 200 wigwams more; we killed 9 last Tuesday. We fetch in their corn daily and that undoes them. This is, as nearly as I can, a true relation. I read the narrative to my officers in my tent, who all assent to the truth of it. Mohegans and Pequods proved very false, fired into the air, and sent word before they came they would so, but got much plunder, guns and kettles. A great part of what is written was attested by Joshua Teffe, who married an Indian woman, a Wampanoag. He shot 20 times at us in the swamp, was taken at Providence Jan’y 14, brought to us the 16th, executed the 18th. A sad wretch, he never heard a sermon but once these 14 years. His father, going to recall him lost his head and lies unburied.

A list of Major Saml Apleton souldjers yt were slayne & wounded the 19th Decemb. ’75, at the Indians fort at Naragansett

In the Company of killed wounded Major Appleton 4 18 Capt. Mosely 6 9 Capt. Oliver 5 8 Capt. Davenport 4 11 Capt. Johnson 4 8 Capt. Gardiner 7 10 Capt. Prentice 1 3

31 67

Of the officers, Capts. Davenport, Johnson, and Gardiner were killed, and Lieutenants Upham, Savage, Swain, and Ting were wounded.

Of the Connecticut troops 71 were killed. Capt. Gallup- 10 Capt. Marshall- 14 Capt. Seeley- 20 Capt. Mason- 9 Capt. Watts- 17

1676

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November 9, Thursday: The Reverend Edward Bulkeley declared that

God hath been pleased to look with favor on his people, helping them to repel the heathen that had burst like a flood upon so many of our towns. Of the several tribes risen against us, there now scarce remains a name or family in their former habitations but are either slain, captive, or fled into remote parts of this wilderness. Let us give praise to God for His singular and fatherly mercies.

“KING PHILLIP’S WAR” The Reverend Cotton Mather’s comment, later, was, at the very least, heartily Un-Christian, or headily Christian:

God sent ’em in the head of a Leviathan for a thanksgiving feast.

THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS

How similar this comment, by the right Reverend, to the cynical 20th-Century comment heard so frequently on sportscasts, “Lo, how the mighty have fallen!” Was our founding father serving for his time and place the function now filled by the TV news commentator? –One might suggest that the divine seems to have missed the difference between praying and preying.8 We will notice in this incident that people were not so fastidious then as they now are, for the severed head of the Native American leader had been on display on a gibbet in Plymouth for 20 years when Reverend Mather saw it, and by that point had evidently stopped rotting and stinking — so he was able to reach out his hand and tear the jawbone away from the skull and take it home as

8. Actually, that pun is from the period in question, offered to history by (among others) a New England racist named Nathaniel Saltonstall:

They that wear the Name of Praying Indians have made Preys of much English Blood.

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a souvenir.9

... the hand which now writes, upon a certain occasion took off the jaw from the exposed skull of that blasphemous leviathan. That pagan was “blasphemous,” it seems, because before Christians killed him he had commented to the Reverend John Eliot that he cared no more for the Gospel than he did for a button upon his coat. “We despite all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.” — Mark Twain

It has recently been pointed out that, although it is commonly assumed in history books that the period of hostilities began with sneak attacks by red warriors upon defenseless isolated farming families, in fact the peace treaty of the time was arranged in such a way that the Native American peoples and cultures would be exterminated whether in their desperation they had held to these treaties, and had been humiliated and abused individually, or had violated these treaties and thereby rendered themselves liable to punitive expeditions against entire groupings. Noticing that the situation was constructed in such a manner as to make it a win/win situation for the white people and a lose/lose situation for the red people, one may legitimately infer that it was not constructed in that manner by any accident. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

According to one commentator, taking into account the small population figures for the time, this race war that broke out in New England in the 1670s inflicted a greater proportion of casualties than any other war in United States history, more than even the Civil War. We may legitimately assume, however, on the basis of the fact that these comments were made in the 1950s, that the population figures the white scholar was referring to were the population figures for white people, and that his use of the word “our” in this context can be expanded to mean precisely “we white folks.” Because the casualty rate among non-whites, in this combat which spared not the noncombatant, nor the woman nor the child, –and in the period of ethnic cleansing which followed, in which any Native American of the New England region who could not get a white person to vouch for him or her was sold into slavery10 with the proceeds of the sale going either to the nearest white man or to the government– must most assuredly have been vastly higher. Another historical commentator, commenting in a more recent period, and this time actually paying attention to the recorded names of white people who had been killed in the fighting or who had died of wounds shortly afterward, has concluded that the white “body count” was vastly exaggerated by the rumor mill that was of course grinding in that era, and that in actual fact the desperate native Americans only managed to kill approximately 100 white people, or at most somewhat less than 200, before they were hunted down in the forest.

So let all thine Enemies perish, O Lord!

9. Refer to “Brief History,” page 197.

10. One of these 10-year-old Native American booties of war would provide service in the home of the family of the Reverend Roger Williams. Since this Reverend is now generally held to have been a really great guy (champion of religious liberty and all that), let us piously hope that this young charge was able to take full advantage of the opportunity of having such a fine role model soearly in life — and that in consequence he grew up to be a really decent person. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another interesting statistic is that, with the forest cleared of “tawny Serpents,” there was a great resurgence of game species. When the white huntsmen found it safe to venture again into the forests, they found New England just teeming with things they could kill. Only the local beaver, which had been hunted virtually to extinction by 1670 in order to obtain trade goods from Europe, would fail to make a significant comeback after this race slaughter.

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1677

The Reverend Cotton Mather, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, and George Berkeley have all tried to decipher the messages chiseled into the 55-square-foot westward-facing flat surface of a 40-ton piece of feldspathic sandstone, a glacial erratic noticed at this timeperiod upside down at the tidewater line on the left bank of the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts, that would become known as the Dighton Rock. Although the sandstone chunk was above water only four hours per day, Stiles of Yale College would convince himself that the inscription on the seventy-degree sloping flat surface was made up of ancient Phoenician petroglyphs.

“Dighton Rock is like the rocks you see along the highways, filled with graffiti,” says Jim Whitall. “It’s where everyone wanted to leave a message, and it’s the first stone in America that anyone paid any attention to. It was a bulletin-board for ancients, Native Americans, and colonials alike.” The rock with the mysterious hieroglyphs was moved to dry land a few years ago by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a building was built around it to preserve the inscriptions. Winter ice and constant submergence at high tide under the Taunton River began obliterating some of the older markings. Also, in case one of the great scholars who deciphered the stone over the past 300 plus years is right, it’s best to preserve what may be a most important piece of history. Even if the hodgepodge of scratches and scribblings can’t ever be deciphered, Dighton Rock is a unique rock of ages. Sam Morison said, “if the history of the Dighton Rock is nothing else, it is a remarkable demonstration of human credulity.” Right on, Sam! -Campbell Grant, ROCK ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, 1967

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1679

December 11: Samuel Whiting died in Lynn MA at the age of 82. (Refer to the “Elegy on the Reverend Samuel Whiting, of Lynn,” by Benjamin Tompson, “ye renowned poet of New England,” printed in Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA. MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

See also William Whiting’s MEMOIRS OF REVEREND SAMUEL WHITING AND OF HIS WIFE, ELIZABETH ST. JOHN, WITH REFERENCE TO SOME OF THEIR ENGLISH ANCESTORS AND AMERICAN DESCENDANTS, Boston 1871.)

1680

October 4: The Reverend Grindal Rawson, who had been a college classmate of Cotton Mather and was the son of the colonial secretary Edward Rawson, was called to the ministry in Mendon, but would not be permanently settled there until April 7, 1684. Having married a daughter of the Reverend John Wilson of Medfield, he would be installed in the parsonage with his family by 1682; we find in that year a 3-man committee “to Rectifie Mr. Rawson’s Chimneyes.” Mr. Rawson’s salary was to be £55 a year, with one cord of wood for every 40-acre lot, and the train-band was to cut it up and deliver it to his door.

1681

King Phillip’s head had been rotting atop a pole in Plymouth for about five years (and would remain there for approximately another fifteen). His teenage son, the next in line to be sachem of the Wampanoag –this grandson of the Massasoit Ousamequin Yellow Feather11 whose name we seldom even bother to record– was serving the duration of his life in overseas slavery.12 “King Phillip’s War” was a matter of memory. At this point the paths of two persons of differing race and culture passed in the forest of Rhode Island, and one discharged his weapon at the other.

In her THE NAME OF WAR: KING PHILIP’S WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN IDENTITY (NY: Knopf, 1998, pages 182-3), Jill Lepore takes most seriously the warning issued by the Reverend Cotton Mather in 1692, “...Our Indian wars are not over yet,” and is willing to deal at length with materials that for instance contemporary Quakers may use in their ruminations on 20th-Century renditions of their Peace Testimony: THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

11. Massasoit is not a name, but a hereditary title, like sachem. Its meaning is approximately equivalent to Shahanshah. 12. In all likelihood the teenager had been sold in the West Indies for approximately £3. 36 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In 1681, five years after King Philip’s War had ended, two men met in the woods outside Providence. One was English, the other Indian. Both carried guns. When the Englishman, Benjamin Henden, saw the Indian (whose name was never mentioned), he ordered him to halt, but the Indian “would not obey his word, and stand at his Command.” Furious, Henden raised his gun and fired, “with an Intent to have killed him.” Luckily for the Indian, Henden was a lousy shot and missed his target entirely. And luckily for Henden, the Indian was not a vengeful man. “Notwithstanding the said violence to him offered did not seek to revenge himselfe by the like return ; although he alsoe had a gunn and might have shott at Henden againe if he had been minded soe to have done.” Instead of shooting Henden, the Indian man “went peaceably away,” stopping only long enough to use “some words by way of Reproof ; unto the said Hernden [sic] blaming him for that his Violence and Cruelty, and wondering that English men should offer soe to shoot at him and such as he was without cause.” Had these same two men met in the same woods five or six years earlier, when King Philip’s War was still raging, it is unlikely that both would have survived the encounter unharmed. Henden, if he had traveled at all in Massachusetts, was probably familiar with the law passed in that colony in 1675 dictating that “it shall be lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall finde any Indian travelling or skulking in any of our Towns or Woods ... to command them under their Guard and Examination, or to kill and destroy them as they best may or can.” But that law was, of course, no longer in effect (and never was in Rhode Island), and for his anachronistic and misplaced aggression, Henden landed himself in court, condemned for his “late rash turbulent and violent behavior.” The case even led the Rhode Island General Assembly to pass “an act to prevent outrages against the Indians, precipitated by a rhode islander shooting an indian in the woods.” In the first place, as the Assembly declared, agreeing with Henden’s intended victim, Henden had “noe Authority nor just cause” to command the Indian to halt. “Noe person,” the Assembly proclaimed, “shall presume to doe any such unlawfull acts of violence against the Indians upon their perills.” And more importantly, Henden and others like him must learn to “behave themselves peaceably towards the Indians, in like maner as before the ware.” PROVIDENCE

I very much appreciate this because it so well illustrates the influence of testimony. One person’s moderation, one person’s individual lived example –to wit, the unnamed native’s declining to return fire after an aggressor had discharged his firearm (and thus effectively for a period of about a minute disarmed himself), this anonymous person’s having contented himself with a verbal reproach after his life had been so unnecessarily endangered– became magnified in Rhode Island into a movement toward de-escalation of the race violence.

A model for us all!

During this same year, at Mount Hope one day, a man was held down and the brand burned into his forehead. This was not the mark of P

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: COTTON MATHER Phillip the sachem Metacom of Mount Hope, but stood instead, curiously, for the term of art Pollution13 — because this white man, named Thomas Saddeler, had been observed to have been taking his mare to “a certaine obscure and woodey place, on Mount Hope,” and to have there been engaging in sexual intercourse with her.14

“As the star of the Indian descended, that of the Puritans rose ever higher.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 63

13. Bear in mind in regard to this term pollution that the concept perversion would not formally enter out medical terminology until 1842, when it would be defined in Dunglison’s MEDICAL LEXICON as one of the four modifications of function in disease, the other three modifications of function being augmentation, diminution, and abolition. 14. Although we don’t have a record of what happened to the mare, in such cases we know the abused animal was always offed. No way would they have left the mare to the mercy of this Tommy and, also, no way would any other white man have been willing to take charge of it. 38 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As the Reverend Cotton Mather would put the matter in 1692,

We have shamefully Indianized in all these abominable things.... Our Indian wars are not over yet.

As Jill Lepore has more recently phrased the matter, relying upon a heightened level of sarcasm and self- awareness,

After fourteen months of bloodshed, followed by three years of intermittent fighting, the colonists were right back where they started, as “Heathenish,” as Indian, as ever. Philip’s death was only a hollow victory. Depravity still soiled New England.... Tempted by the devil, corrupted by the Indian wilderness, Englishmen were still degenerating into beasts.

What was a poor white man to do?

Here, then, was the solution to the colonists’ dilemma ... wage the war, and win it, by whatever means necessary, and then write about it, to win it again. The first would be a victory of wounds, the second a victory of words.

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1682

How many times does a “blazing exhalation” that has been appearing in the upper skies at intervals of about every 76 years at least since the year 1404 BCE have to return right on schedule, and lose another about 1/ 10,000ths of its mass into an awesome tail across the heavens, before anyone will notice that it is a recurring phenomenon? Well, maybe this time Edmond Halley would notice. And maybe, also, the Reverends Increase Mather and Cotton Mather would speculate on this bright comet through Harvard College’s “3 foote and a halfe with a concave ey-glasse” reflecting telescope. HALLEY’S COMET ASTRONOMY

This is what Halley’s Comet looked like, the last time it passed us. We have records of the appearances of this comet on each and every one of its past 30 orbits, which is to say, we have spotty records of observations before that, in 1,404 BCE, 1,057 BCE, 466 BCE, 391 BCE, and 315 BCE, but then on the 240 BCE return the sightings record begins to be complete. The Babylonians recorded seeing it in 164 BCE and again in 87 BCE, and then it was recorded as being seen in 12 BCE, 66 CE, 141 CE, 218 CE, 295 CE, 374 CE, 451 CE, 530 CE, 607 CE, 684 CE, 760 CE (only by Chinese), 837 CE, 912 CE, 989 CE, 1066, 1145, 1222, 1301, 1378, 1456, 1531, 1607, 1682, 1758, 1835, 1910, and 1986 — and we are confidently awaiting sightings in 2061 and 2134 even though due to a close conjunction with the earth we are presently unable to calculate what orbit it will have by the date of that approach. Each time P/Halley orbits in out of the Kuiper HALLEY’S COMET belt beyond the planets Neptune and Pluto and whips EDMOND HALLEY around the sun, it has been throwing off about one 10,000ths of its mass into a streaming tail, which means that this comet which we know to have been visiting us for at the very least the past 3,000 years or so is only going to be visiting us for perhaps another half a million years or so!

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1683

Halley’s Comet was a publication opportunity. In this year appeared both Christopher Ness’s A STRANGE AND WONDERFUL TRINITY; OR, A TRIPLICITY OF STUPENDOUS PRODIGIES, CONSISTING OF A WONDERFUL ECLIPSE, AS WELL AS OF A WONDERFUL COMET, AND OF A WONDERFUL CONJUNCTION [of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars], NOW IN ITS SECOND RETURN, and the Reverend Increase Mather’s KOMETOGRAPHIA; OR, DISCOURSE CONCERNING COMETS.... Attempting to provide a catalog of appearances of all known historical comets, the Reverend cited a number of appearances that we now know to have been Halley’s Comet: he knew of the appearances during 66, 684, 837, 912, 1066, 1145, 1301, 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682, missing the appearances it had made during 141, 218, 295, 347, 451, 530, 607, 760, 989, and 1378.

Of course, he supposed all these to be separate comets, rather than one comet returning multiple times. In this book the Reverend bound two of his sermons “occasioned by the late blasing [blasting] stars.” The Reverend’s son Cotton Mather authored an almanac article about this appearance of Halley’s Comet. SKY EVENT

1684

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s LATE MEMORABLE PROVIDENCES RELATING TO WITCHCRAFTS AND POSSESSIONS (in this the right reverend transferred the term “Americans” from red natives to white colonists).

“As the star of the Indian descended, that of the Puritans rose ever higher.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 63

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1686

Friend George Keith ran the initial survey to mark out the border between West Jersey and East Jersey.

Clergymen such as the Reverend Increase Mather and his son the Reverend Cotton Mather regarded the royally imposed “Dominion for New England” as the death of their dream for a Puritan state under the thumb of persons of their own ilk. In this crisis, of course, not being able to attack England and needing somebody to attack, they attacked the ever-handy members of the Religious Society of Friends, and hence it is that we have: • The Reverend Increase Mather’s AN ESSAY FOR THE RECORDING OF ILLUSTRIOUS PROVIDENCE • The Reverend Cotton Mather’s MEMORABLE PROVIDENCES RELATING TO WITCHCRAFTS AND POSSESSIONS A FAITHFUL ACCOUNT OF MANY WONDERFUL AND SURPRISING THINGS THAT HAVE BEFALLEN SEVERAL BEWITCHED AND POSSESED PERSONS IN NEW-ENGLAND, PARTICULARLY A NARRATIVE OF THE MARVELLOUS TROUBLE AND RELEEF EXPERIENCED BY A PIOUS FAMILY IN BOSTON, VERY LATELY AND SADLY MOLESTED WITH EVIL SPIRITS : WHEREUNTO IS ADDED A DISCOURSE DELIVERED UNTO A CONGREGATION IN BOSTON ON THE OCCASION OF THAT ILLUSTRIOUS PROVIDENCE : AS ALSO A DISCOURSE DELIVERED UNTO THE SAME CONGREGATION ON THE OCCASION OF AN HORRIBLE SELF-MURDER COMMITTED IN THE TOWN : WITH AN APPENDIX IN VINDICATION OF A CHAPTER IN A LATE BOOK OF REMARKABLE PROVIDENCES FROM THE CALUMNIES OF A QUAKER AT PEN-SILVANIA / WRITTEN BY COTTON MATHER … AND RECOMMENDED BY THE MINISTERS OF BOSTON AND CHARLESTON was printed at Boston in N. England, by R.P., to be sold by Joseph Brunning ….

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1687

It was in about this year the Indian Library of the Reverend John Eliot issued a 3d edition of its 1669 THE INDIAN PRIMER, mostly in the Nipmuc language.

Meanwhile the Christian religion was in payback mode as two families of Groton, the Lawrence family and the Robbins family, obtained for themselves a two-mile swath cut out of what had been the Nashobah Plantation for Praying Indians.

“As the star of the Indian descended, that of the Puritans rose ever higher.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 63

A Declaration of Indulgence was issued by the king, which prohibited any discrimination against Catholics. This decree, combined with the tyranny of Andros made the Puritans quite upset; the next year, they sent the Reverend Increase Mather over to England, in order that he might persuade James to revoke the royal charter and to give New England back its old one. No sooner had Increase arrived and nearly convinced James, than he was overthrown and a new pair of monarchs, William and Mary, assumed the throne of England. Again Mather tried to lobby for the old charter of Massachusetts, but to no avail.

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s MILITARY DUTIES, RECOMMENDED TO AN ARTILLERY COMPANY; AT THEIR ELECTION OF OFFICERS, IN CHARLES-TOWN....

1689

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s WORK UPON THE ARK.

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The Reverend Cotton Mather preached a sermon on witchcraft that would be pirated and included in a Boston publication, MEMORABLE PROVIDENCES RELATING TO WITCHCRAFTS AND POSSESSIONS.

In Concord, a town that was never in any way involved in the New England witchcraft hysteria, at this point Thomas Brown was Town Clerk.

Samuel Parris was ordained as the first minister of Salem village (not the present Salem town, but what is now Danvers).15

15. Samuel Parris of Salem, son of Thomas Parris of London, had been educated at Harvard College but had left before graduation. He had been of the first church at Boston, had become a freeman during 1683, and in this year was preaching at Salem village (now Danvers), where he was ordained on November 15, 1689 as the first minister. He would be fired from his job as minister during June 1696, and would be for two or three years a preacher at Stow, but in 1700 he would be in Watertown MA, with a license as a retailer, and soon afterward he would move to Concord, where he would continue during 1705 to engage in trade, but unprofitably, and afterward he would preach for a few months at Dunstable MA during 1711. His wife Dorothy Parris would die on September 6, 1719 and he would die on February 29, 1720 at Sudbury. In his will, probated on March 28, 1720, he would mention his father Thomas Parris, his uncle John Parris, his daughters Elizabeth Parris Barnard, the wife of Benjamin Barnard, Dorothy Parris Brown, born August 28, 1700 and the wife of Hopestill Brown, and Mary Parris Bent, born during 1703, married during 1727 with Peter Bent, and two sons Samuel Parris, born at Watertown MA on January 9, 1702 and baptized on March 1, 1702; and Noyes Parris, born on August 22, 1699, Harvard College 1721, both minors. (There is also a record of a Samuel Parris of Boston who by his wife Elizabeth had Thomas Parris, born on October 25, 1681; Elizabeth Parris, born on November 28, 1682; and Susanna Parris, born on January 9, 1688, and perhaps this man left Boston and became that unhappy minister at Salem.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1690

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THE WONDERFUL WORK OF GOD COMMEMORATED.His DISCOURSES UPON

THE NATURE, THE DESIGN, AND THE SUBJECT OF THE LORD’S SUPPER, yet another of the more than 400 publications for which the Reverend would bear responsibility during his long career.

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1691

The Reverend Cotton Mather‘s THINGS TO BE LOOK’D FOR. DISCOURSES ON THE GLORIOUS CHARACTERS, WITH CONJECTURES ON THE SPEEDY APPROACHES OF THAT STATE, WHICH IS REFERVED FOR THE CHURCH OF GOD IN THE LATTER DAYS. TOGETHER WITH AN INCULCATION OF SEVERAL DUTIES, WHICH THE UNDOUBTED CHARACTERS AND APPROACHES OF THAT STATE, INVITE US UNTO: DELIVERED UNTO THE ARTILLERY COMPANY OF THE MAFFACHUFETS COLONY: NEW ENGLAND; AT THEIR ELECTION OF

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OFFICERS, FOR THE YEAR 1691.

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1692

The Reverend Cotton Mather, characterized the spiritual condition of New England’s white people as a problem of pollution, a problem not of having engaged in a genocide but of their, during their extermination campaign of 1675-1676, having had debilitating cultural contact with another race:

We have shamefully Indianized in all these abominable things.... Our Indian wars are not over yet.

“KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

“Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed.” — Iris Chang, author of THE RAPE OF NANKING (1997), when the Japanese translation of her work was cancelled by Basic Books due to threats from Japan, on May 20, 1999.

“Historical amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it.” — Russell Shorto

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The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD added yet more faggots to the bonfire of witchcraft-suspicions.

WITCHES

His THE TRIUMPHS OF THE REFORMED RELIGION.

His PREPARATORY MEDITATIONS UPON THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT.

(I’m having difficulty restraining my impulse to make this seem tiresome and repetitive!)

June 15, Sunday: The Special Court appointed to hold the witch trials in Massachusetts colony, early in its sittings, had requested the opinions of a round dozen of ministers of Boston and the vicinity in regard to witchcraft. On this day, after due deliberation, the Reverend Cotton Mather and his associates signed an answer he had written, entitled THE RETURN OF SEVERAL MINISTERS CONSULTED BY HIS EXCELLENCY AND THE HONORABLE COUNCIL UPON THE PRESENT WITCHCRAFTS IN SALEM VILLAGE. The group of ministers provided the court with their evaluation of the spectral evidence16 upon which many of the convictions had been based, in a list of eight points containing the germ of an idea that the court ought to be cautious — for the devil might fake such spectral evidence in order to employ it for his own wicked purposes: 1. The afflicted state of our poor neighbors that are now suffering by molestations from the Invisible World we apprehend so deplorable, that we think their condition calls for the utmost help of all persons in their several capacities. 2. We cannot but with all thankfulness acknowledge the success which the merciful God has given unto the sedulous and assiduous endeavors of our honorable rulers to detect the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in the country; humbly praying that the discovery of these mysterious and mischievous wickednesses may be perfected. 3. We judge that, in the prosecution of these and all such witchcrafts there is need of a very critical and exquisite caution, lest by too much credulity for things received only upon the devil’s authority, there be a door opened for a long train of miserable consequences, and Satan get an advantage over us; for we should not be ignorant of his devices. 16. What was “spectral evidence”? Here is an illustration: Ann Putnam had testified that one evening an apparition of the Reverend Mr. Burroughs had appeared, and asked her to write her name in the devil’s book. Then, the child testified, the spectres of two women in winding sheets came to her, and looked angrily upon the minister and scolded him until he was fain to vanish away. The women spectres informed Ann that they were the ghosts of Mr. Burroughs’s 1st and 2d wives, whom he had murdered. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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4. As in complaints upon witchcraft there may be matters of inquiry which do not amount unto matters of presumption, and there may be matters of presumption which yet may not be matters of conviction, so it is necessary that all proceedings thereabout be managed with an exceeding tenderness toward those that may be complained of, especially if they have been persons formerly of an unblemished reputation. 5. When the first inquiry is made into the circumstances of such as may lie under the just suspicion of witchcrafts, we could wish that there may be admitted as little as possible of such noise, company and openness as may too hastily expose them that are examined, and that there may be nothing used as a test for the trial of the suspected, the lawfulness whereof may be doubted by the people of God, but that the directions given by such judicious writers as Perkins and Barnard may be observed. 6. Presumptions whereupon persons may be committed, and much more, convictions whereupon persons may be condemned as guilty of witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable than barely the accused persons being represented by a spectre unto the afflicted, inasmuch as it is an undoubted and notorious thing that a demon may by God’s permission appear even to ill purposes, in the shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous man. Nor can we esteem alterations made in the sufferers, by a look or touch of the accused, to be an infallible evidence of guilt, but frequently liable to be abused by the devil’s legerdemains. 7. We know not whether some remarkable affronts given the devils, by our disbelieving these testimonies whose whole force and strength is from them alone, may not put a period unto the progress of the dreadful calamity begun upon us, in the accusation of so many persons whereof some, we hope, are yet clear from the great transgression laid to their charge. 8. Nevertheless, we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government, the speedy and vigorous prosecutions of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the directions given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcrafts.

August 4, Monday: Six persons had thus far been executed in Salem as witches. It was at this point that the Reverend Cotton Mather wrote, in his A DISCOURSE ON THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, the following words: They —the judges— have used as judges have heretofore done, the spectral evidences, to introduce their farther inquiries into the lives of the persons accused; and they have thereupon, by the wonderful Providence of God, been so strengthened with other evidences that some of the witch-gang have been fairly executed.

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August 19, Tuesday: George Jacobs, Sr., the Reverend George Burrough, John Proctor,17 John Willard, and Martha Carrier of Andover were hanged on Salem’s Gallows Hill. Before he was turned off, the Reverend Burrough was allowed to make a statement, which he concluded with a prayer, reciting at the end the Lord’s Prayer. This caused great consternation among the onlookers, as the Reverend Burrough recited the Lord’s Prayer without any obvious blunders — and the common belief of the time was that a witch would not be able to accomplish this task without making blunders. It required the Reverend Cotton Mather, on horseback, to quell the assemblage by assuring them that the action being taken was righteous.

George Jacobs: “Because I am falsely accused. I never did it.”

17. Four years after her husband was hanged, the widowed Elizabeth Procter would remarry. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 53 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Major American Witchcraft Cases

1647 Elizabeth Kendall, Alse Young 1663 Mary Barnes

1648 Margaret Jones, Mary Johnson 1666 Elizabeth Seager

1651 Alice Lake, Mrs. (Lizzy) Kendal, Goody 1669 Katherine (Kateran) Harrison Bassett, Mary Parsons

1652 John Carrington, Joan Carrington 1683 Nicholas Disborough, Margaret Mattson

1653 Elizabeth “Goody” Knapp, Elizabeth 1688 Annie “Goody” Glover Godman

1654 Lydia Gilbert, Kath Grady, Mary Lee 1692 Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Towne Nurse, Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Mary Staplies, Mercy Disborough, Elizabeth Clawson, Mary Harvey, Hannah Harvey, Goody Miller, Giles Cory, Mary Towne Estey, Reverend George Burrough, George Jacobs, Sr., John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, Sarah Good, Martha Corey, Margaret Scott, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmott Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Tituba

1655 Elizabeth Godman, Nicholas Bayley, 1693 Hugh Crotia, Mercy Disborough Goodwife Bayley, Ann Hibbins

1657 William Meaker 1697 Winifred Benham, Senr., Winifred Ben- ham, Junr.

1658 Elizabeth Garlick, Elizabeth Richardson, 1724 Sarah Spencer Katherine Grade

1661 Nicholas Jennings, Margaret Jennings 1768 —— Norton

1662 Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Green- 1801 Sagoyewatha “Red Jacket” smith, Mary Sanford, Andrew Sanford, Goody Ayres, Katherine Palmer, Judith Varlett, James Walkley

November 29, Saturday: The Reverend Cotton Mather recorded that “While I was preaching at a private Fast (kept for a possessed young woman,) — on Mark 9.28.29, — ye Devel in ye damsel flew upon mee & tore the leaf, as it is now torn over against ye Text.” WITCHCRAFT

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1693

In Boston, the Reverend Cotton Mather’s WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD was becoming available for purchase.

It was clear that the Reverend Mather had not had any second thoughts about the Salem witch executions:

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If in the midst of the many dissatisfactions among us, the publication of these trials may promote such a pious thankfulness unto God for justice being so far executed among us, I shall rejoice that God is glorified. (Also, during this year, in October, the right Reverend would write eight of his nine rules in his diary, which eventually would be published as a broadside RULES FOR THE SOCIETIES OF NEGROES. The right Reverend’s 9th rule, written later, would mention his NEGRO CHRISTIANIZED, first published in 1706. A manuscript note by Samuel Sewall on the verso of the copy of NEGRO CHRISTIANIZED at the American Antiquarian Society states, “Left at my house for me, when I was not at home, by Spaniard Dr. Mather’s Negro; March 23. 1713-14.”) “Witches call the Devil a Black Man, and they generally say he resembles an Indian.” That this stuff about the suppression of witchcraft was no mere figment of the Reverend’s perfervid imagination, we can see from an execution order made out in Connecticut: Hugh Crotia, Thou Standest here presented by the name of Hugh Crotia of Stratford in the Colony of Connecticut in New England; for that not haueing the fear of God before thine Eyes, through the Instigation of the Devill, thou hast forsaken thy God & covenanted with the Devill, and by his help hast in a preternaturall way afflicted the bodys of Sundry of his Majesties good Subjects, for which according to the Law of God, and the Law of this Colony, thou deseruest to dye. Record Court of Assistants, 2: 16, 1693.

June 8, Sunday: Bad things had happened in the life of Elizabeth Emerson of Haverhill (born January 26, 1664; in May 1676 her father had been fined three shillings for having cruelly and excessively kicked and beaten her), a sister to Hannah Emerson Duston in consequence of her long-term affair with an older local married man, Samuel Ladd18 — a liaison which had produced three infants none of whom had survived.19 She had been languishing in the local lockup for two years and despite a plea of innocence and (it would appear) the entire absence of forensic evidence, had been found guilty of several counts of murder: 26th Sept. Elizabeth Emmerson single woman Daughter of Michael Emmerson of Haverhill in the County of Essex being indicted by the Jurors for our Soveraigne Lord & Lady King William & Queen Mary upon their Oathes. For that the sd. Elizabeth Emmerson being with child with two living Children or Infants on Thursday night the 7th of May 1691 before day of Fryday morning at Haverhill aforesd in the house of Michael Emmerson aforesd by the Providence of God two Bastard Children alive did bring forth and the sd. Elizabeth Emmerson not haveing the feare of Cod before her Eyes and being instigated by ye Devil of her malice forethought, the sd two Infants did feloniously kill & Murther, and them in a small Bagg or cloath sewed up, and concealed or hid them in sd Emmersons house untill afterwards, that is to say, on sabbath day May the tenth 1691, the sd two Infants in the yard of sd Emmerson in Haverhill aforesd did secretly bury contrary to the peace of Our Soveraign Lord 6 Lady the King & Queen, their Crown & Dignity, the Laws of God, and the Lawes & Statutes in that case made & provided. Upon which Indictment the sd Elizabeth Emmerson was arraigned and to the Indictment 18. He was married since December 1, 1674 with Martha Corlis Ladd, with whom he produced six legitimate children. On February 22, 1697 he would be struck in the head and killed in an Indian raid while gathering hay. 19. A girl named Dorothy born April 10, 1686, and then on the night of May 7, 1691 twin boys. 56 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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pleaded not guilty & put herselfe upon Tryal by God & the Country, _____20 a Jury was impannelled being the first Jury, whereof Mr. Richard Crisp was foreman, and were accordingly sworne (the prisoner making no challeng). The Indictment Examination & evidences were read, & the prisoner made her defence, The Jury return their Verdict, the Jury say, That she sd. Elizabeth Emmerson is guilty according to Indictment. The Court Order, That sentance of Death he pronounced ag. her. Although all of Haverhill knew Ladd to be the father, there seems to be no record of his being called to make any accounting. On this day Elizabeth Emerson was taken from her jail cell to listen to the Reverend Cotton Mather as he delivered a sermon which included her purported post-conviction confession, and was then taken from the church and hanged on Boston’s Common. Per the diary of the Reverend Mather: I had often wished for an Opportunity, to bear my Testimonies, against the Sins of Uncleanness, wherein so many of my Generacon do pollute themselves. A young Woman of Haverhil, and a Negro Woman also of this Town [Boston] were under sentence of Death, for the Murdering of their Bastard-children. Many and many a weary Hour, did I spend in the Prison, to serve the Souls of those miserable Creatures; and I had Opportunities in my own Congregation, to speak to them, and from them, to vast Multitudes of others. Their Execution, was ordered to have been, upon the Lecture of another; but by a very strange Providence, without any Seeking of mine, or any Respect to mee, (that I know of) the order for their Execution was altered and it fell on my Lecture Day. I did then with the special Assistance of Heaven, make and preach, a Sermon upon Job. 36.14. Whereat one of the greatest Assemblies, ever known in these parts of the World, was come together. I had obtained from the young Woman, a pathetical Instrument, in Writing, wherein shee own’d her own miscarriages, and warn’d the rising Ceneracon of theirs. Towards the close of my Sermon, I read that Instrument unto the Congregation; and made what Use, was proper of it. I accompany’d the Wretches, to their Execution; but extremely fear all our Labours were lost upon them; however sanctifyed unto many others. The Sermon was immediately printed; with another which I had formerly uttered on the like Occasion; (entitled, Warnings From the Dead [Or Solemn admonitions unto all people; but especially unto young persons to beware of such evils as would bring them to the dead, Boston: Printed by Bartholomew Green, for Samuel Phillips, at the west end of the Exchange, 1693]) and it was greedily bought up; I hope, to the Attainment of the Ends, which I had so long desired. T’was afterwards reprinted at London.

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Elizabeth had pled not guilty until, under sentence of death in prison, the Reverend Mather had worked his word magic on her. We have no way of knowing whether she actually had been guilty of anything more than simple fornication, and of giving birth to infants which either due to their biological condition or to their deprived environment had been unable to survive — indeed we have no way of knowing whether or not such an uneducated young woman could have fashioned the confession that was being “recorded” on her behalf. We can legitimately infer that in that era, the American court system was not following the precept “Innocent until proven Guilty.” What the Reverend Mather read that he characterized as having been Elizabeth’s confession to him in the jail cell, on that day, he carefully preserved for us in his Magnalia Christi Americana. –You can decide for yourself how much of this is what Elizabeth wanted to say about herself, versus how much of it is what the good Reverend had desired to hear from her, and considered suitable for the moral education of the other sinners of his flock: I am a miserable sinner, and I have justly provok’d the holy God to leave me unto that folly of my own heart, for which I am now condemned to die. I cannot but see much of the anger of God against me, in the circumstances of my woful death. He hath fulfilled upon me that word of his, “Evil pursueth sinners!” I therefore desire humbly to confess my many sins before God and the world; but most particularly my blood guiltiness. Before the birth of my twin-infants, I too much parlied with the temptation of the devil to smother my wickedness by muthering of them. At length, when they were born, I was not insensible that at least one of them was alive; but such a wretch was I, as to use a murderous carriage towards them, in the place where I lay, on purpose to dispatch them out of the world. I acknowledge that I have been more hard hearted than the sea-monsters; and yet for the pardon of these my sins, I would fly to the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the only “fountain set open for sin and uncleanness.” I know not how better to glorifie God, for giving me such an opportunity as I have had to make sure of his mercy, than by advertising and entreating the rising generation here to take warning by my example, and I will therefore tell the sins that have brought me to my shameful end. I do warn all people and expecially young people, against the sin of uncleanness in particular. ’Tis that sin that hath been my ruine. Well had it been for me, if I had answered all temptations to that sin as Joseph did, “How shall I do this wickedness, and sin against God?” But, I see, bad company is that which leads to that and other sins; And I therefore beg all that love their souls to be familiar with none but such as fear Cod. I believe the chief thing that hath brought me into my present condition, is my disobedience to my parents. I dispised all their godly counsel and reproofs; and I was always of a haughty, stubborn spirit. So that now I am become a dreadful instance of the curse of God belonging to disobedient children. I must bewail this also, and although I was baptized, yet when I grew up, I forgot the bonds that were laid upon me to be the Lord’s. Had I given my self to God, as soon as I was capable to consider that I had been in baptism set apart for him, How happy had I been! It was my delay to repent of my former sins, that provoked God to leave me unto the crimes for which I am now to die. Had I seriously repented of my uncleanness the first time I fell into it, I do suppose I had not been left unto what followed. Let all take it from me: They little think what they do when they put off turning from sin to God, and resist the strivings of the Holy Spirit. I

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fear ’tis for this that I have been given up to such “hardness of heart,” not only since my long imprisonment but also since my just condemnation. I now know not what will become of my distressed, perishing soul. But I would humbly commit it unto the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.

1694

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s EARLY RELIGION, URGED IN A SERMON, UPON THE DUTIES WHEREIN, AND THE REASONS WHEREFORE, YOUNG PEOPLE, SHOULD BECOME RELIGIOUS, WHERETO ARE ADDED, THE EXTRACTS OF SEVERAL PAPERS, WRITTEN BY SEVERAL PERSONS, WHO HERE DYING IN THEIR YOUTH, LEFT BEHIND THEM THOSE ADMONITIONS FOR THE YOUNG SURVIVORS, WITH BRIEF MEMOIRS RELATING TO THE EXEMPLARY LIVES OF SOME SUCH, THAT HAVE GONE FROM HENCE TO THEIR EVERLASTING REST. He discovered irreligiosity in New England and attributed it to excess “tippling” (indulgence in alcoholic beverages).

1695

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s BRONTOLOGIA SACRA. His PISCATOR EVANGELICUS. ORTHE LIFE OF MR. THOMAS HOOKER....

Friend Thomas Maule, a Quaker of Salem, one of the richest men in town, proclaimed, in TRUTH HELD FORTH, that there were indeed witches loose in New England, and that the reason why this was so was that God was displeased that his people the Quakers were being persecuted. God had unleashed witches and Indians to devastate the persecutors of his people. This pamphlet was not anonymous — he would be imprisoned for slander. (In 1701 he would become more personal about his message, in NEW ENGLAND PERSECUTORS MAULED, by asserting flat out that “the evil one abideth in Cotton Mather.”)

April 29: According to page 161 of David E. Stannard’s THE PURITAN WAY OF DEATH: A STUDY IN RELIGION, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE (NY: Oxford UP, 1977): April 29, 1695 dawned “warm and sunshiny” in Boston, but by midafternoon the town was assaulted by a sudden, unexpected hailstorm. The hailstones were “as bigg as pistoll and Musquet Balls,” and they wreaked havoc on many of Boston's homes and public buildings. That evening Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall dined together. As they stood in Sewall’s kitchen discussing the day’s storm Mather happened to mention that “more Ministers Houses than others proportionally had been smitten with Light-

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[CONTINUE WITH PAGE 162]

1697

That notorious witch hunter, the Reverend Cotton Mather, was the Ken Starr of Puritan New England. When he wasn’t out hunting witches, he was busy predicting the end of the world, this year being his first announced End Times. When this prediction had failed, he would revise the date of the End of the World two more times (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 338). MILLENNIALISM

2d edition of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MEMORABLE PROVIDENCES … of 1689, re-printed at Edinburgh by the heirs and successors of Andrew Anderson printer to His most Excellent Majesty.

April 21: Husband Thomas Duston escorted Hannah Emerson Duston, Mary Corliss Neff, and Samuel Lenorson or Lennardson to Boston, where they had an opportunity to tell their story and display their bloody sack of trophies to the Reverend Cotton Mather and to Judge Samuel Sewall.21 A special bounty of £50 would be authorized, an ungenerous £5 per scalp whereas a few years before such scalps would have fetched £50 each out of the Commonwealth coffers, and of this Hannah would receive £25,22 Mrs. Neff and young Samuel, as players of secondary standing, needing to split the remaining £25 between themselves. The situation being as dicey as it was, nobody would be inclined to ask this teenager any pointed questions about what role he had played during the raid on Haverhill. A nifty personalized silver tankard would be presented by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts.23 Governor Sir Francis Nicholson of Maryland would have a set of pewter plates made in London, and later would present them to Hannah. A monument to Hannah and her deed would be erected in 1879 in the G.A.R. Park at the center of Haverhill, Massachusetts.

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97 (which is Broadway Street) past the rotary that has a statue of Lafayette until you come to the Haverhill Public Library and the town’s Common facing it:

Below are the plaques on the four faces of the Haverhill statue, depicting comic-book style the taking of the prisoners followed by the retaliation of Hannah’s husband (which nobody talks much about nowadays), Hannah’s killing and scalping of the band, and their night escape with their bounty scalps down the dark

21. One can only speculate as to the caution with which Hannah Emerson Duston told her tale to this Reverend Cotton Mather — the righteous Boston being who a few years before had participated in the righteous hanging on the Boston Common of her sister Elizabeth. 22. That’s the simplified story we tell, but it ignores the obvious fact that it was quite impossible in that era for a Mrs. to be the recipient of such a payment. A wife in those days had no such economic independence. She was a married woman, everything pertaining to her was handled by her husbandman the head of the household. What actually happened therefore –of course– was that the Commonwealth paid out this prize money into the hand of the Mr. in recognition of the Mrs., for him to do with as he saw fit. 23. Nota Bene: The custodians have a practice of loaning the tankard for the weddings of brides who can trace their ancestry to the Emerson family. Since another source alleges that it was the Governor of Maryland who sent the inscribed silver tankard, we really should ask such a bride to take a close look at that inscription, and report to us what it says. These collectibles are at the “Buttonswoods” home of the Haverhill Historical Society, which long since has been forced to throw out Hannah’s collection of moldering human body parts, retaining only the rag in which they had been wrapped. 62 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and silent Merrimack River:

Today, by car, it is 66 miles from Haverhill to the island near Lancaster, situated at the entry of the Contoocook River into the Merrimack River, on which Hannah took her scalps. Leave Haverhill on I-495 southbound from exit 50, travel to exit 40, turn north on I-93 and travel to Exit 17. There is no sign announcing the Duston monument there. You must pay a 75-cent toll between exits 16 and 17. You will be six miles north of Concord NH. Go west on US-4 for about half a mile to a Park-’n-Ride beside the river. There is a cast-iron historical marker at the entrance to the lot. At the west end of the lot a paved path leading down to the river and over an unused railroad bridge onto the island. The island boasts a monument erected in 1874 with Hannah at the top.24

24. You are aware, of course, that Hard-Hearted Hannah has the distinction of being the 1st woman in honor of whom USers had ever erected a monument! “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 63 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1698

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THE BOSTON EBENEZER. His ELEUTHERIA.

1699

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s DECENNIUM LUCTUOSM.

1700

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s A PILLAR OF GRATITUDE.... and his THE RELIGIOUS MARRINER.

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June: From the Reverend Cotton Mather’s diary, we can learn that a Puritan is distressed by the things we have in common with other of God’s creatures, things which must for that reason be base, rather than by the ways in which we differ from them — for to the Puritan mind it is such differences which certify our inherent superiority over all others of God’s creatures, and thus our right to be the boss over them, and use and abuse them at our discretion:

I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; “What mean, and vile Things are the Children of Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us, and place us in some regard, on the same Level with the very Dogs!” My Thought proceeded. “Yett I will be a more noble Creature; and at the very Time, when my natural Necessities debase me into the Condition of the Beast, my Spirit shall (I say, at that very Time!) rise and soar, and fly up, toward the Employment of the Angel.” Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my ordinary Practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an Opportunity of shaping my Mind, some holy, noble, divine Thought; usually, by way of occasional Reflection on some sensible Object which I either then have before me, or have lately had so: a Thought that may leave upon my Spirit, some further Tincture of Piety! And I have done according to this Resolution!

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1701

Friend Thomas Maule, a Quaker of Salem, one of the richest men in town, proclaimed, in NEW ENGLAND PERSECUTORS MAULED, that “the evil one abideth in Cotton Mather.”)

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1702

The Reverend Cotton Mather (son of Increase and grandson of Richard) wrote in MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND that:

...we can hardly tell where any of ’em [the Narragansett?] are left alive upon the face of the earth.

MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

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Rowlandson’s perspective, as how his wife’s captivity had tested his faith, and how her return to him had demonstrated that his faith had been superior to the evil she had been forced to endure. This is in sharp contrast with Mrs. Rowlandson’s own story, which she frames within her separation from and her reunion with her daughter “upon free cost,” that is to say, without the need for the paying of a money ransom. This Right Reverend also wrote in 1702 of the Salem witch trials:

The devils which had been so played withal, and, it may be, by some few criminals more explicitly engaged and imployed, now broke in upon the country, after as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of. Some scores of people, first about Salem, the centre and first-born of all the towns in the colony, and afterwards in several other places, were arrested with many preternatural vexations upon their bodies, and a variety of cruel torments, which were evidently inflicted from the dæmons of the invisible world.... Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of Sadducism can question them.

This Right Reverend, a white man who wouldn’t quit, wrote:

Barbaris pro libertate erepta fidem Jesu Christi, et vitam hominibus dignam reddamus.

which translates literally if approximately as:

So what if we are reducing these savages to slavery? —In exchange for their liberty on this continent, our white rule bestows upon them not only the religion of Jesus Christ but also a decent manner of existence!

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1706

The Reverend Cotton Mather recounted the captivity narrative told to him by Hannah Emerson Duston, in GOOD FETCH’D OUT OF EVIL: A COLLECTION OF MEMORABLES RELATING TO OUR CAPTIVES. (If you remember, Mrs. Duston waited until the children had said their Christian prayers, and had drifted to sleep, before she whacked them on their little heads with a hatchet and recovered their scalps, for the Salem scalp reward, with a knife.) It seems that, on the authority of ancient Jews, if one is armed with sufficient determination one may bring good by doing great harm. Since there is no record that anyone ever has gone broke by underestimating the cupidity of his or her audience, perhaps we will not be surprised to learn that this book sold 1,000 copies in the first week.

Here then is the manner in which the Reverend’s atrocity story is rendered in the 1852 edition of his MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND (Volume 2, Article XXV, pages 634-636): MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

[following screens]

The Reverend, also during this year, in his THE NEGRO CHRISTIANIZED, originated the “stewardship” argument which is being recycled today by “religious greens” to justify the pacification of the planet under benevolent human control — that as God’s steward each slavemaster had a duty to Christianize his black slaves, to make their souls white as snow. His congregation made the good Reverend the gift of one black man, who had originated in Burkina Faso and who had as a child there been variolated against the small pox. The Reverend bestowed upon his new slave the name Onesimus, a gift more precious than rubies.

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s CORDERIUS AMERICANUS.

1710

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THEOPOLIS AMERICANA.

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These two poor women were now in the hands of those whose “tender mercies are cruelties;” but the good God, who hath all “hearts in his own hands,” heard the sighs of these prisoners, and gave them to find unexpected favour from the master who hath laid claim unto them. That Indian family consisted of twelve persons; two stout men, three women, and seven children; and for the shame of many an English family, that has the character of prayerless upon it, I must now publish what these poor women assure me. ’Tis this: in obedience to the instructions which the French have given them, they would have prayers in their family no less than thrice every day; in the morning, at noon, and in the evening; nor would they ordinarily let their children eat or sleep, without first saying their prayers. Indeed, these idolaters were, like the rest of their whiter brethren, persecutors, and would not endure that these poor women should retire to their English prayers, if they could hinder them. Nevertheless, the poor women had nothing but fervent prayers to make their lives comfortable or tolerable; and by being daily sent out upon business, they had opportunities, together and asunder, to do like another Hannah, in “pouring out their souls before the Lord.” Nor did their praying friends among our selves forbear to “pour out” supplications for them. Now, they could not observe it without some wonder, that their Indian master sometimes when he saw them dejected, would say unto them, “What need you trouble your self? If your God will have you delivered, you shall be so!” And it seems our God would have it so to be. This Indian family was now travelling with these two captive women, (and an English youth taken from Worcester, a year and a half before,) unto a rendezvous of salvages, which they call a town, some where beyond Penacook; and they still told these poor women that when they came to this town, they must be stript, and scourg’d, and run the gantlet through the whole army of Indians. They said this was the fashion when the captives first came to a town; and they derided some of the faint-hearted English, which, they said, fainted and swooned away under the torments of this discipline. But on April 30, while they were yet, it may be, about an hundred and fifty miles from the Indian town, a little before break of day, when the whole crew was in a dead sleep, (reader, see if it prove not so!) one of these women took up a resolution to imitate the action of Gael upon Siberia; and being where she had not her own life secured by any law unto her, she thought she was not forbidden by any law to take away the life of the murderers by whom her child had been butchered. She heartened the nurse and the youth to assist her in this enterprize; and all furnishing themselves with hatchets for the purpose, they struck such home blows upon the heads of their sleeping oppressors, that ere they could any of them struggle into any effectual resistance, “at the feet of these poor prisoners, they bow’d, they fell, they lay down; at their feet they bow’d, they fell; where they bow’d, there they fell down dead.” Only one squaw escaped, sorely wounded, from them in the dark; and one boy, whom they reserved asleep, intending to bring him away with them, suddenly waked, and scuttled away from this desolation. But cutting off the scalps of the ten wretches, they came off, and received fifty pounds from the General Assembly of the province, as a recompence of their action; besides which, they received many “presents of congratulation” from their more private friends: but none gave ’em a greater taste of bounty than Colonel Nicholson, The Governour of Maryland, who, hearing of their action, sent ’em a very generous token of his favour.

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On March 15, 1697, the salvages made a descent upon the skirts of Haverhill, murdering and captivating about thirty-nine persons, and burning about half a dozen houses. In this broil, one Hannah Dustan, having lain in about a week, attended with her nurse, Mary Neff, a body of terrible Indians drew near unto the house where she lay, with designs to carry on their bloody devastations. Her husband hastened from his employments abroad unto the relief of his distressed family; and first bidding seven of his eight children (which were from two to seventeen years of age) to get away as fast as they could unto some garrison in the town, he went in to inform his wife of the horrible distress come upon them. Ere she could get up, the fierce Indians were got so near, that, utterly despairing to do her any service, he ran out after his children; resolving that on the horse which he had with him, he would ride away with that which he should in this extremity find his affections to pitch most upon, and leave the rest unto the care of the Divine Providence. He overtook his children, about forty rod from his door; but then such was the agony of his parental affections, that he found it impossible for him to distinguish any one of them from the rest; wherefore he took up a courageous resolution to live and die with them all. A party of Indians came up with him; and now, though they fired at him, and he fired at them, yet he manfully kept at the rear of his little army of unarmed children, while they marched off with the pace of a child of five years old; until, by the singular providence of God, he arrived safe with them all unto a place of safety about a mile or two from his house. But his house must in the mean time have more dismal tragedies acted at it. The nurse, trying to escape with the new- born infant, fell into the hands of the formidable salvages; and those furious tawnies coming into the house, bid poor Dustan to rise immediately. Full of astonishment, she did so; and sitting down in the chimney with an heart full of most fearful expectation, she saw the raging dragons rifle all that they could carry away, and set the house on fire. About nineteen or twenty Indians now led these away, with about half a score other English captives; but ere they had gone many steps, they dash’d out the brains of the infant against a tree; and several of the other captives, as they began to tire in the sad journey, were soon sent unto their long home; the salvages would presently bury their hatchets in their brains, and leave their carcases on the ground for birds and beasts to feed upon. However, Dustan (with her nurse) notwithstanding her present condition, travelled that night about a dozen miles, and then kept up with their new masters in a long travel of an hundred and fifty miles, more or less, within a few days ensuing, without any sensible damage in their health, from the hardships of their travel, their lodging, their diet, and their many other difficulties.

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The Reverend Cotton Mather’s last publication of any significance, BONIFACIUS; OR ESSAYS TO DO GOOD, urged voluntaristic do-goodist activism. Benjamin Franklin, who was four years of age at this time, would eventually aver that this volume had influenced him throughout his life “for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation.”

WALDEN: But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my PEOPLE OF townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little WALDEN in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in town; and if I had nothing to do, –for the devil finds employment for the idle,– I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may by spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for any thing else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Here Henry Thoreau would take issue not only with the Reverend Cotton Mather but also with Benjamin Franklin’s DOGOOD PAPERS. He would be offering that their attitude, which they had put forward as an expression of one’s personal ethical responsibility, amounted instead to a direct and deliberate evasion of that ethical responsibility. —Strong stuff indeed!

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1712

The Reverend Cotton Mather made a rather unimaginative (in comparison with others) record of the inscription on the Dighton Rock:25

The Reverend Mather would send these drawings to the Royal Society in London to see what they thought,

25. Per Garrick Mallery’s “Picture-Writing of the American Indians” in TENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY TO THE SECRETARY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1888-1889. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 75 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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but the English natural philosophers would be reluctant to commit themselves.

“Dighton Rock is like the rocks you see along the highways, filled with graffiti,” says Jim Whitall. “It’s where everyone wanted to leave a message, and it’s the first stone in America that anyone paid any attention to. It was a bulletin-board for ancients, Native Americans, and colonials alike.” The rock with the mysterious hieroglyphs was moved to dry land a few years ago by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a building was built around it to preserve the inscriptions. Winter ice and constant submergence at high tide under the Taunton River began obliterating some of the older markings. Also, in case one of the great scholars who deciphered the stone over the past 300 plus years is right, it’s best to preserve what may be a most important piece of history. Even if the hodgepodge of scratches and scribblings can’t ever be deciphered, Dighton Rock is a unique rock of ages. Sam Morison said, “if the history of the Dighton Rock is nothing else, it is a remarkable demonstration of human credulity.” Right on, Sam! -Campbell Grant, ROCK ART OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, 1967

1714

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s DUODECENNIUM LUCTUOSUM.

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1716

That notorious witch hunter, the Reverend Cotton Mather, was the Ken Starr of Puritan New England. When he wasn’t out hunting witches he was busy predicting the end of the world, this year being his second announced End Times (his initial guess had been 1697). When this prediction also failed, he would revise the date of the End of the World yet another time. (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 338) MILLENNIALISM

“I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.” — Henry Thoreau, “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”

Even an idiot doesn’t need to be wrong just all the time. The 1st certain account of plant hybridization was provided in a letter written by the Reverend Mather, discussing the “infection” of Indian corn planted alongside yellow corn.26 The following year a British hybrid dianthus would be described. In 1721 a hybrid cabbage would be reported. By 1750 the controversy of sex in plants would be in the news. By 1760 plant hybridization would have become a professional occupation. The study, hybridization, and selection of corn would of course continue. By 1969 scientists would have come to understand more about the genetics of corn than about the genetics of any other flowering plant. PLANTS

26. In this timeframe the Reverend was being invited to become FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society), which would be to say that he was being considered as a “scientist.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 77 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1717

February 27 through March 7: Came the “nor’eastern” to be known to folklore as the “Great Snow.”27 The Reverend Cotton Mather would report in MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF NEW- ENGLAND on this storm, vividly, for the benefit of the Royal Society in London, to the effect that “Indians near an hundred years old, affirm that their Fathers never told them of any thing that equalled,” and Thoreau would

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comment on this divine’s report that it was “worth all the philosophy [Mather] might dream of.” MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

In the chapter “Sounds” in WALDEN, Thoreau would make a passing allusion to this “blizzard” (to employ anachronistically a later Great Plains coinage) from the North-East, implying that when there was a

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severe snowstorm of a winter, it still evolved in Concordians a memory of that February-March 1717 series of storms “raging and chilling men’s blood”:

WALDEN: What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise PEOPLE OF and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. WALDEN I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed that they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE THE GREAT SNOW

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WALDEN: Even the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, –only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, –a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow, –no gate, –no front-yard, –and no path to the civilized world!

CANADA GOOSE THE GREAT SNOW

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Also, in the chapter “Winter Visitors,” Thoreau would retail a tale of an early settler’s family –clearly a family of white people because of course the indefeasible convention among white people is that white people alone can “settle”– in the town of Sutton “in this state” during the Great Snow of February-March 1717. In the absence of the husband and father the family’s cottage became so covered by snow that “an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family”:

WALDEN: At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or a fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that early settler’s family in the town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which the chimney’s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring.

THE GREAT SNOW

HENRY OFTEN MENTIONS THE GREAT SNOW

Here is a retrospective newspaper article that has been published on the topic: Following heavy snows, warm, pleasant weather prevailed through most of February, lulling New Englanders into believing the worst was over. From February 27 through March 7, four snowstorms blanketed the region with three to five feet of snow, and wind whipped it into drifts ten to twenty-five feet high. People found themselves imprisoned in their homes by what became known as the Great Snow. For two successive Sundays in Boston, members of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s congregation couldn’t make it to the meetinghouse for worship services. Snow kept postal riders from traveling their routes. In New London on March 18, diarist Joshua Hempstead recorded that men traveling by snowshoes were at last able to place in his grave a man named George Way, who had been dead “10 or 12 days.” Wild deer were almost wiped out. Unable to run in the deep snow, they fell prey to bears and wolves. Livestock perished in large numbers. On Fishers Island, off the northeastern tip of Long Island, John Winthrop reported that more than 1,100 sheep and an uncounted number of cattle and horses had been lost. Astonishingly, four weeks after the storm, inhabitants of

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Fishers Island who were digging 100 frozen sheep out of a sixteen-foot drift found two still alive. The Reverend Mather reported that two hogs emerged from a snowbank twenty-seven days after the storm, having nourished themselves on some tansy at the bottom of their icy tomb. “The Poultry as unaccountably survived as these,” continued his report. “Hens were found alive after seven days; Turkeys were found alive after five and twenty days, buried in ye Snow, and at a distance from ye ground, and altogether destitute of any thing to feed them. The number of creatures that kept a Rigid Fast, shutt up in Snow for divers weeks together, & were found alive after all, have yielded surprizing stories unto us.” No early thaw arrived to help New Englanders out of their predicament, and the deep snow remained into early April. The memory of it lasted far longer; a children’s history book published in 1827 by John Warner Barber in New Haven, Connecticut, still referred to it as “the greatest snow ever known in this country or perhaps in any other.” The snow was so deep that “the people stepped out of their chamber [second- floor] windows on snow shoes,” he reported. The winter of 1740-41 staged an early arrival, with October “as cold as ordinarily November is,” wrote Bolton, Connecticut, town clerk John Bissell, and a substantial snowfall in mid-November. Two solid weeks of rain in early December resulted in the worst floods on the Connecticut River in half a century, damaging “bridges, fences, hay” and ruining “the Indian corn chambers, cribs...” “Extreme cold” followed, then late December brought “a prodigious storm of snow out of the north and north west, which was full knee deep, attended in said storm with violent cold weather,” continued Bissell. “Travelling was almost wholly suspended by reason of the extreme cold and deep snow, and God had sealed up the hand of every man. We had a very sensible consideration of ... Who can stand before His cold?” Ludlum reports that by January “Drifting snow soon brought an end to regular travel by highway over New England and the Middle Colonies, and the continuance of penetrating cold soon closed all the rivers and inland waterways with solid ice. Many salt water bays and channels, seldom before frozen, congealed solidly, and even the ocean shore along southern and eastern New England became ringed with an unusual icy surface.” Boston Harbor became an expanse of ice so thick that sleighs carried worshipers across it from Dorchester to Sabbath services every week from December 25 until April 1. One man made a 200- mile trip by sleigh over the ice from Cape Cod to New York City. The extreme cold was not confined to the Northeast; that year the York River in Virginia froze hard enough to cross. A January thaw was followed by bouts of more “violent cold” and repeated snowfalls through early March. “The weather continued cold and the snow wasted but slowly, so that there was considerable quantity of snow the middle of April,” wrote Bissell. The Connecticut River was still frozen solid enough to be crossed on foot on the first of April. On April 10 snow still lay two and a half feet deep on the ground on the Massachusetts- New Hampshire border. Like the Great Snow of 1717, this phenomenal season produced a

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story of remarkable survival. “At Guilford [Connecticut], a Sheep was in the winter buried in a storm of snow and lay there ten weeks and three days and came out alive,” reported Bissell. The severe weather affected life in New England long beyond the end of winter. “The spring came on very slowly; the beginning of March about half the people of the government had spent all their hay, and subsisted them by ... giving out their Indian corn, and by reason of which scarcity a great number of cattle and horses died, and near half the sheep, and about two thirds of the goats,” Bissell wrote. “Exceeding scarcity followed, partly by reason of abundance of Indian corn being ruined by the long rains in December, and partly by people giving their corn to their creatures to save their lives. We suppose the ensuing summer was the greatest scarcity as ever the English felt since the first settlement of this government. Indian corn rose in the price from ten to twenty shillings, and what was commonly sold for twenty shillings, till at last all buying and selling utterly ceased, viz. of corn. Money was no temptation, and men of good estates who had money were forced to put themselves into the quality of beggars, and beg sometimes two quarts at a place, to relieve the distresses of their poor families.” Here is how Thoreau would enter the weather into his journal:

... In Barber’s His’t Coll — p 476 there is a letter by Cotton Mather dated “Boston, 10th Dec. 1717.” describing the great snow of the previous February. from which I quote— “On the twentieth of the last February there came on a snow, which being added unto what had covered the ground a few days before, made a thicker mantle for our mother than what was usual: And the storm with it was, for the following day, so violent as to make all communication between the neighbors every where to cease. People, for some hours, could not pass from one side of a street unto another,”— — — — — — “On the 24th day of the month, comes Pelion upon Ossa: Another snow came on which almost buried the memory of the former, with a storm so famous that Heaven laid an interdict on the religious assemblies throughout the country, on this Lord’s day, the like whereunto had never bee seen before. The Indians near an hundred years old affirm that their fathers never told them of any thing that equalled it. Vast numbers of cattle were destroyed in this calamity. Whereof some there were, of the stranger [stronger? mine] sort, were found standing dead on their legs, as if they had been alive many weeks after, when the snow melted away. And others had their eyes glazed over with ice at such a rate, that being not far from the sea, their mistake of their way drowned them there. One gentleman, on Whose farms were now lost above 1100 sheep, which with other cattle, were interred (shall I say) or inmired, in the snow, writes me word that there were two sheep very singularly circumstanced. For no less than 8 & 20 days after the storm, the people pulling out the ruins of above an 100 sheep out of a snow bank which lay 16 foot high, drifted over them, there was 2 found alive, which had been there all this time, & kept themselves alive by eating the wool of their dead companions. When they were taken out they shed their own fleeces, but soon got into good care again.” — — “A man had a couple of young hogs, which he gave over for dead, but on the 27th day after their burial, they made their way out of a snow-bank, at the bottom of which they had found a little tansy to feed upon.”— — “Hens were found alive after 7 days; Turkeys were found alive after 5 & 20 days, buried in the snow, & at a distance from the ground, & altogether destitute of anything to feed them.”— — — “The wild creatures of the woods, the out-going of the evening, made their descent as well as they could in this time of scarcity for them towards the sea-side. A vast multitude of deer, for the same cause, taking the same course, & the deep snow spoiling them of their only defence, which is to run, they became such a prey to these devourers, that it is thought not one in 20 escaped.” — — — “It is incredible how much damage is done to the orchards, for the snow freezing to a crust, as high as the bows of the trees, anon split them to pieces. The cattle also, walking on the crusted snow a dozen foot from the ground, so fed upon the trees as very much to damnify them.”— “Cottages were totally covered with the snow, & not the very tops of their chimneys to be seen”— These “odd accidents” he says “would afford a story. But there not being any relation to Philosophy in them, I forbear them.” He little thought that his simple testimony to such facts as the above — could be worth all the philosophy he might dream of.

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1718

November 3, Monday: Five people drowned near Great Brewster Island. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

George Worthylake (or Worthilake), who had been brought up on George’s Island in Boston Harbor, lived in the lighthouse on Little Brewster Island with his wife Ann and their daughters Ruth and Ann. They had a black slave there named Shadwell. On this day George Worthylake sailed to Boston to collect his pay, and on his way back sailed to Lovell’s Island, where he and his wife Ann and their daughter Ruth boarded a sloop heading for Boston Light. A friend, John Edge, and a servant, George Cutler, were accompanying them. Just after noon, this sloop came to anchor and Worthylake’s black slave Shadwell paddled out in a canoe to fetch them from the sloop to their island home. The daughter Ann Worthylake and a friend of hers, Mary Thompson, watched from shore as all six of them seated themselves in this canoe. Suddenly, the two girls on shore saw them “swimming or floating on the water, with their boat Oversett.” The body of George Cutler would not be recovered. The bodies of the Worthylakes would be buried beneath a triple headstone in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End while the body of John Edge would be placed elsewhere. Perhaps the body of the slave Shadwell was buried also –somewhere or other– since it was in fact recovered from the water of the harbor, although of course nothing has been said of this.

It would be reported in the Boston News Letter that “On Monday last the 3d Currant an awful and Lamentable Providence fell out here, Mr. George Worthylake, (Master of the Light-House upon the Great Brewster [called Beacon-Island] at the Entrance of the Harbour of Boston) Anne his Wife, Ruth their Daughter, George Cutler, a Servant, Shadwell their Negro Slave, and Mr. John Edge a Passenger; being on the Lord’s Day here at Sermon, and going home in a Sloop, dropt Anchor near the Landing place, and all got into a little Boat or Cannoo, designing to go on Shoar, but by Accident it overwhelmed, so that they were Drowned, and all found and Interred except George Cutler.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 85 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Benjamin Franklin, 12 at the time and newly apprenticed by his father Josiah to his elder brother James Franklin in the printing business in Boston, wrote a broadside ballad “A Lighthouse Tragedy” which was duly published.28 Franklin’s father’s response to his younger son’s printed ballad would be a caution: “...verse- makers were generally beggars. So I escaped being a poet.…” The poem sometimes attributed to young Franklin on the drowning, however, the one beginning, “Oh! George, This wild November” is nothing more than a 19th-Century forgery, or perhaps charitably we might offer that it is someone’s belated imitation of what young Franklin might have dashed off in the 18th Century.

The “very solemn” funeral sermon was delivered by the Reverend Cotton Mather before the father, wife, and daughter were “carried all together to the grave.” (“I entertain the flock with as pungent and useful a discourse as I can.”)

1720

In THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER: A COLLECTION OF THE BEST DISCOVERIES IN NATURE, WITH RELIGIOUS IMPROVEMENTS, the Reverend Cotton Mather, D.D. F.R.S. accused Mohammed of having a thick skull.

THIN THICK

(Hey, Rev, get this into your wig — it’s called a “turban”!)

1721

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s INDIA CHRISTIANA.

28.The gazette of Boston, known as the News Letter, was being put out of course by its postmaster, John Campbell, for only the postmaster could read all the mail, and thus know what the news was(!), but in this year Campbell had lost his postmastership to William Brooker and yet had refused to turn over the gazette to this successor — who had thus been forced to begin a separate publication. Brooker had titled this new 2d paper the Boston Gazette and had arranged for it to be issued through the printshop of James Franklin. 86 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 26, day: Inoculation was being introduced to Boston by Dr. Zabdiel Boylston.

His home besieged by a Boston mob, he would spend the following two weeks hiding in a secret compartment in the structure.29

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The Reverend Cotton Mather had heard of inoculation from his slave Onesimus or Onesimes, who had been procured for his use by parishioners. Onesimus or Onesimes had been inoculated while still in Africa. The Reverend Mather inoculated two of his other black slaves, as well as his young son Thomas. Although the Reverend Mather had written to Dr. William Douglass, a Scottish physician practicing in Boston who had studied in Edinburgh, Leyden, and Paris, in advance, Dr. Douglass protested in the Franklin paper, the New England Courant, that Dr. Boylston had no physician’s license but was merely “a certain cutter for the stone,” and that in order to prevent qualified physicians from being able effectively to register their objections, this procedure had been undertaken in haste without allowing them an opportunity to consult.30 The Reverend Mather spoke out from the pulpit in favor of such experimentation, referring to this inoculation procedure as “transplantation.” A “grenado” was then pitched into the Reverend Mather’s parsonage with a note tied to it which read: COTTON MATHER, YOU DOG. DAM YOU! I’LL INOCULATE YOU WITH THIS, WITH A POX TO YOU. The bomb was a dud and the General Court would offer a reward of £50 for information leading to the conviction of the person who had heaved it. Judge Samuel Sewall would be inoculated, and with him his family, whereupon the selectmen, fearing

infection, would require them to relocate to Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, where there was being maintained in those times a quarantine station referred to as “Province Hospital.” VARIOLA

29. We may note that his home was firebombed by white people not because he was advocating that native Americans be inoculated against the small pox, but because he was advocating that white people be inoculated. (Refer to letter by Jeffrey Amherst in 1732, recommending that native Americans be deliberately inoculated with the small pox. Dr. Douglass also suggested this.) Also, I don’t know whether either the Reverend’s firebombed home, or the home of Dr. Boylston, was on the street that would eventually be named in the doctor’s honor, Boylston Street. 30. Inoculation was being determinedly opposed by Benjamin Franklin and his elder half-brother James Franklin. 88 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1722

Benjamin Franklin’s THE DOGOOD PAPERS were published before he was 17 years of age, in James Franklin’s New England Courant:

WALDEN: But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my PEOPLE OF townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little WALDEN in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in town; and if I had nothing to do, –for the devil finds employment for the idle,– I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may by spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for any thing else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

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Henry Thoreau would take issue not only with Franklin’s prudentialism here but also with the Reverend Cotton Mather’s ESSAYS TO DO GOOD. He would be saying that their prudential attitude, which they had put forward as an expression of one’s personal ethical responsibility, amounted instead to a direct and deliberate evasion of such ethical responsibility. —Strong stuff! Thoreau would don moral blinders. He would recognize that the Franklineque personality, because so desirous of gain, would become ipso facto foolishly fearful of loss. His agenda in “Economy” would be to directly confront such fearfulness of loss, and such nostalgia for past losses, and reduce these to the absurdity which they are. In life, unlike on Franklin’s ledger sheet, there is no

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possibility of red ink. Consider Franklin’s prudentialism and its blinders: Franklin never wrote the definitive handbook he projected on “the art of virtue.” Instead, he left his (incomplete) AUTOBIOGRAPHY, in which his own life story is related as a sequence of parables, each with its moral lesson. The book shows how to shape one’s personality through fostering some impulses and restraining others. The rhetorical posture of the detached, self- controlled observer, like the postulated model of human faculties, is quintessential eighteenth-century moral philosophy and can be traced back to The Spectator. Overall, the lesson is that by shaping and controlling one’s self, one can shape and control one’s destiny, even in an uncaring world. Self-discipline is the key to success. The author Franklin is necessarily detached from the character Franklin in the book, since the character is meant to stand for Everyman, to be a model for universal imitation. (The postulated universal desire for success is part of the security for the system. A person who has constructed himself in accordance with Franklin’s maxims will be of use to society because he will want a good reputation, and the way to gain that is by being useful to others.) Franklin would have found the opposition between public and private virtue, supposedly characteristic of eighteenth-century American republicans, quite incomprehensible. For him, there was no conflict between virtue and commerce, or between the individual and the collective welfare. The prudential virtues that made one a good tradesman or a good housewife also characterized the good citizen. Indeed, his AUTOBIOGRAPHY points out, the good reputation that one earns by private virtue can be put to use in politics. Far from there being a conflict between virtue and self-interest, self-interest should be a motive to virtue and virtue should be practically useful. It is a cliché, though not less true for being such, that Franklin was more interested in means than ends, in practice than theory. This does not mean he was unsophisticated; the choice was quite deliberate on his part. He accepted the prevailing model of the human faculties and addressed himself with shrewdness to the practical problems that model posed. He assumed that the autonomous, rational self would be socially useful and that society would appropriately reward, with fame, those who served it. He devoted little thought to the nature of virtue in and of itself. Once, when Franklin was planning the agenda for coming Junto meetings, he considered discussing “whether men ought to be denominated good or ill men from their actions or their inclinations.” But then he crossed it off the list. Very likely the question seemed too abstract to be interesting. It seemed quite otherwise to Jonathan Edwards.

1723

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s COELESTINUS.

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1724

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s PARENTATOR.

1725

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THE PALM-BEARERS. I n his extreme old age, the reverend began to be more conciliatory toward the Quaker teaching of the Christ Within. In the dedication to his sermon “Vital Christianity,” which he had published in Philadelphia, he wrote “To all who desire to worship God in the Spirit, and ... more particularly to our beloved Friends.... There is no Vital Christianity without a Christ living in us.... [S]ee how far we join with you, in owning a Christ within.” (The Reverend Mather’s offer of an olive branch to the Quakers would be, however, conditional upon their “owning a Christ without.” –Otherwise, just forget he mentioned it.)

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1726

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s RATIO DISCIPLINAE FRATRUM NOV ANGLORUM and his THE VIAL POURED OUT UPON THE SEA.

This was an era in which gin drinking, and crime, were on the rise. The Reverend Mather along with 16 other ministers issued A SERIOUS ADDRESS TO THOSE WHO UNNECESSARILY FREQUENT THE TAVERN, AND OFTEN SPEND THE EVENING IN PUBLICK HOUSES. BY SEVERAL MINISTERS. TO WHICH IS ADDED A PRIVATE LETTER ON THE SUBJECT, BY THE LATE REV. DR. INCREASE MATHER, with the running title SEASONABLE ADVICE CONCERNING TAVERNS. TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT

1727

The Reverend Cotton Mather’s AGRICOLA and his THE TERROR OF THE LORD and his BOANERGES.

1728

February 12, Thursday: The Reverend Cotton Mather died.

On the other side of the pond, James Sherwood, George Weedon, and John Hughs, street robbers and footpads, were being hanged on the Tyburn gallows outside London.31 Amongst the many artifices by which vice covers itself from our

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apprehension, there is no method which it more commonly takes, and yet better succeeds in, than by putting on a mask of virtue and thereby imposing the most flagitious actions upon us as things indifferent, sometimes as things which may gain applause. This was exactly the case with the persons whose lives we are now about to write, who were all of them young men of tolerable education, but giving way to their vicious inclinations, they associated themselves together for the better carrying on those evil practices by which they supported their extravagances, into which lewd women especially had betrayed them. James Sherwood, who was the eldest of them, and also went by the name of Hobbs, was the son of but mean parents, who, however, took all the pains that were in their power to educate him in the best manner they were able. When he grew up they put him out apprentice to a waterman, with whom he served his time, and was afterwards a seaman in a man-of-war. When at home he spent his time in the worst company imaginable, viz., idle young men and lewd, infamous women. As he had naturally a good understanding and quick apprehension, he quickly became adroit in every mystery of wickedness to which he addicted himself. However, Justice soon overtook him and his first companions in wickedness; upon which he turned evidence and saved his own life by sacrificing theirs. He was transported soon afterwards, but upon his finding it difficult to live abroad without working (a thing, for which he had an intolerable aversion) he took the

31. LIVES OF THE MOST REMARKABLE CRIMINALS WHO HAVE BEEN CONDEMNED AND EXECUTED FOR MURDER, THE HIGHWAY, HOUSEBREAKING, STREET ROBBERIES, COINING OR OTHER OFFENCES / COLLECTED FROM ORIGINAL PAPERS AND AUTHENTIC MEMOIRS, AND PUBLISHED IN 1735 / Edited by Arthur L. Hayward 94 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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first opportunity that offered of returning home again.

When he returned he fell to his old practices, taking up his lodgings at the house of one Sarah Payne, a most infamous woman who was capable of seducing unwary youths for the commission of the greatest villainies, and then ready to betray them to death, either to benefit or secure herself. By hers and Sherwood’s means George Weedon was drawn in, a young man of very reputable parents, who had been brought up with the greatest care in the principles of virtue and true religion. It seems, however, that having contracted an acquaintance with a lewd and artful woman, who drew him into an excessive fondness for her, he yielded to the solicitations of Sherwood and his landlady, and took to such courses as they suggested, in order to supply himself with money for the entertainment of that strumpet who was his ruin. It was but a few days before his apprehension that he had been induced to quit the house of his mother, who had ever treated him with the greatest tenderness and affection, and instead thereof had taken lodging with the before-mentioned Payne, who continually

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solicited him to commit robberies and thefts. At length John Hughs, alias Hews, another young man, joined them. Though bred up carefully to the trade of a shoemaker by his father, who was of the same profession, yet for many years he had addicted himself to picking pockets and such other low kinds of theft, but had never done any great robbery until he fell into the hands of Sherwood and Weedon; with whom he readily agreed to associate himself, and to go with them out into Moorfields and such other places near Town as they thought most convenient in order to waylay and rob passengers, and at other times, when such opportunities did not offer, to break open houses, and to divide their profits equally amongst them. These designs were hardly made before they were put into execution and a very short space elapsed before they had committed many robberies and burglaries, always bringing the booty home and spending it lewdly and extravagantly in the house of that abandoned monster, Sarah Payne. It may not be amiss to take notice here how common a thing it is for such wicked old sinners as this woman was, to set up houses of resort for lewd and abandoned women of the town, who, first getting young men into their company on amorous pretences, by degrees bring them on from one wickedness to another, till at last they end their lives at the gallows, and thereby leave these wretches at liberty to bring others to the same miserable fate. These agents to the Prince of Darkness are usually women who have an artful way of flattering and a pleasing deceitfulness in their address. By this means they, without much difficulty, draw in young lads at their first giving way to the current of their lewd inclinations, and before they are aware, involve them in such expenses as necessarily lead to housebreaking or the highway for a supply. When once they have made a step of this kind, by which their lives are placed in the power of those old practitioners in every kind of wickedness, they are from thenceforward treated as slaves and forced to continue, whether they will or no, in a repeated course of the like villainies until they are arrested by the hand of Justice. Then, none so ready to become evidences against them as those abominable wretches by whom they were at first seduced. Such was the fate that befell these three unhappy young men, of whose courses information being given, they were all apprehended and committed close prisoners to Newgate, and at the next ensuing sessions not a few indictments were found against them. The first indictment they were all three arraigned upon was for felony and burglary in breaking open the house of one William Meak, in the night-time, and taking from thence twelve Gloster cheeses. But the evidence appearing clear only against Sherwood, alias Hobbs, he alone was convicted and the other two acquitted. They were then indicted a second time for breaking open the house of Daniel Elvingham, in the night-time, and taking out of it several quantities of brandy and tobacco; upon which both Sherwood and Weedon were, from very full evidence, convicted. On a third indictment for breaking into the house of Elizabeth Cogdal, and taking thence eight pewter dishes and twenty pewter plates, they were all found guilty; Sherwood and Weedon also being a fourth time convicted for a robbery on the highway, which was proved upon them by the testimony of their landlady, Sarah

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Payne. Under sentence of death they all testified great sorrow for the offences of their misspent lives. Weedon was of a better temper than the two other, retained a greater sense of the principles of religion upon which he had been brought up in his youth and exceeded his companions in seriousness and steadiness in his devotions. Sherwood had been a much longer proficient in all kinds of wickedness than the other two, having practised several kinds of thefts for nearly eighteen years together, and this had habituated him so much to sin that he showed much less penitence than either of his companions. Hughs had been a thief in a low degree for some years before he fell into the confederacy of Sherwood and Weedon, to which, as he frankly owned, he was drawn by his own previous inclination rather than the persuasions of any of his companions. As the time of their death approached they seemed much more affected than formerly they had been; in which frame of mind they continued till they suffered, which was on the 12th of February, 1728, Sherwood being in his twenty-sixth year, Hughs in the twenty-third, and Weedon in the twenty-second year of his age.

1736

That notorious witch hunter, the Reverend Cotton Mather, was the Ken Starr of Puritan New England. When he wasn’t out hunting witches he was busy predicting the end of the world, this year being his third announced End Times (his initial guess had been 1697, his second guess had been 1716). (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 338) The Witchcraft Act of King James I was replaced under King George II by a new witchcraft act under which those suspected of consorting with evil spirits were no longer to be hanged. Instead, a person who pretended to have the power to call up spirits, or to have the power to foretell the future, or to have the power to cast spells, would be fined and imprisoned as a vagrant and con artist.

William Forbes’s INSTITUTES OF THE LAW OF SCOTLAND had in 1722 termed witchcraft “that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by a power derived from the devil.” Scotland’s 1563 act on witchcraft as a sin and crime was by this point so firmly seated in the Scotch mind that when the law against witchcraft was repealed, the repeal was commonly denounced as contrary to the law of God.

1752 MILLENNIALISM

January-August: The longest epidemic of the small pox in the history of the town of Boston. There were 5,544 persons affected, 514 of whom died. It was quickly noted that among those who had deliberately induced the disease according to prevailing British custom in such as manner as hopefully to mute its severest effects, 1 in 7 had died, while of the 2,109 persons who had followed the precise advice of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s slave in having themselves previously variolated in the African manner, only 31 had died, or 1 in 68.

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1800

Here is a silhouette of that famous Quaker preacher of Pennsylvania, Friend Nicholas Waln, who opinioned famously, in opposition to the orthodox dress code, that he did not care a button for a religion that cared about buttons.

This Public Friend lived from 1742 to 1813. In addition to being a Public Friend, this man was a Philadelphia lawyer — so you can now think about all the jokes you’ve heard about Philadelphia lawyers. You can also ask yourself, whether in making this remark about religion and buttons, he may deliberately have been echoing the remark made by Metacom that the white man’s profession of Christianity was not worth so much as a button, that had so angered Cotton Mather that –eventually– the reverend would add King Phillip’s jawbone to his personal collection of human body parts (how very Christian of him).

1816

The preaching of Thomas Oxnard in Baltimore led to the organization of the Unitarian church there, at which the Reverend William Ellery Channing would deliver his famous 1819 sermon. He met every two weeks with about 20 liberal ministers in the Boston area, mostly Congregational, for discussions relating to religion, morals, and civic order. Freeman was appointed to a committee charged with considering the creation of a formal body. The work of this committee led, in 1825, to the founding the American Unitarian Association.

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Little Harriet Beecher, five years old, was fascinated with the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; ORTHEECCLEFIASTICAL HIFTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRFT PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620, UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN BOOKS. (Well, the mentality of the reverend author of this tome was approximately the mentality of a five-year-old, so there you are.)

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Meanwhile, her daddy the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who had done so much to safeguard Boston against the spiritual errors of the Unitarians, was urging that to counter the threat of Roman Catholicism there should be created a Protestant school for each district of the community, and that there should be at least one Protestant minister available for each 1,000 residents, and that –since Roman Catholicism feared the common man with his Holy Bible and his ability to read and understand it for himself– there must be a copy of the Holy Bible in each and every home. The Reverend, it is to be mentioned, was not a member of the Know-Nothing Party: he approved of their objectives but he thought of himself nevertheless as standing aloof from the “hatreds” which that political group tended to nurture and he thought of himself as standing aloof from the “violence and secrecy” of the means they tended to employ. (I think it is important for me here to emphasize this for you, because my sense of the matter is that very few of us now think of the development of 19th-Century “bible societies” as in any sense prejudicial or partial or sectarian. This was the year in which, in New-York, the American Bible Society was being founded and of course that was righteous. Of course it was. This was the year in which Noah Webster not only was helping found and write the constitution for a “charitable society,” but also was becoming a director of the New Hampshire Bible Society, and of course that was righteous. –It is relevant for you to recognize that what you are gazing at is the kindly countenance of American anti-Catholic prejudice.)

1820

Publication, by Syrus Andrus and printing by Roberts & Burr in Hartford, Connecticut of the edition of the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; ORTHEECCLEFIASTICAL HIFTORY OF NEW- ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRFT PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620, UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN BOOKS that Henry Thoreau would access in 1859 for use in CAPE COD (since Google Books has not as yet scanned this particular printing, what I have captured behind these buttons is the reprint put out by Syrus Andrus in 1853 and 1855). MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

1831

February: The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier developed the captivity narrative of Hannah Emerson Duston as recounted by the Reverend Cotton Mather and others, in his tale “The Mother’s Revenge” in his 1st book-length publication, LEGENDS OF NEW-ENGLAND IN PROSE AND VERSE. Not as convinced as the Reverend Mather had been in the previous century that the authority of ancient Jews was superior over the authority of the author of the Sermon on the Mount, this Quaker poet evaded some of the complexity of the narrative by masking the fact that six of the persons killed and scalped in that pre-dawn act of vengefulness had been children, and by masking the fact that these children before lying down to sleep that night had recited their Christian prayers.

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1834

The 2d volume, on water birds, of Professor Thomas Nuttall’s A MANUAL OF THE ORNITHOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES AND OF CANADA (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown; Boston: Hilliard, Gray). He resigned as curator of the Botanical Garden of Harvard in order to accompany the Wyeth Expedition to the Pacific coast. NUTTALL’S WATER BIRDS

Horatio Cook Meriam received his A.M. degree from Harvard College: Horatio Cook Meriam; LL.B. 1831; A.M. 1834 1872

NEW “HARVARD MEN”

James Russell Lowell matriculated at Harvard.

The Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard began the long-term task of editing a 10-volume series (Boston: Hilliard, Gray; London: Kennett) –and then a 15-volume series– of THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY.

LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. I

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1835

October: Regular as clockwork, the return of the comet which had been observed by the Reverends Increase Mather and Cotton Mather through Harvard College’s “3 foote and a halfe with a concave ey-glasse” reflecting telescope in 1682, the comet which is known as “Halley’s” to commoners and as “P/Halley” to others.

Halley has caught the attention of mankind so often because only it has long durations of visibility, and great brightness outside twilight and often at large elongations from the sun, and only brief interruptions of visibility by the sun’s glare, and occasional spectacular approaches to the earth For all this to be possible its natural adequate brightness is requisite but not sufficient (some of its comrades may have more of it); the real key is a combination, unique to it, of orbital features.

It would be during this appearance of Halley’s Comet that it would first be hypothesized that the outgassing from comets must be shoving them around, perturbing their orbital motion, and also, Newton to the contrary notwithstanding, causing them to lose mass toward their eventual disintegration.32

This time, Maria Mitchell and her father recorded the movements of this periodic comet.

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This is what Halley’s Comet looked like, the last time it passed us. We have records of the appearances of this comet on each and every one of its past 30 orbits, which is to say, we have spotty records of observations before that, in 1,404 BCE, 1,057 BCE, 466 BCE, 391 BCE, and 315 BCE, but then on the 240 BCE return the sightings record begins to be complete. The Babylonians recorded seeing it in 164 BCE and again in 87 BCE, and then it was recorded as being seen in 12 BCE, 66 CE, 141 CE, 218 CE, 295 CE, 374 CE, 451 CE, 530 CE, 607 CE, 684 CE, 760 CE (only by Chinese), 837 CE, 912 CE, 989 CE, 1066, 1145, 1222, 1301, 1378, 1456, 1531, 1607, 1682, 1758, 1835, 1910, and 1986 — and we are confidently awaiting sightings in 2061 and 2134 even though due to a close conjunction with the earth we are presently unable to calculate what orbit it will have by the date of that approach. Each time P/Halley orbits in out of the Kuiper HALLEY’S COMET belt beyond the planets Neptune and Pluto and whips EDMOND HALLEY around the sun, it has been throwing off about one 10,000ths of its mass into a streaming tail, which means that this comet which we know to have been visiting us for at the very least the past 3,000 years or so is only going to be visiting us for perhaps another half a million years or so!

This magazine illustration would undoubtedly have been somewhat exaggerated:

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1836

In this year a volume of Harvard College records was published. As you might imagine, they had to do it up in Latin: HARVARD RECORDS

A group of undergraduates had begun to publish a magazine of their own writings in September 1835 and would continue this practice until June 1838. The undergraduate David Greene Haskins would publish several articles anonymously during his Junior and Senior years, but David Henry Thoreau would take no part in such activity.33 At this point the group reissued the accumulating materials as a 2d book volume:34 HARVARDIANA, VOL. II

Harvard French and Spanish instructor Francis Sales in this year put out a revised, emended, improved, and enlarged 7th American edition of Augutin Louis Josse (1763-1841)’s A GRAMMAR OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE, WITH PRACTICAL EXERCISES (1827; Boston: Munroe and Francis, 128 Washington-Street, corner of Water-Street. 1836, 7th American Edition; Boston: Munroe and Francis, etc. 1842, 10th American Edition: Boston: James Munroe and Company). This 1836 edition would be found in Henry Thoreau’s personal library and is now, with a front free endpaper bearing the notation “D H. Thoreau,” in the special collections of the Concord Free Public Library (having been donated by Sophia E. Thoreau in 1874). GRAMMAR OF SPANISH

Since William Whiting had graduated from Harvard College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts with the Class of 1833, in this year in the normal course of events he would receive in addition the customary degree of Master of Arts.

The publication of volumes V and VI of the Reverend Professor Jared Sparks of Harvard’s THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY. LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. V LIBRARY OF AM. BIOG. VI

These volumes encompassed four contributions:

•LIFE OF JOHN ELIOT by the Reverend Convers Francis. LIFE OF JOHN ELIOT

•LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY by Henry Wheaton LIFE OF WILLIAM PINKNEY

33. In later life the Reverend Haskins, a relative of Waldo Emerson on his mother’s side, would denigrate his classmate Thoreau for having neglected to contribute to this undergraduate literary effort. He would aver that Thoreau had neither been a good scholar nor a convivial classmate — in addition, he would cast Thoreau as a mere imitator of his cousin the Sage of Concord. 104 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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•LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY by Edward T. Channing LIFE OF WILLIAM ELLERY

•LIFE OF COTTON MATHER by William B.O. Peabody LIFE OF COTTON MATHER

34. There would be three such volumes, labeled Volume I, Volume II, and Volume IV. There does not seem to have been a Volume III published in this book form (apparently it was produced only in monthly magazine form) and no electronic text as yet exists, for the Volume I that had been published. The initial editorial group for his magazine consisted of Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, Charles Stearns Wheeler, and perhaps for a time Horatio Hale, and their editorial office was a small room on what has become Holyoke Street. Thoreau had volumes II and IV in his personal library, and would give them to F.H. Bigelow. The illustration used on the cover of the magazine represented University Hall:

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1849

May 30, Wednesday: As the last Wednesday in May, this was Election Day.

James Munroe and Co. published Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with the notice in its endpapers, “Will soon be published, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. By Henry D. Thoreau.”

TIMELINE OF WALDEN The author had included comments on the captivity narrative of Hannah Emerson Duston in the “Thursday” chapter,35 recycling some material about the validity of historicizing which he had originally created while contemplating the captivity narrative of Mistress Mary Rowlandson of Lancaster after hiking past the rocky terrain on which Rowlandson had been ransomed and which he had previously incorporated into “A Walk to Wachusett”:

On beholding a picture of a New England village as it then appeared, with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, we find we had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. We do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip’s war, nor on the war-path of Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire in. They must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds.

CAPTIVITY AND RESTAURATION

Bob Pepperman Taylor has, in his monograph on the political content of Thoreau’s ideas AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY. (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996), provided a most interesting analysis of Thoreau’s accessing of the Hannah Emerson Duston story. The author starts his chapter “Founding” by offering three Waldo Emerson sound bytes by way of providing us with a typically

35. The version of the Reverend Cotton Mather, the version of Friend John Greenleaf Whittier, the Nathaniel Hawthorne version, and the Thoreau version of the Hannah Emerson Duston captivity narrative may now best be contrasted in Richard Bosman’s CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE OF HANNAH DUSTON RELATED BY COTTON MATHER, JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HENRY DAVID THOREAU, FOUR VERSIONS OF EVENTS IN 1697, INTERSPERCED WITH THIRTY-FIVE WOOD-BLOCK PRINTS BY RICHARD BOSMAN (San Francisco CA: Arion Press, 1987). Also see Arner, Robert. “The Story of Hannah Duston: Cotton Mather to Thoreau.” American Transcendental Quarterly 18 (1973):19-23. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 107 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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trivial Emersonian take on the concepts of nature and freedom: “The old is for slaves.” “Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin today.” “Build, therefore, your own world.”

Bob Pepperman Taylor points up in his monograph how tempted Emerson scholars have been, to presume that Thoreau would have shared such a perspective on nature and freedom, and offers C. Roland Wagner as a type case for those who have fallen victim to such an easy identification of the two thinkers. Here is Wagner as he presented him, at full crank: Thoreau’s uncompromising moral idealism, despite its occasional embodiment in sentences of supreme literary power, created an essentially child’s view of political and social reality. Because his moral principles were little more than expressions of his quest for purity and of hostility to any civilized interference with the absolute attainment of his wishes, he was unable to discriminate between better and worse in the real world. Taylor’s comment on this sort of writing is that if Thoreau holds an understanding of nature and freedom similar to that found in Emerson’s writings, we cannot expect a social and political commentary of any real sophistication or significance. In this event, it is easy to think that Thoreau is little more than a self-absorbed egoist. There are good reasons to believe, however, that Thoreau’s views are significantly different than Emerson’s on these matters. In fact, these differences can be dramatically illustrated by looking at Thoreau’s first book, A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. In this work Thoreau immerses himself in American colonial history, specifically investigating the relationship between Indian and European settler. Far from encouraging us to escape our past, to cut ourselves off from our social legacies and the determinative facts of our collective lives, Thoreau provides us with a tough, revealing look at the historical events and conditions and struggles that have given

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birth to contemporary American society ... what is thought of as a painfully personal and apolitical book is actually a sophisticated meditation on the realities and consequences of the American founding. In other words, Taylor is going to offer to us the idea that Emerson was not, and Thoreau was, a profound political thinker. He goes on in this chapter “Founding” to further elaborations upon the overlooked sophistication of the political analysis offered by Thoreau in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS: Thoreau begins his book with the following sentence: “The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of Concord form the first plantations on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.” Out of respect for historical chronology, Thoreau presents the Indian before the English name for the river. The river itself and, by implication, the native inhabitants are of ancient lineage, while “Concord” and the people responsible for this name are relative newcomers. In the second sentence of text, Thoreau explains that the Indian name is actually superior to the English, since it will remain descriptively accurate as long as “grass grows and water runs here,” while Concord is accurate only “while men lead peacable lives on its banks” -- something obviously much less permanent than the grass and flowing water. In fact, the third sentence indicates that “Concord” has already failed to live up to its name, since the Indians are now an “extinct race.” Thoreau wastes no time in pointing out that regardless of the “spirit of peace and harmony” that first moved the whites to establish a plantation on this river, relations between the natives and the settlers soon exhibited very little concord indeed. In these opening sentences Thoreau presents us with an indication of a primary problem motivating his trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: he hopes to probe the nature of the relationship between Indian and white societies and to consider the importance of this relationship for understanding our America. Joan Burbick, one of the few to recognize the primacy of the political theme underlying Thoreau’s voyage, writes that in this book Thoreau “tries to forge the uncivil history of America.” We know the end of the story already: one “race” annihilates the other. Part of Thoreau’s intention is to not let us forget this critical truth about our society, to remind us that our founding is as bloody and unjust as any, try as we may to put this fact out of sight and tell alternative stories about our past. As the story progresses throughout the book, however, we see that another intention is to explain the complexity and ambiguity of the historical processes that led to and beyond this bloody founding. The history Thoreau presents is “uncivil” in two senses: first, and most obviously, it is about violent, brutal, uncivil acts; second, it is not the official or common self-understanding that the nation wants to hold. Thoreau’s journey is not only aimed at personal self-discovery, despite the obvious importance of that theme for the book. On the contrary, the opening sentences and the problems they pose “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 109 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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suggest that Thoreau is first and foremost interested in a project of discovery for the nation as a whole, the success of which will depend upon looking carefully at the relationship between settler and native. The project of self-discovery is to be accomplished within the context of this larger social history. Thoreau’s personal and more private ruminations are set quite literally between ongoing discussions of events from the colonial life of New England. We are never allowed to forget for very long that our contemporary private lives are bounded by, in some crucial sense defined within, the possibilities created by this earlier drama of Indian and colonist. Duston is taken from childbed by attacking Indians, sees “her infant’s brain dashed out against an apple-tree,” and is held captive with her nurse, Mary Neff, and an English boy, Samuel Lennardson. She is told that she and her nurse will be taken to an Indian settlement where they will be forced to “run the gauntlet naked.” To avoid this fate, Duston instructs the boy to ask one of the men how to best kill an enemy and take a scalp. The man obliges, and that night Duston, Neff, and Lennardson use this information to kill all the Indians, except a “favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods” -- the victims are two men, two women, and six children. They then scuttle all the canoes except the one needed for their escape. They flee, only to return soon thereafter to scalp the dead as proof of the ordeal. They then manage to paddle the sixty or so miles to John Lovewell’s house and are rescued. The General court pays them fifty pounds as bounty for the ten scalps, and Duston is reunited with her family, all of whom, except the infant, have survived the attack. Thoreau ends the story by telling us that “there have been many who in later times have lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple tree,” the tree upon which Duston’s child was murdered. Striking as it is, many of the themes of this story are repetitive of what has come before, a powerful return to the material from the opening chapters, primarily the violence in “Monday.” Thus, Thoreau starkly conveys the grotesque violence on both sides of the conflict, and he concludes here, as he did earlier, that we are the beneficiaries, even the products, of these terrible events -- it is we, of course, who have “eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.” But this story is different too. Most obviously, it is a story in which women and children, traditional noncombatants, play a crucial role. The brutality in the Lovewell campaigns is between men who voluntarily assume the roles of warrior and soldier. The brutality in the Duston story is aimed primarily at those who are most innocent, children. And this brutality, like that among male combatants, is not confined to one side. The Indians murder Duston’s infant, but she, in turn, methodically kills six children and attempts to kill the seventh (the “favorite boy” was a favorite within his family, not to Duston). In addition, this murder of children is conducted not only by men but by women and children as well. The violence and hostility between Indian and settler have reached a point at which all traditional restraints have vanished, where the weakest are fair game and all members of the community are combatants. Here, not in the Revolution, is the climax of the American founding. In this climax all colonists

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and Indians, even women and children, are implicated, and the entire family of Indians, not just the male warriors, is systematically killed off. This frenzy of violence, of escalating atrocity and counteratrocity, of total war, is the natural culmination of the processes Thoreau has been describing throughout the book. The Duston story represents the victory of the colonists and the final destruction of the Indians. Thoreau is returning down the river to his own home, as Duston had to hers 142 years earlier. His investigation into the nature of the American founding, his “uncivil history,” is mainly complete. Consider Thoreau’s use of the Hannah Emerson Duston story as the climax of a historical process set in motion by the collision of incompatible societies. He is appalled by the events, but he also understands that they are the culmination of huge political conflicts that are greater than the individual players. Bob Pepperman Taylor goes on in this chapter “Founding” about the political content of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS to consider each drama of Indian and colonist recounted there by Thoreau, culminating in the last and perhaps most powerful of these major tales, that of the Hannah Emerson Duston odyssey in “Thursday”: It is instructive to contrast this analysis with Cotton Mather’s simple praise of Duston as a colonial heroine and with Hawthorne’s shrieking condemnation of her when he calls her “this awful woman,” “a raging tigress,” and “a bloody old hag” on account of her victims being primarily children. Thoreau’s analysis is considerably more shrewd than either Mather’s or Hawthorne’s, and Thoreau resists the temptation of either of these simpler and much less satisfactory moral responses. Thoreau’s conclusion about our political interconnectedness is built upon a hard-boiled and realistic political analysis combined with a notable moral subtlety. As we have seen, Thoreau believes that the forms of life represented by Indian and colonist are simply and irrevocably incompatible; the structure of each requires a mode of production and a social organization that makes it impossible to accommodate the other. This argument is compelling ... the Hannah Emerson Duston story in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS represented for Thoreau the final destruction of the Indians at the hands of the white settlers.

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Joan Burbick, one of the few to recognize the primacy of the political theme underlying Thoreau’s story of a riverine quest, points up the fact that in his A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS Thoreau was attempting to “forge the uncivil history of America.” Here is our narrative as it is supposed to get itself narrated, within a basic-rate Western Union telegraph message of eleven words: 1 One 2 race 3 must 4 snuff 5 the 6 others 7 White 8 to 9 play 10 and 11 win Thoreau is not going to allow his readers to indulge in any foundation myth that can serve as a legitimation scenario, but instead he is going to remind us that our founding as been quite as vicious, quite as bloody as any other.

When the Reverend George Ripley would review A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, he would profess to be disturbed at what he took to be Thoreau’s irreverent stance:36

...he asserts that he considers the Sacred Books of the Brahmins in nothing inferior to the Christian Bible ... calculated to shock and pain many readers, not to speak of those who will be utterly repelled by them.

Thoreau inscribed a copy of his book for the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, writing on the front free endpaper: “Rev O.A. Brownson with the Regards of the author.” This copy is now in the rare book collection of the University of Detroit and it is to be noted that after page 272 the text is unopened. Brownson had not read past that point:

36. In 1853 or 1854, in the creation of Draft F of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Henry Thoreau would tack in what would be in effect a response to the Reverend George Ripley’s reaction to A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

I do not say that the Reverend Ripley will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

(Well, OK, what he would insert would not be so specific as this, actually he would distance the remark through the deployment of cartoon characters: instead of “the Reverend Ripley” he wrote “John or Jonathan.”) 112 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

February 3, Sunday: The Reverend Convers Francis preached in Concord. His prooftext for the morning service was Psalms 38:21 and his topic was “God as Distant and as Near.” His prooftext for the afternoon service was Proverbs 16:4 and his topic was “The Wicked for the Day of Evil.” (A prolonged illness in late 1855 and early 1856 had sent the Reverend Barzillai Frost off to the West Indies to recuperate, and Attorney General Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, on behalf of the parish, had offered to the Reverend Francis that he might fill this pulpit in the absence of its incumbent at “the usual country price of $15 a Sabbath.”)

HENRY OFTEN MENTIONS THE GREAT SNOW

Feb. 3. Analyzed the crow blackbird's nest from which I took an egg last summer, eight or ten feet up a white maple hY river, opposite Island. Large, of an irregular form, appearing as if wedged in between a twig and two huge contiguous trunks. From outside to ut1t>Si(1e it measures from six to eight inches; inside, foul; depth, two, height, six. The fomeda.tion is a loose mass of coarse strips of grape-vine bark chiefly, some eighteen inches long by five eighths of an inch wide; also slender grass and weed stems, mikania stems, a few cellular river weeds, as rushes, sparganium, pipe-grass, and some soft, coarse, fibrous roots. The same coarse grape-vine bark and grass and weed stems, together with some harder, wiry stems, form the sides and rim, the bark being passed around the twig. The nest is lined with the finer grass and weed stems, etc. The solid part. of the nest is of half-decayed vegetable matter and mud, full of fine fibrous roots and wound internally with grass stems, etc., and some grape bark, being an inch and a half thick at bottom. Pulled apart and lying loose, it makes a great mass of material. This, life similar nests, is now a great haunt for spiders.

P.M. — Up North Branch. A strong northwest wind (and thermometer 11 0), driving the surface snow like steam. About five inches of soft snow now on ice. See many seeds of the hemlock on the snow still, and cones which have freshly rolled down the bank. Tracked some mice to a black willow by riverside,.just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker's hole, was probably the mouse-nest, a double handful, consisting, four ninths, of fine shreds of inner bark, perhaps willow or maple; three ninths, the greenish moss, apparently, of button-bush; two ninths, the gray-slate fur, apparently, of rabbits or mice. Half a dozen hog's bristles might have been brought. by some bird to its nest there. These made a very warm and soft nest. Got some kind of vireo's nest from a maple far up the stream, a dozen feet high, pensile; within, almost wholly rather coarse grape-vine shreds; without, the same and bark, covered with the delicate white spider-nests (?}, birch-bark shreds, and brown cocoon sill:. 114 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Returning, saw near the Island a shrike glide by, cold and blustering as it was, with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion like a hawk, eight or ten feet above the ground, and alight in a tree, from which at the same instant a small bird, perhaps a creeper or nuthatch, flitted timidly away. The shrike was apparently in pursuit. We go wading through snows now up the bleak river, in the face of the cutting northwest wind and driving snow- steam, turning now this car, then that, to the wind, and our gloved hands in our bosoms or pockets. Our tracks are obliterated before we come back. How different this from sailing or paddling up the stream here in July, or poling amid the rocks! Yet still, in one square rod, where they have got out ice and a thin transparent ice has formed, I can see the pebbly bottom the same as in summer. It is a cold and windy Sunday. The wind whistles round the northwest corner of the house and penetrates every crevice and consumes the wood in the stoves,- soon blows it all away. An armful goes but little way. Such a clay makes a, great hole in the wood-pile. [It] whisks round the corner of the house, in at a crevice, and flirts off with all the heat before we have begun to feel it. Sonic of the low drifts but a few inches deep, made by the surface snow blowing, over the river especially, are of a fine, pure snow, so densely packed that our feet make hardly any impression on them. River still tight at Merrick's. There comes a deep snow in midwinter, covering up the ordinary food of many birds and quadrupeds, but anon a high wind scatters the seeds of pines and hemlocks and birch and alder, etc., far and wide over the surface of the snow for them. 1'ou may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps. Mr Emerson who returned last week from lecturing on the Mississippi— having been gone but a month— tells me that he saw boys skating on the Mississippi— & on Lake Erie— & on the Hudson— & has no doubt they SKATING are skating on Lake Superior— & prob— at Boston he saw them skating on the Atlantic. Tic inside of the gray squirrel, or leaf, nests is of leaves chewed or broken up finely. I sec where one, by the snow lodging on it, has helped weigh down a birch. BARBER In Barber’s His’t Coll — p 476 there is a letter by Cotton Mather dated “Boston, 10th Dec. 1717.” describing the great snow of the previous February. from which I quote— “On the twentieth of the last February there came on a snow, which being added unto what had covered the ground a few days before, made a thicker mantle for our mother than what was usual: And the storm with it was, for the following day, so violent as to make all communication between the neighbors every where to cease. People, for some hours, could not pass from one side of a street unto another,”— — — — — — “On the 24th day of the month, comes Pelion upon Ossa: Another snow came on which almost buried the memory of the former, with a storm so famous that Heaven laid an interdict on the religious assemblies throughout the country, on this Lord’s day, the like whereunto had never bee seen before. The Indians near an hundred years old affirm that their fathers never told them of any thing that equalled it. Vast numbers of cattle were destroyed in this calamity. Whereof some there were, of the stranger [stronger? mine] sort, were found standing dead on their legs, as if they had been alive many weeks after, when the snow melted away. And others had their eyes glazed over with ice at such a rate, that being not far from the sea, their mistake of their way drowned them there. One gentleman, on Whose farms were now lost above 1100 sheep, which with other cattle, were interred (shall I say) or inmired, in the snow, writes me word that there were two sheep very singularly circumstanced. For no less than 8 & 20 days after the storm, the people pulling out the ruins of above an 100 sheep out of a snow bank which lay 16 foot high, drifted over them, there was 2 found alive, which had been there all this time, & kept themselves alive by eating the wool of their dead companions. When they were taken out they shed their own fleeces, but soon got into good care again.” — — “A man had a couple of young hogs, which he gave over for dead, but on the 27th day after their burial, they made their way out of a snow-bank, at the bottom of which they had found a little tansy to feed upon.”— — “Hens were found alive after 7 days; Turkeys were found alive after 5 & 20 days, buried in the snow, & at a distance from the ground, & altogether destitute of anything to feed them.”— — — “The wild creatures of the woods, the out- going of the evening, made their descent as well as they could in this time of scarcity for them towards the sea- side. A vast multitude of deer, for the same cause, taking the same course, & the deep snow spoiling them of their only defence, which is to run, they became such a prey to these devourers, that it is thought not one in 20 escaped.” — — — “It is incredible how much damage is done to the orchards, for the snow freezing to a crust, as high as the bows of the trees, anon split them to pieces. The cattle also, walking on the crusted snow a dozen foot from the ground, so fed upon the trees as very much to damnify them.”— “Cottages were totally covered with the snow, & not the very tops of their chimneys to be seen”— These “odd accidents” he says “would afford a story. But there not being any relation to Philosophy in them, I forbear them.” He little thought that his simple testimony to such facts as the above — could be worth all the philosophy he might dream of.

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1859

Henry Thoreau derived quotations for CAPE COD from the Reverend Richard Hakluyt’s THE PRINCIPALL NAVIGATIONS, RICHARD HAKLUYT’S, I RICHARD HAKLUYT’S, II RICHARD HAKLUYT’S, III RICHARD HAKLUYT’S, IV RICHARD HAKLUYT’S, V

Ramusio’s NAVIGATIONI ET VIAGGI, Penhallow’s HISTORY OF THE WARS ... WITH THE EASTERN INDIANS, the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA, MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

and Pliny the Elder’s NATURAL HISTORY. NATURAL HISTORY, I NATURAL HISTORY, II NATURAL HISTORY, III NATURAL HISTORY, IV NATURAL HISTORY, V NATURAL HISTORY, VI

In response to an appeal for support, he contributed $5.00 to a Harvard Library fund. This cash, like the widow’s mite, exceeded his “income from all sources together for the last four months.”37

Thoreau became a member of the Harvard Visiting Committee in Natural History, a committee including six physicians including such notables as Dr. Samuel Cabot, Theodore Lyman III, James Elliot Cabot, and Dr. Augustus Addison Gould. This committee was charged to annually evaluate the science curriculum of the college.38

37. Kenneth Walter Cameron, THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND MINERVA, II:488. 38. REPORTS OF THE OVERSEERS, Volume I, 1859-1864, Academical Series I, in the Harvard Archives. 116 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who GRAHAM has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of JOHN SMITH Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

REVEREND COTTON MATHER

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August 15, Monday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend Cotton Mather’s MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA; OR THE ECCLEFIASTICAL HIFTORY OF NEW-ENGLAND, FROM ITS FIRST PLANTING IN THE YEAR 1620. UNTO THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1698. IN SEVEN BOOKS (the initial American edition, published by Silas Andrews and printed by Roberts & Burr in Hartford, Connecticut)39 MATHER’S MAGNALIA, I MATHER’S MAGNALIA, II

Thoreau also checked out the volume of the three volumes of Pierre-Louis-Georges Du Buat’s PRINCIPES D’HYDRAULIQUE ET DE PYRODYNAMIQUE VÉRIFIÉS PAR UN GRAND NOMBRE D’EXPÉRIENCES (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1816) that dealt mathematically with the analysis of fluid flow.

DU BUAT, ANALYSIS

39. He would copy extracts into his Indian Notebook #12 and utilize some of the material in CAPE COD. 118 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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CAPE COD: The Harbor of Provincetown —which, as well as the greater part of the Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch— is deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms which prevail on the American coast generally come from the east; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.” J.D. Graham, who GRAHAM has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast.” It is the harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of JOHN SMITH Milford Haven, and Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles, changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said, Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

REVEREND COTTON MATHER

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1861

June 1: Several centuries beyond Hannah Emerson Duston’s bloody act of 17th-Century race vengeance, the 1st monument in the United States commemorating the fame of a woman, a 25-foot obelisk, was erected, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Guess who!40

At some point during this month J.D. Mills would demonstrate to President Abraham Lincoln a Union Repeating Gun that someone, perhaps Edward Nugent or William Palmer, had developed. This device was mounted on wheels and had a tray of cartridges that, as the operator turned a crank, dropped into the rotating cylinder. Lincoln would in a few months on his own authority place an order for 10 such “coffee-mills” at $1,300 each.

40. At some point during this decade the 25-foot granite monolith which the town of Haverhill had erected upon its common in honor of its fave local ax murderer, Hannah Emerson Duston, would be repossessed by the stonecarvers and cut up into individual tombstones for resale, when subscribers got behind in their payments. New England literati wrestled over Duston’s grisly tale for centuries. Cotton Mather lauded her courageous stand against Catholic (French) inspired “idolators” and saw her deliverance as evidence of God’s mercy. Henry Thoreau, floating down the same Merrimack by which Duston had fled, thought her exploits worthier of the Dark Ages than an enlightened modern era. Haverhill native John Greenleaf Whittier cast her as an avenging angel acting in a fury of passion. And intent as always on revealing a stain in the Puritan soul, Nathaniel Hawthorne dourly offered in THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE, “Would that the bloody old hag had been drowned in crossing Contocook river.”

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1910

April 20-21: Regular as clockwork, the 3d whip around the sun as had been predicted by Edmond Halley in 1704 of the comet which had been observed by the Reverends Increase Mather and Cotton Mather through Harvard College’s “3 foote and a halfe with a concave ey-glasse” reflecting telescope in 1682, the comet which is known as “P/Halley” to the initiated and as “Halley’s Comet” to the unwashed. It would be during this appearance that it would be possible to calculate in advance the date of its perihelion (the point at which it would come closest to the sun, some 55,000,000 miles, which is not really all that much on target) within a margin of error of three days. It was announced in the popular press that this time the million- kilometer tail of the comet would sweep across Earth’s orbit, and a “comet pill” was marketed as an antidote for the comet’s poisonous gasses.41

Halley’s Comet is sometimes called “the comet of all lifetimes,” or “mankind’s comet,” because the length of its orbit brings it within sight of the earth about every seventy-five years — the approximate length of one human lifetime. Most people who live to adulthood have the opportunity to view it.

ASTRONOMY Samuel Langhorn Clemens, who had been born in Missouri while the comet was departing in 1835, died on this day during this next passage of the comet. The biologist Sewall Wright witnessed this visit of this comet while working on the railroads in South Dakota, and would endure to mark its disappointing performance upon its well-anticipated next visit in 1985-1986.

On its trip back out into the cold dark the comet would come within 0.15 astronomical units of the earth, and in all probability the earth did pass through its 120-degree tail of gas and dust.

41. This pill would prove to be quite effective, so effective in fact that it would work even for those who neglected to procure it. 122 Copyright 2011 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This is what Halley’s Comet looked like, the last time it passed us. We have records of the appearances of this comet on each and every one of its past 30 orbits, which is to say, we have spotty records of observations before that, in 1,404 BCE, 1,057 BCE, 466 BCE, 391 BCE, and 315 BCE, but then on the 240 BCE return the sightings record begins to be complete. The Babylonians recorded seeing it in 164 BCE and again in 87 BCE, and then it was recorded as being seen in 12 BCE, 66 CE, 141 CE, 218 CE, 295 CE, 374 CE, 451 CE, 530 CE, 607 CE, 684 CE, 760 CE (only by Chinese), 837 CE, 912 CE, 989 CE, 1066, 1145, 1222, 1301, 1378, 1456, 1531, 1607, 1682, 1758, 1835, 1910, and 1986 — and we are confidently awaiting sightings in 2061 and 2134 even though due to a close conjunction with the earth we are presently unable to calculate what orbit it will have by the date of that approach. Each time P/Halley orbits in out of the Kuiper HALLEY’S COMET belt beyond the planets Neptune and Pluto and whips EDMOND HALLEY around the sun, it has been throwing off about one 10,000ths of its mass into a streaming tail, which means that this comet which we know to have been visiting us for at the very least the past 3,000 years or so is only going to be visiting us for perhaps another half a million years or so!

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1977

West, Michael. “Scatology and Eschatology: The Heroic Dimensions of Thoreau’s Wordplay.” PMLA 89 (1977): 1043-64 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

West delves into the importance of Thoreau’s “dirty jokes” in WALDEN and sees an understanding of them to be essential in the understanding of the book. In his using puns, Henry David Thoreau is following an American tradition that stretches from his own period to Puritans like the Reverends Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather. Thoreau’s puns often center around bodily functions, and West argues convincingly that this reveals Thoreau’s deep ambivalence about the body and its functions. He recognizes the body’s need to cleanse itself but is frightened because it will never totally to do so. This ambivalence expands to situations in nature and society that resemble the purging of the body as in WALDEN when he notes the mud flowing from the railroad cut and when he looks at people’s home as places of contamination. West acknowledges that other critics have attributed Thoreau’s obsession with the excremental to his misogyny or latent homosexuality, but he presents another reason. Thoreau, with good cause since his family had a history of tuberculosis, feared consumption, the disease that does eventually kill him, and the popular medicine of the time linked the bowels and proper excrementory functioning to the health of the lungs. Thoreau’s jokes about scatological subjects are serious business. He is laughing bravely at death.

1985

Regular as clockwork, the 4th return as had been predicted by Edmond Halley in 1704 of the comet which had been observed by the Reverends Increase Mather and Cotton Mather through Harvard College’s “3 foote and a halfe with a concave ey-glasse” reflecting telescope in 1682, the comet which is known as “Halley’s” to commoners and as “P/Halley” to others. It would be during this appearance of Halley’s Comet that it would attract visitors: it would be met by two Vega and one Giotto spacecraft, from the USSR and from Europe, which would pass near its head and take many photographs. ASTRONOMY

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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

West traces Thoreau’s interest in etymology and language to a deep interest in the subject in America in the early 1800s. He finds Thoreau’s attitude toward the body and toward excrement ambivalent: Henry David Thoreau found all excremental functions necessary and good in purifying the body but at the same time found the excrement and functions highly unclean. West says, Thoreau “was naturally bothered, like the Hindu, by the problem of contamination. How to preserve an immanent divinity from pollution is a recurring preoccupation in WALDEN and the journals.” West continues by analyzing Thoreau’s attitude toward sexuality. Not surprisingly he finds Thoreau’s near asexuality to be influenced by a feeling that all sexuality is dirty. “Largely because of some oddly sentimental verses to Ellen Devereux Sewall’s brother, Thoreau’s misogyny has often been interpreted as latent homosexuality. But it may stem more simply from the feeling that whereas all sexuality is dirty, female biology renders woman intrinsically more unclean than man, and apparently sicklier and less independent to boot.” In that statement lie as many clues about the author of this article as about Henry Thoreau. Here, West assumes Thoreau was misogynous, dismisses his fascination with Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., and make female biology dirtier than male. Such are the dangers of psychological analysis. West’s most valuable analysis is of Thoreau’s scatological wordplay. He relates Thoreau’s fascination with cleanliness to his fear of consumption and his asceticism to his attempt to ward off the illness that would eventually kill him. Thoreau enthusiastically supported the 19th-Century campaign for an American native style and national literature. The mid-19th Century was a time of much philosophic speculation about language, one result being a renewed interest in this country in the gentlemanly English cult of the pun as it had been revitalized by the English Romantics. This interest in puns and other types of wordplay “was also stimulated by the thriving native tradition of vernacular humor, with its stylistic habit of isolating and intensifying individual words.” Wordplay, at least for Thoreau, was also a way to free American language from its English roots. Thoreau indulges freely in his love of wordplay in WALDEN to the point that he questions if there isn’t something wrong with so much “playing with words, — getting the laugh.” At the same time, he feels that “most words in the English language do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors,” so that even as he uses humor to open up his text, to attract a popular audience, he also uses it to close his text, to create what at times amounts almost to a private language. West spends most of the article analyzing the scatological wordplay and dirty jokes in WALDEN, most of which reflect Thoreau’s powerful ambivalence toward the human body. West brings to the surface the underlying images of excrement, pollution, contamination, uncleanliness, and disease that lace Thoreau’s text. West argues that “Thoreau’s excremental wordplay is neither primarily evasive nor primarily subversive. It is in the radical sense elusive.”

(Lane Stiles, Winter 1992)

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This is what Halley’s Comet looked like, the last time it passed us. We have records of the appearances of this comet on each and every one of its past 30 orbits, which is to say, we have spotty records of observations before that, in 1,404 BCE, 1,057 BCE, 466 BCE, 391 BCE, and 315 BCE, but then on the 240 BCE return the sightings record begins to be complete. The Babylonians recorded seeing it in 164 BCE and again in 87 BCE, and then it was recorded as being seen in 12 BCE, 66 CE, 141 CE, 218 CE, 295 CE, 374 CE, 451 CE, 530 CE, 607 CE, 684 CE, 760 CE (only by Chinese), 837 CE, 912 CE, 989 CE, 1066, 1145, 1222, 1301, 1378, 1456, 1531, 1607, 1682, 1758, 1835, 1910, and 1986 — and we are confidently awaiting sightings in 2061 and 2134 even though due to a close conjunction with the earth we are presently unable to calculate what orbit it will have by the date of that approach. Each time P/Halley orbits in out of the Kuiper HALLEY’S COMET belt beyond the planets Neptune and Pluto and whips EDMOND HALLEY around the sun, it has been throwing off about one 10,000ths of its mass into a streaming tail, which means that this comet which we know to have been visiting us for at the very least the past 3,000 years or so is only going to be visiting us for perhaps another half a million years or so!

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2011. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 28, 2013

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

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