THE REVEREND EZRA STILES1
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
1. The Reverend Ezra Stiles in a circa-1812 copy of a 1794 painting by Reuben Moulthrop, in the Redwood Library Painting Collection in Newport, Rhode Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1727
November 29, Wednesday (Old Style): Ezra Stiles was born in North Haven, Connecticut, the son of a Congregational minister there.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
President Ezra Stiles “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1746
Ezra Stiles graduated from Yale College. (While at Yale, Stiles had become involved in electrical experiments after a parlor apparatus was sent there, by Benjamin Franklin.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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His bachelor’s sheepskin is still on deposit at Yale Library: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1749
Ezra Stiles was licensed to preach and became a tutor at Yale College.
Gideon Hawley graduated from Yale.
When the Reverend Elihu Spencer, a 1746 graduate of Yale, attempted to establish a mission to the Six Nations at the town of Oquaga on the Susquehanna River near what is now Windsor, New York, his missionary attempt failed.
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project President Ezra Stiles HDT WHAT? INDEX
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LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project President Ezra Stiles HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1753
The Reverend Ezra Stiles was admitted to the bar in the state of Connecticut.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project President Ezra Stiles HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1755
October 22, Wednesday: Ezra Stiles was called to Newport, Rhode Island and on this day ordained as the pastor of the Second Congregational Church.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project President Ezra Stiles HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1756
The Reverend Ezra Stiles became librarian of the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island.
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
President Ezra Stiles “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1758
In about this year the Reverend Ezra Stiles prepared a map of Newport, Rhode Island which is now at the Redwood Library.
This map indicates that there were substantial buildings on Farewell Street, Marlborough Street, and Tanner Street surrounding the Friends’ meetinghouse. A sampling of the accounts of the Proprietors of Easton’s Point indicates that the Quakers were benefitting from making the grounds available for use. GREAT MEETINGHOUSE
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
President Ezra Stiles “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1763
July: The Reverend James Manning arrived in Newport, Rhode Island with a plan for a “liberal and catholic”
A Man with a Plan institution of higher education: the College of Rhode Island. Rhode Island’s leading citizens had previously heard a similar plan presented by the Congregationalist Reverend Ezra Stiles. He, assisted by the attorney
William Ellery, Jr., drew up a charter based on the Reverend Manning’s draft and this was presented to the General Assembly. This charter’s “catholic” plan was to divide the Corporation’s power about equally among Baptists (who would make up a majority of the Trustees) and Presbyterians, while allowing a few seats to Quakers and Anglicans (no actual Roman Catholics or Jews or, Heaven forbid, Moslems or Buddhists or Hindus need apply). (Long afterward, this would be regarded as the genesis of Brown University.)
Interestingly, although no provision whatever was being made for any Jewish involvement in higher education, it was at the Jacob Rivera mansion on the Parade in Newport, then being used as the residence of Deputy Governor John Gardiner, that the meeting was held in which the plan was announced to interested citizens. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December 2, Friday, Chanukah: Dedication of the 1st synagogue in New England, the Touro Synagogue of congregation K.K. Yeshuat Israel, the Holy Congregation of the Salvation of Israel, in Newport, Rhode Island (this congregation had actually been in existence on Aquidneck Island since 1658).2
The Reverend Ezra Stiles noticed that the only furniture in the place was the wainscoting, but that this was adequate seating since there were only about eighty in the congregation. Presumably by “wainscoting” the Congregational reverend was referring to the wooden bench structures built into the walls.
(Some of the Jews of this synagogue, like some of their Christian neighbors such as the Quakers, next door up the hill, engaged in the international slave trade. In general, in Rhode Island harbors as a whole during this year, it has been estimated by Alexander Boyd Hawes, some 17-20 vessels were being fitted out for the coast of Africa. For instance, Captain Ferguson arrived on that coast some time before September. If an average cargo of slaves was 109 –as we have estimated on the basis of a number of known cargos– then a total of more than 1,850 souls were transported during this year in Rhode Island bottoms alone. Examples from this year include the Rhode Island snow Adventure carrying a cargo of 150 slaves, the brig Diamond carrying a cargo
2. It would not, until a much later timeframe, be referred to as the Touro Synagogue. After their synagogue building, in what had become the bad part of town, had been deconsecrated, the dilapidated empty structure, under a caretaker who was a Quaker, would perhaps find use occasionally, surreptitiously, as free temporary accommodations for escaping slaves as a station on the Underground Railroad (the word “perhaps” is used because no evidence whatever has ever been produced and, most likely, this has been pious wishful thinking). The edifice would be designated a national historical site in 1946. —When you visit, and are proudly shown the must-see secret hiding hole underneath the lectern, try to be discrete and polite and do not complicate matters (Boo!) by inquiring about participation in the international slave trade. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of 120, the schooner Kitty carrying 70, the schooner Little Sally carrying 60, the sloop Salisbury carrying 90, the sloop Three Friends carrying 78, the sloop Wydah carrying 60, a schooner of unknown name carrying 120, a schooner of unknown name carrying 72, a schooner of unknown name carrying 90, and a schooner of unknown name carrying 90.)
Isaac Touro (“de Toro”) was officiating as Cantor.
He would be the first rabbi. It had been he, presumably, who had provided, from memory, the design of the Portuguese Sephardic Synagogue of Amsterdam. The structure had been faced so that the congregation as it turned toward the Aron Kodesh would be turning toward Mizrah. The main floor was for men and the gallery for women. JUDAISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1771
November 17, Sunday: The Reverend Ezra Stiles estimated in his journal that “The town of Providence is 500 dwelling-houses and about 4000 inhabitants, or half as big as Newport.” RHODE ISLAND
The Reverend Stiles, by Samuel King: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1772
King George III appointed Benjamin West as historical painter to the monarch, with an annual allowance of 1,000 pounds.
When Paul Revere went to create an image of King Phillip in this year for use in Ezra Stiles’s edition of Benjamin Church’s ENTERTAINING HISTORY, he displayed no more originality than was usual for him. It is likely that he created this depiction of a man who had died in the previous century well before he was born on the basis of a series of mezzotints that had been published in London in 1710 which purported to depict not this Wampanoag leader but instead a couple of his Mohawk enemies, named Ho Nee Yeath and Sa Ga Yeath (and also, a group of Ohio natives that Benjamin West had painted in 1764). We note that neither of Metacom’s hands appear crippled in this famous Revere engraving, when the one salient fact that we have about his appearance is that a hand had been maimed, evidently when a pistol he was firing split in his gun hand (not knowing whether he was right-handed or left-handed, and the records not telling us which hand was in HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Alderman’s bucket of rum, we don’t know which hand Phillip had maimed).
This crude and derivative engraving would subsequently be used by New England whites to demonstrate that the sachem Metacom had indeed been in his person quite as hideous and malformed and dwarfish as his white enemies in his generation had been pleased to suppose.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
President Ezra Stiles “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 25, Tuesday: The Reverend Ezra Stiles estimated in his journal that “The town of Providence is now, 1772, about 400 houses, 500 families. I estimate 100 families real Baptists; 140 political Baptists and nothingarians; 140 Mr. Snow’s Congregation, 2/3 Baptists, 1/3 Presbyterians; 60 Pedobaptist Congregationalists; 40 Episcopalians; 20 families Quakers, a few Sandemanians, and perhaps 20 or 40 persons Deists.” RHODE ISLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1773
February 5, Friday: In Providence, Rhode Island, Anna Brown, wife of Moses Brown, who had collapsed some five months earlier, died.
In Newport, Captain Pollipus Hammond died shortly before midnight. This 72-year-old’s eyes were closed by his friend, the Reverend Ezra Stiles. The gravestone of this negrero skipper still stands for our edification in the Common Burying Ground:
“Here lieth the body of the ingenious Capt. Pollipus Hammond who died February 5, 1773. The hoary head is a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteousness.”
(His friend the Reverend Stiles, pastor of the 2d Congregational Church on Clarke Street in Newport, had invested in a slave trading voyage in 1756 that had returned him a 10-year-old boy. The Reverend would not free his slave until becoming president of Yale College in 1777. Noting that Hammond had disengaged himself from the international slave trade during his mid-50s, this slaveholding Reverend reassured himself with the conceit that had his dead friend “his Life to live over again, he would not choose to spend it in buying and selling the human species.”) THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY
8th day of 4th month: During this year the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of the 1st Congregational Church in Newport and President Ezra Stiles of Yale College were urging that freed Africans be resettled in West Africa. The Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends issued a query: Are friends clear of Importing, Buying or any way purchasing HDT WHAT? INDEX
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disposing or holding of Mankind as Slaves, And are all those who have been held in a State of Slavery discharged therefrom. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE SLAVERY EMANCIPATION HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1774
May 4, Wednesday: The good news was out, in Rhode Island, that the brothers Moses Brown and Joseph Brown were back from Massachusetts, and that somehow they had managed to bring the captured leading citizen John Brown home with them. The Reverend Ezra Stiles registered the news in his diary as “A humbling stroke for the Tories!” THE BROWN BROTHERS
(Subsequent to these events, 16-year-old Elkanah Watson would become apprenticed to John Brown.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1776
March: Fearful that the guns of the British warships anchored off Newport were aiming in directly at his Second Congregational Church, the Reverend Ezra Stiles went to reside in Dighton. While tending congregations in Taunton and in Providence, Rhode Island he would periodically travel back to Newport for a sermon. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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May 4, Monday: The Rhode Island General Assembly made it the first of the English colonies in America to renounce allegiance to King George III of England. In December the British navy would occupy Newport and all of Aquidneck Island, where they would remain until they would voluntarily shift their base of operations toward the south in October 1779.3
3. In Algonquian, “Aquidnet” means “a place of security or tranquility,” from “aquene” or “aquidne” meaning secure or peaceful, and “et” meaning place. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Fearful that the guns of the warships anchored nearby had been aiming in directly at his Second Congregational Church, the Reverend Ezra Stiles had in March gone to live in Dighton. Aquidneck never would recover its commercial prosperity after this occupation, as too many of the state’s commercial operatives had already shifted their headquarters to Providence. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 12, 1776 North Carolina Instructions April 22, 1776 Cumberland County, Virginia Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly April 23, 1776 Charleston, South Carolina, Judge Drayton’s charge to the Grand Jury April 23, 1776 Charlotte County, Virginia Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly April 24, 1776 James City County, Virginia Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly May 4, 1776 Rhode Island Act repealing another securing allegiance May 6, 1776 Georgetown, South Carolina presentment to the Grand Jury May 13?, 1776 Buckingham County, Virginia Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly May 13?, 1776 Declaration of Chelmsford, Massachusetts May 15, 1776 Virginia Instructions May 20, 1776 Cheraws District, South Carolina presentment to the Grand Jury May 20, 1776 Declaration of Plymouth, Massachusetts May 20, 1776 Declaration of Watertown, Massachusetts May 20, 1776 Declaration of Brookline, Massachusetts May 21, 1776 Declaration of Lynn, Massachusetts May 22, 1776 Declaration of Rowley, Massachusetts May 23, 1776 Declaration of Plympton, Massachusetts May 23, 1776 Declaration of Billerica, Massachusetts May 23, 1776 Declaration of Boston, Massachusetts May 27, 1776 Declaration of Dedham, Massachusetts May 27, 1776 Declaration of Malden, Massachusetts May 29, 1776 Declaration of the New-York Mechanics in Union May 31, 1776 Declaration of Brunswick, Massachusetts May 31, 1776 Declaration of Newburyport, Massachusetts May 31, 1776 Declaration of Newbury, Massachusetts (undated) 1776 Declaration of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (undated) 1776 Declaration of Pittsfield, Massachusetts June 3, 1776 Declaration of Taunton, Massachusetts June 4, 1776 Declaration of Scituate, Massachusetts June 5, 1776 Declaration of Wrentham, Massachusetts June 6, 1776 Declaration of Hanover, Massachusetts June 7, 1776 Declaration of Tyringham, Massachusetts June 7, 1776 Declaration of Alford, Massachusetts June 7, 1776 Declaration of Norwich, Massachusetts June 8, 1776 Pennsylvania Instructions to Assembly June 10, 1776 Declaration of Ipswich, Massachusetts HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 10, 1776 Declaration of the Associators, 1st Battalion (militia) of Chester County PA June 10, 1776 Declaration of the Associators of Colonel Crawford’s Battalion, Lancaster County PA (undated) 1776 Declaration of the Associators, Elk Battalion Militia of Chester County, Pennsylvania June 10?, 1776 Declaration of Associators, 4th Battalion (militia), City and Liberties of Philadelphia June 10?, 1776 Declaration of Associators, 5th Battalion (militia), City and Liberties of Philadelphia June 12, 1776 Declaration of Salem, Massachusetts June 12, 1776 Declaration of Andover, Massachusetts June 13, 1776 Declaration of Beverly, Massachusetts June 13, 1776 Declaration of Amherst, Massachusetts June 14, 1776 Connecticut Instructions June 14, 1776 Declaration of Acton, Massachusetts June 14, 1776 Declaration of Hubbardston, Massachusetts June 14, 21, 1776 Declaration of Topsfield, Massachusetts June 15, 1776 New Hampshire Instructions June 15, 1776 Delaware Instructions June 17, 1776 Declaration of Palmer, Massachusetts June 17, 1776 Declaration of Bedford, Massachusetts June 17, 1776 Declaration of Murraysfield, Massachusetts June 17, 1776 Declaration of Marblehead, Massachusetts June 17, 1776 Declaration of Boxford, Massachusetts June 17, 1776 Frederick County, Maryland Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly June 18, 1776 Declaration of Weston, Massachusetts June 18, 1776 Declaration of Leverett, Massachusetts June 18, 1776 Declaration of Danvers, Massachusetts June 19, 1776 Declaration of Gageborough, Massachusetts June 20, 1776 Declaration of Natick, Massachusetts June 20, 1776 Declaration of Bradford, Massachusetts June 21, 1776 Declaration of Southampton, Massachusetts June 22, 1776 New Jersey Instructions June 22, 1776 Anne Arundel County, Maryland Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly (undated) 1776 Charles County, Maryland Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly (undated) 1776 Talbot County, Maryland Instructions to Provincial Convention or Assembly June 24, 1776 Declaration of the Town of King’s District, New York June 24, 1776 Pennsylvania Instructions to Provincial Congress June 24, 1776 Declaration of Spencer-Town [Albany], New York June 24, 1776 Declaration of Gloucester, Massachusetts HDT WHAT? INDEX
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June 24, 1776 Declaration of Williamstown, Massachusetts June 25, 1776 Declaration of Northbridge, Massachusetts June 25, 1776 Declaration of Haverhill, Massachusetts June 27, 1776 Declaration of Sturbridge, Massachusetts June 28, 1776 Maryland Instructions June 28, 1776 Declaration of Ashburnham, Massachusetts June 29, 1776 Preamble, Virginia constitution June 30, 1776 Declaration of Hanover, Massachusetts July 1, 1776 Declaration of Amesbury, Massachusetts July 1, 1776 Declaration of Fitchburg, Massachusetts July 1, 1776 Declaration of Ashby, Massachusetts July 1, 1776 Declaration of Greenwich, Massachusetts July 2, 1776 Preamble, New Jersey constitution July 4, 1776 Declaration of Bellingham, Massachusetts July 4, 1776 Declaration of Winchendon, Massachusetts (undated) 1776 Declaration of Eastham, Massachusetts July 6, 1776 Maryland’s “A Declaration”
The Reverend Ezra Stiles held evening classes on Clarke Street in Newport, Rhode Island, for blacks, classes which included not only instruction but also preaching and singing.
The Reverend Ezra Stiles had white mulberry trees in the garden of his parsonage at #14 Clarke Street in Newport, Rhode Island, across the street from his Second Congregational Church, for the feeding of silkworms. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1777
James Madison, Jr. lost his seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, seemingly because he was cheap about treating the voters to the usual whiskey. Never mind, later that year he was elected to the 8-member Council of State.
The Reverend Ezra Stiles recorded in his diary4 after a meal with John Langdon, who had been a delegate from New Hampshire to the Continental Congress but had been replaced by William Whipple prior to the drafting
of the Declaration of Independence, that he had “Dined in Company with Col. Langdon formerly of the Continental Congress. He says Mr. Jeffries of Virginia drafted the Declaration of Independency.” (The confusion about Thomas Jefferson’s name indicates that Langdon, as well as Stiles, is a hearsay source for this allegation.)
If you had asked any of these people at that time, which was the more important document, this declaration or the Articles of Incorporation, there is little doubt but that the response you would have received would have
4. Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, ed., THE LITERARY DIARY OF EZRA STILES. NY, 1901, Volume II, page 155 VIEW VOLUME ONE VIEW VOLUME TWO VIEW VOLUME THREE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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been “Why, the Articles of Incorporation, of course.”
May: The Reverend Ezra Stiles took charge of a church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Fall: The Reverend Ezra Stiles was elected president of Yale College.
Studying under the perpetually depressed and depressing Yale tutor, the Reverend Joseph Buckminster, D.D., in the hick town of Glastonbury, could not have been particularly intriguing. Despite the fact that as a student he was exempt from military service, Noah Webster, Jr. enlisted as a private in his father Captain Noah Webster, Sr.’s Hartford militia unit, on its way to resist the army of British General Burgoyne (the militia unit would not take part in any actual altercations).
GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1778
March: The Reverend Ezra Stiles accepted the post of president of Yale College.
June 9, Tuesday: The new President of Yale College, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, manumitted Newport, the one black slave whom he owned.
I freed or liberated my Negro Man Newport, about aged 30. Settled all my Affairs, & myself & seven children set out in two Carriages for New Haven.
June 14, Sunday: In President of Yale College Ezra Stiles’s diary, we find a reference to several students doing well in debating. Noah Webster, Jr. was among them.
The Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne sighed in his journal, “White butter-flies unnumerable: woe to the cabbages!” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1780
December 30, Saturday: Concord enabled 10 of its citizen soldiers to serve for 9 months with the Continental Army at Fishkill.
TABLE OF REVOLUTIONARY CAMPAIGNS5
WHEN REQUIRED MEN TIME WHERE EMPLOYED BOUNTY AMOUNT
June 5, 1780 19 6 months Continental Army 1000 16000
These [the above] men were hired by the same committee. They were intended to march to Albany to prevent the incursions of the Indians, but counter orders were issued and they went to Rhode Island. Cyprian How was Colonel; ———— Bancroft of Dunstable, Lieutenant-Colonel; ———— Stone, of Ashby, Major; Abraham Andrews, Captain; Silas Walker and Eli Conant, Lieutenants. Bedford furnished eight; Acton, eleven; Lincoln, twelve; Carlisle, nine.
June 22, 1780 19 3 months Rhode Island 17090
December 2, 1780 16 3 years Continental Army Hired in Classes
These [the above] men were to serve three years or during the war. The town decided, after con- siderable debate, by a vote of 53 to 42, to hire them in classes. The Selectmen, James Barrett, Esq., Jonas Heywood, Esq., Mr. Isaac Hubbard, Mr. Samuel Hosmer, Col. Nathan Barrett, and Mr. Job Brooks were chosen to divide the town into as many classes as there were men to hire, according to wealth. The town voted to “proceed against” any who should neglect to pay their proportion in the several classes; each one of which hired a man at as low a rate as possible. The men’s names were Charles Adams, Richard Hayden, Jonathan Wright, Joseph Dudley, Isaac Hall, Lot Lamson, Francis Baker, Joseph Adams, Benjamin Barron, William Tenneclef, Richard Hobby, Leonard Whitney, Samuel Farrar, John Stratten, Daniel McGregor, and Jonathan Fiske. Bedford furnished eight; Acton, ten; Lincoln, ten; Carlisle, six. They were mustered by Capt. Joseph Hosmer.
December 28, 1780 10 9 months Continental Army, Fishkill
At Yale College, a pencil sketch was made of President Ezra Stiles.
5. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1782
December: Newport, the black man who had been manumitted by the Reverend Ezra Stiles as he had set out from Newport, Rhode Island in 1778 to become the President of Yale College, showed up in New Haven, Connecticut with wife and 2-year-old son in tow, and a proposition. “How about I come work for you?” This Evening arrived here my Man servant Newport and his Wife & Child, whom I have hired for seven years @ $20 per annum. The Child Jacob two years old last Month and bound to me till age 24. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1783
May 8, Thursday: The earliest known public reference (so far as we presently know6) to Thomas Jefferson’s role as the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence would be a pamphlet version distributed in New England7 of a sermon of this date by the Reverend President Ezra Stiles of Yale College before the Connecticut General
Assembly. In this sermon, although Stiles attributed the fine sentiments of the document to all Americans, he also took note of Jefferson’s “signal act” of having drafted it on behalf of the Continental Congress. It had been Jefferson, according to the Reverend, no historian, who had “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of Independence.” The style of this brief reference seems suggestive of emphasis being placed upon a known but disregarded piece of information, rather than announcement of a novel piece of information.
6. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence,” 560; Boyd, et al., eds., THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, XV, 241n. 7. The sermon would subsequently be issued as a pamphlet: THE UNITED STATES ELEVATED TO GLORY AND HONOR. A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY JONATHAN TRUMBULL,... AND THE HONORABLE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT... MAY 8TH, 1783 (New Haven CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1783; Worcester MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1785). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1785
September 15, Thursday: Abiel Holmes, who had returned from the Midway Congregational Church in Georgia to New England for this ceremony, was ordained in the chapel at Yale College. It was the Reverend President Stiles, who would become Mr. Holmes’s father-in-law, who offered the ordaining prayer. Mr. Holmes having signified his acceptance of the call, in August following (1784) commenced preaching among them, and being only a licentiate, in the following year, September 15, 1785, was, upon the request of the church, ordained in the chapel at Yale College, Rev. Levi Hart preaching the ordination sermon, from Galatians I:10, Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles offering the ordaining prayer, Rev. Dr. Williams giving the charge, and Rev. Warham Williams the right hand of fellowship.
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1786
May: The parishioners of the Second Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island selected a new pastor, a full decade after their pastor, the Reverend Ezra Stiles, had left for Dighton, Providence, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1787
July: Isaac Hicksled was killed by a shark while swimming near the St. Helena landing place.
25 followers of Jemimah Wilkinson, the disowned Universal Friend, journeyed from Connecticut to the Mohawk River, then to Seneca Lake, New York where they arrived near today’s Dresden. Jemimah herself was not among them, and would follow only after some of the initial hardships had been reduced: “We go to prepare a place for you.” QUAKER DISOWNMENT November 25, Sunday: The following, about an al fresco Sunday afternoon performance outside the courthouse in New Haven, Connecticut at which Jemimah Wilkinson preached, is from the literary diary of the Reverend Ezra Stiles: 25. Ldsdy.... At IVh P.M. Mrs. Jemima Wilkinson held a religious Meetg at the Courthouse. I attended. There might be 300 Persons present. I never saw her before. She has 3 or 4 Men & 3 or 4 Women her Companions. They with her were seated in Chairs upon the upper broad stair. Here with them she kneeld & prayed, then stood & preached or discoursed in the grave, tonic & unconnected Manner of the Friends or Quakers. She desisted after phps. near an hours Discourse in wc she said many pious good Things & Exhortn to Virtue, with many Texts repeated without Connexion. Then sat down & Mr. Avery her Companion then spake 3 or 4 Minutes. She arose & spake again-& again-then kneeld & prayed & then wished a Blessing. I spake to her after the whole was concluded, In the Eveng my D. Emilia & Ruth visited her at Mr. Shipmans where she drank Tea. She invited her to breakfast with us.... VIEW VOLUME ONE VIEW VOLUME TWO VIEW VOLUME THREE November 26, Monday: According to the literary diary of the Reverend Ezra Stiles, Universal Friend Jemimah Wilkinson politely responded declining an invitation to breakfast: This Morng Emilia sent a Billet to the Universal Friend invitg her & her Companions to Breakfast. She excused, as soon to sett off for Philada but on her Return would comply with her Request. She is about aet. 30, strait, well made, light Complexion, black Eyes, round face, chesnut dark Hair. Wears light cloth Cloke with a Cape like a Man’s—Purple Gown, long sleeves to Wristbands—Mans shirt down to the Hands with Neckband purple handkerchief or Neckcloth tied round the neck like a man's—No Cap—Hair combed turned over & not long—wears a Watch—Man's Hat.— Voluble Tongue—decent & graceful & grave. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Universal Friend Jemimah’s note has been preserved (although she would return through New Haven in November 1788, she would neither then call upon Emilia nor inform her that she was nearby): Friend Stiles, I except thy favour but as we are on so long a journey and our brekfast is now prepard think it most expediant to go on as fast as is possible. But when I return in the Spring if it’s then thy desire & request I see nothing but it may be so. My love to thee & family. New haven the 26th of the 11th 1787. THE UNIVERSAL FRIEND. See also this Diary, Oct. 20, 1779, and Feb. 14, 1781. VIEW VOLUME ONE VIEW VOLUME TWO VIEW VOLUME THREE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1790
The Reverend Abiel Holmes got married with Mary Stiles, daughter of the Reverend Professor Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College (he would make his father-in-law the subject of a laudatory biography). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1794
The Reverend Ezra Stiles’s HISTORY OF THREE OF THE JUDGES OF CHARLES I, WHALLEY, GOFFE, DIXWELL REGICIDE was printed at Hartford, Connecticut.
The author was painted by Reuben Mouththrop. This is a copy of that painting, done in about 1812:
Yellow Fever in New Haven, Connecticut: Summer weather was proving delightful and the world seemed to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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be returning to normal with deadly fevers in the far away tropics. Then doctors in New Haven, Connecticut, observed the sine qua non of yellow fever, a terrible quick death. On June 10 Isaac Gorham’s 27 year old wife Elizabeth complained of violent head, back and limb pains and nausea. On the 14th the pains stopped “and she was elated with the prospect of a speedy recovery.” That evening “she vomited matter resembling coffee- grounds.” She died the next day. A few days later a niece who had lived with her a week died with the same symptoms. On June 20, the merchant Elijah Austin and his clerk both died in New York City after having left New Haven a few days previous. “Sickness and death prevail in the town,” Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, wrote in his diary. Three doctors, asked by the city’s selectmen to investigate, found that a sloop from Martinique “infected with the contagion of the yellow fever” had been near the Gorham house. A chest of clothes that belonged to one of the seamen who died of yellow fever had been opened by Austin in the presence of his clerk and Mrs. Gorham. For New Haven official the imperative to conceal the existence of any epidemic disease outweighed any other consideration. The city of 3,400 was Connecticut’s largest port, specializing in the South Sea trade. Its chief glory each year was the mid- September commencement day at Yale College during which the population of the town might swell by several thousand. The investigating doctors’ report of July 8 tried to put the recent deaths in perspective. Seventy-seven people had died in New Haven since January, 43 of them, mostly children, from scarlet fever, 18 from consumption and 16 “with erratic diseases.” The committee thought reports “respecting the mortality of this disease” had been “very much exaggerated.” Still, the New Haven epidemic became notorious. A New York paper reported that Yellow Fever imported in a trunk from the West Indies killed several people in New Haven. New York and Philadelphia announced a quarantine on all ships and goods from New Haven. A merchant in New York with New Haven connections advised friends there not to protest. “The distress which the Philadelphians experienced last year is fresh in the memory of everyone, and a possibility of the fever being introduced here apologizes for almost any means to prevent it.” New Haven town officials kept quiet even as the death toll rose. There were at least 4 deaths a week from yellow fever beginning in August. Officials quietly designated a special hospital for those with the fever, hired nurses at a dollar a day, and solicited money to defray the expense. On August 20 the committee published a report noting that only 5 were sick with the fever, and that “regulations lately adopted, will prevent the progress of the fever.” Ezra Stiles left a franker assessment in his diary. Out of 20 patients, 16 to 18 had died. On the 26th there were three funerals and three or four taken sick. “Terror.... Scholars alarmed. At 2 P.M. they began to apply for leave to go home. I have dismissed 61 scholars out of 115 today. Numbers of gentlemen moving their families out of town.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Stiles’ diary provides the most candid source on the progress of the epidemic: August 27th, the sick in town today are ten. The town in general more healthy than usual in August. 29th only four in town today with Yellow Fever at 10 a.m. 30th this morning the sick better, all but one. Two vessels in from the West Indies. Both had the fever on board. One kept off in the channel. Streets on wharf being cleansed. Stores on wharf cleansing. September 1st, the sick better; two new ones taken yesterday, and one last night. 5th, 3 died last night; the doctors count eight patients down with Yellow Fever. Hitherto I believed that by care and vigilance of the authorities, it might be guarded and its progress checked, as we could hitherto, trace all the instances; but now they begin to be lost and bewildered. I begin to give up the possibility of preventing its spread, and to be discouraged and to wish my family out of town. Sent off my Eliza to farm. 9th, Dr. Dana’s statement of this disorder this day; deaths 29; recovering and convalescent, 22; sick and not yet arrived at crisis, 3. 12th, the sick getting along very comfortably today; seven sick of which one dangerous; four died the past week. 19th, six more taken with the disorder. 20th, the disorder spreads; about twelve or thirteen have it; some bad. 24th, the disorder spreading away from New Haven; twenty-six sick with Yellow Fever, of which four dangerous. 25th, twenty-six sick. 27th, thirty-two sick. October 11th, ten this evening on the list, of which two dangerous. 15th, eight now sick with Yellow Fever; eight deaths from yellow fever since October 1st. 16th, there are but five sick with the fever, and all convalescent. The disorder greatly abated. 18th, the sick are recovering; no more taken. The committee are dismissing all the nurses, in hopes it may not break out again. There have sometimes been twenty nurses at a dollar a day. The expense incurred on the town by this sickness has amounted to 500 Pounds; about 160 patients, and between 60 and 70 deaths of this disorder. 21st, three or four still laboring with this disorder, of which two are critical and dangerous. November 8th, arrived home from a journey. The Yellow Fever abated and hopefully extinguished, as the last was HDT WHAT? INDEX
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27th ultimo. None now sick; inhabitants are returning. Some More Primary Documents In 1795 in response to the national crisis being caused by Yellow Fever, the newspaper editor Noah Webster solicited reports from doctors and others in an effort to better understand the epidemics. A Yale graduate and native of Connecticut, Webster inspired two physicians, father and son, to respond: Two Letters Relative to the Yellow Fever, as it appeared in New- Haven, in the State of Connecticut, in the Year 1794 Letter First On the Origins, Symptoms, & c., of the Yellow Fever, in New Haven Dr. Monson, Jun. to the Publisher. Sir, In giving a history of the origin of the Yellow Fever, or Pestilential Fever, as it appeared in this City, in the year 179, it will be necessary to premise some account of those diseases which prevailed here, immediately before; that the Public may be enabled to judge whether there is any analogy between them and the Fever in question. Sometime in 1792 and 1793, the Scarlet Fever, or Ulcerous Sore Throat, made its appearance in Litchfield, Water-town, and the towns in the vicinity of New-Haven; and raged with great mortality. In September and October 1793, many of the inhabitants of this town were affected with a slight Influenza, stinking pains in their jaws and limbs, soreness in muscles of the neck, with a light Fever. - In November and December following, several children were affected with the Ulcerous Sore Throat. The symptoms were no alarming; and in every instance it terminated favorably. - In January 1794, the disease assumed a more malignant appearance. In February, March, April, May, June and July, it was highly putrid; and many fell victims to its malignity. On the 10th of June 1794, the Pestilential, or Yellow Fever, appeared here. - Doctor Hotchkiss visited Isaac Gorham’s wife, on the Long-Wharf. She complained of a violent pain in her head, back and limbs; her eyes were dull, and slightly inflamed; she had nausea at stomach, was obstinately costive, with a moderate degree of Fever. No marks of inflammation were discoverable, by inspection in the throat. The distressful symptoms, above-mentioned, continued till the fourteenth; when her pains and distress suddenly subsided; and she was elated with the prospect of a speedy recovery. In the evening, she vomited matter resembling coffee-grounds; and died on the 15th. The Physician, who attended her, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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was ignorant of her complaint until he saw what she vomited. He then declared her disease to be the Yellow Fever. On the 15th of June, I visited Elias Gorhams daughter, a child of 8 years of age, in Chapel Street, three quarters of a mile from Isaac Gorham’s house. She had been sick three days; her countenance was flushed with a deep red color; her eyes were dull, and highly inflamed; she had violent pain in her head, back, and limbs; nausea, and frequent vomiting; obstinate costiveness, a quick, full, hard, throbbing pulse; her skin was hot and dry; and her tongue covered with a thick white fur. On the 16th, her pain and distress suddenly abated; in a few hours, she vomited up matter resembling coffee-grounds; and died the next day. I inspected her throat, during her illness, and could discover no marks of inflammation. I was surprised at the singular appearance of the disease, and hearing of the death of Mrs. Gorham (Isaac Gorham’s wife) inquired of the mother if her daughter had been on the wharf. She informed me that the child had lived with her aunt (Isaac Gorham’s wife) nearly a week. The 23d of June, I visited the child’s mother. She complained of violent pain in her head, back, and limbs; nausea; frequent vomiting; obstinate costiveness; with considerable degree of fever. These symptoms continued five or six days; then gradually abated; and soon after she recovered her usual health. On the 20th of June, Mr. Elijah Austin died in New-York; and his clerk, Henry Hubbard, died in Derby. They complained within three or four hours of each other; and Mr. Hubbard vomited matter resembling coffee-grounds. The inhabitants of this town were alarmed at these sudden deaths, and requested the Select-Men to make diligent inquiry into the origin of this disease. On examination, it appeared - That, in the beginning of June, Capt. Truman arrived from Martinico, in a sloop that was infected with the contagion of the Yellow Fever; that this vessel lay at the wharf, within a few rods of Isaac Gorham’s house; that she had on board a chest of clothes, which had belonged to a mariner, who had died of the Yellow Fever, in Martinico; and that his chest was carried into Mr. Austin’s store, and opened in the presence of Capt. Truman, Mr. Austin, Henry Hubbard and Polly Gorham; the three last mentioned of whom, died, in a short time after their exposure to the contents of the chest. Hence it is highly probable that Mrs. Gorham caught the disease from the infected sloop, or clothing. Mr. Austin’s store stands within three or four rods of Isaac Gorham’s house; and no person in town was known to have the Yellow Fever previous to Capt. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Truman’s arrival. June 26th, Isaac Gorham lost an infant child with the Yellow Fever; and soon after his son and daughter were affected with it: the former died. Solomon Mudge died on the 30th, Jacob Thomson’s negro woman, on the 1st of July; Archibald M’Neil on the 9th; Polly Brown on the 3d of August; John Storer, jun. and John Hide on the 8th: and widow Thomson on the 10th. - Jacob Thomson’s negro woman, Solomon Mudge, John Storer, jun. and John Hide, had visited Mr. Gorham’s house; and Archibald M’Neil nursed Solomon Mudge. Elias Gill died on the 12th of August; and Samuel Griswold’s wife, on the 7th: the former visited Mr. Gorham’s house; the latter nursed in his family. There were a number of persons who caught the disease at Mr. Gorham’s house and recovered. Mrs. Thomson, on the first day of her illness, was moved half a mile from Mr. Gorham’s, into George Street. Luther Fitch caught the disease from Mrs. Thomson, and communicated it to his servant maid. Both recovered - Mr. Fitch lives in College-street, nearly three quarters of a mile distant from Mr. Gorham’s house. I could trace the disease throughout the town. No person had the Yellow Fever, unless in consequence of attending the sick, or of being exposed by nurses, infected houses, clothing, or furniture. I have inquired of several aged persons in this town, relative to the Yellow Fever, whether they knew of its having ever been here, previous to June 1794, and there is but a single instance; the facts relating to which are these: - in the year 1743, a transient person, by the name of Nevins, who came from the West Indies, lodged in the house of Nathaniel Brown, an inn-keeper in this city. The man was taken very sick, in the night; and died shortly afterwards; and his body was very yellow after death. - Mr. Brown’s wife sickened in a short time, and died, of the same complaint; which was, at that time, supposed to be the Yellow Fever. I am credibly informed that several persons, at Mill- River in Fairfield county, and also at New- London, died with the Yellow Fever, in August and September 1795. It was propagated there by infected persons from New York. Capt. John Smith died in this town, the 20th of August 1795. He caught the disease in New York and communicated it to one of his negro servants. ******** The following is an account of the number who died with the Yellow Fever in New-Haven in the different months of the year HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1794. June 6 July 3 August 16 September 26 October 12 November 1 Total 64 Of this number, forty-eight vomited matter resembling coffee- grounds, or port wine. There were about a hundred and sixty persons who had the Yellow Fever. Three persons recovered who vomited matter like coffee-grounds; but none recovered, that I remember, who vomited matter resembling port wine. Some vomited a viscid, tough mucus, similar to the white of eggs; others, natter like chocolate; which were as fatal as the black vomit. The Yellow-Fever was attended with specific contagion in every instance, and proved equally mortal in every part of the town, in proportion to the number that were sick. No age, nor sex, were exempted from it’s ravages. All descriptions of people were alike susceptible of receiving the contagion. In the month of September, when the Yellow Fever raged with the greatest violence, the inhabitants, in general, were almost entirely free from every other complaint. It was remarked by the citizens, that they never knew it so healthy, at that season of the year - excepting the Yellow Fever. ********** The following is an accurate register of the number who died of Scarlet-Fever, or Ulcerous Sore Throat, in 1794. February 3 March 5 April 5 May 10 June 15 July 7 August 3 September 2 October 2 Total 52 It was computed that 750 persons had the Scarlet Fever. — This disease appeared in almost every family in town, indiscriminately; and was evidently, an Epidemical disease, which originated in the constitution of the air, — while the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Yellow Fever was propagated only by contagion. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1795
May 12, Tuesday: The widow of Dr. John Prescott of Concord, Ann Lynde Prescott, died at the age of 88.
Ezra Stiles died in New Haven, Connecticut, while still president of Yale College. He would be buried at the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1798
The Reverend Abiel Holmes’s THE LIFE OF EZRA STILES (his father-in-law, who had died in 1795). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1832
March 1, Thursday: The Reverend Abiel Holmes, D.D. presented a copy of his biography of his father-in-law, THE LIFE OF EZRA STILES, to the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts (that copy is now the very one that has been electronically preserved by Google Books).
New York’s antipoverty legislation went into effect. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1901
Franklin Bowditch Dexter prepared an edition of the Reverend Ezra Stiles’s THE LITERARY DIARY OF EZRA STILES, D.D., PRESIDENT OF YALE COLLEGE...JAN. 1, 1769-MAY 6, 1795. VIEW VOLUME ONE VIEW VOLUME TWO VIEW VOLUME THREE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1916
Franklin Bowditch Dexter processed the letters of the Reverend Ezra Stiles. REVIEW THE MATERIALS HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2006
March 12, Sunday: Paul Davis’s column about the days of slavery and the international slave trade in Providence, Rhode Island’s “ProJo,” the Providence Journal: Buying and Selling the Human Species: Newport and the Slave Trade For more than 75 years, Rhode Island ruled the American slave trade. On sloops and ships called Endeavor, Success and Wheel of Fortune, slave captains made more than 1,000 voyages to Africa from 1725 to 1807. They chained their human cargo and forced more than 100,000 men, women and children into slavery in the West Indies, Havana and the American colonies. The traffic was so lucrative that nearly half the ships that sailed to Africa did so after 1787 — the year Rhode Island outlawed the trade. Rum fueled the business. The colony had nearly 30 distilleries where molasses was boiled into rum. Rhode Island ships carried barrels of it to buy African slaves, who were then traded for more molasses in the West Indies which was returned to Rhode Island. By the mid-18th century, 114 years after Roger Williams founded the tiny Colony of Rhode Island, slaves lived in every port and village. In 1755, 11.5 percent of all Rhode Islanders, or about 4,700 people, were black, nearly all of them slaves. In Newport, Bristol and Providence, the slave economy provided thousands of jobs for captains, seamen, coopers, sail makers, dock workers, and shop owners, and helped merchants build banks, wharves and mansions. But it was only a small part of a much larger international trade, which historians call the first global economy. Pollipus Hammond was dying. As a young man in Newport he had sailed wooden sloops and brigs across the roiling Atlantic. Now, at 72, he was curled up in agony. The Rev. Ezra Stiles was surprised. He had heard that dying men often stretched out. Shortly before midnight in the winter of 1773, Hammond died. Stiles, a pastor for nearly 20 years at the Second Congregational Church on Clarke Street, closed the dead man’s eyes. Physically, Hammond was short and thin. But spiritually, he had been a pillar in the congregation, a sober churchgoer for nearly 34 years. A boat builder, mechanic and father of five, Hammond could have turned “his hand to any Thing,” Stiles wrote in his daily journal. For a quarter of century, Hammond had turned his hand to the slave trade. Sailing from Newport’s crowded harbor, he purchased hundreds of slaves from the west coast of Africa and chained them aboard ships owned by some of the town’s wealthiest merchants. Hammond belonged to a group of captains who depended on the slave trade for a living. He quit the business in the 1750s, when he was in his mid-50s. He became a devout Congregationalist; he even offered his home for monthly meetings. But he never stopped telling stories about danger, even exaggerating what he had seen and heard on his African HDT WHAT? INDEX
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voyages along what slavers called the Guinea Coast. It was, Stiles wrote, the only “blemish in his character.” “He was many years a Guinea Captain; he had then no doubt of the Slave Trade,” Stiles wrote. “But I have reason to think that if he had his Life to live over again, he would not choose to spend it in buying and selling the human species.” If Hammond regretted his life as a slave captain, he left no record of it. When Hammond died on Feb. 5, 1773, Newport’s slave trade was booming. Nearly 30 captains had sailed to Africa the year before, ferrying away nearly 3,500 Africans to slave ports in the Americas and the Caribbean. “Our orders to you are, that you Embrace the first fair wind and make the best of your way to the coast of Africa,” wrote merchant Aaron Lopez to Capt. William English. “When please God you arrive there ... Convert your cargo into good Slaves” and sell them “on the best terms you can,” ordered Lopez, who outfitted four slave ships that year. The first recorded departure of a Newport slave ship was in 1709, and regular voyages from Newport to Africa were recorded beginning in 1725. “There’s no Newport without slavery,” says James Garman, a professor of historic preservation at Salve Regina University in Newport. “The sheer accumulation of wealth is astonishing and it has everything to do with the African trade....” It’s unclear when Pollipus Hammond, born in 1701, boarded his first slave ship, but Hammond and the trade matured together. By the time Hammond turned 21, more than 600 ships a year passed through Rhode Island’s busy ports. Many carried New England goods — mackerel, pork, beef, cider, beer, onions, flour, butter, candles, apples, cheese and staves — to other colonies along the Atlantic Coast. Others carried goods directly to the slave plantations in the Caribbean or in South America. These ships returned to Newport with sugar and barrels of molasses, which distillers turned into rum. Some of it was sold in New England. But Rhode Islanders soon discovered a new market for their rum: tribal leaders and European traders along the African coast, in regions known as the Slave, Gold and Windward Coasts. In all, Rhode Island ships carried nearly 11 million gallons of rum to Africa during the l8th and early 19th centuries. Tribal leaders were willing to dicker with Newport captains, turning over prisoners from rival tribes and other natives in exchange for Rhode Island rum. The African captives were then sold in the Caribbean or in the southern colonies for cash or for more sugar and molasses, creating what was known as the Triangular Trade. Rhode Islanders distilled an especially potent liquor that was referred to as Guinea rum, spirits which quickly displaced French brandy in the slave trade. As a result, slavers from Rhode Island were often called “rum men.” By his mid-30s, Hammond was a rum man. In 1733, he sailed the Dispatch, owned by merchant Godfrey Malbone, to Africa. Six years later Malbone, who owned a house in Newport, a country estate and several slaves, hired Hammond again, this time to take 55 slaves to the West Indies aboard the sloop Diamond. Already, the slave trade was competitive. In 1736, Capt. John Cahoone told Newport merchant HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Stephen Ayrault that seven Rhode Island captains and 12 other slavers were anchored off the coast of Africa, “ready to devour one another for the chance to trade” for slaves being held at a handful of British ports. Never “was so much rum on the Coast at one time before....” Four years later, the colony’s fleet of 120 ships was “constantly employed in trade, some on the coast of Africa, others in the neighboring colonies, many in the West Indies and a few in Europe,” Gov. Richard Ward told the Board of Trade in 1740. The sugar and slave plantations especially benefited from Rhode Island’s exports. Plantation owners — too busy growing sugar cane to grow their own food — “reaped great advantage from our trade, by being supplied with lumber of all sorts, suitable for building houses, sugar works and making casks,” Governor Ward noted. The West Indies slave owners dined on beef, port, flour and other provisions “we are daily carrying to them.” Rhode Island horses hauled their cane and turned their sugar mills. And “our African trade often furnishes ’em with slaves for their plantations.” For Pollipus Hammond and other slave captains, African voyages posed many risks. The voyages were filthy, laborious and dangerous. “Few men are fit for those voyages but them that are bred up to it,” Dalby Thomas, an agent for the Royal African Company, told his superiors in London in the early 1700s. These captains must be ready to “do the meanest office,” he wrote. Africa teemed with killers — river blindness, yellow fever, malaria. One or two captains died each year from disease, violent storms or slave uprisings. Capt. George Scott barely escaped a slave revolt in 1730, when several Africans aboard the Little George murdered three of his men in their sleep. Caleb Godfrey jumped into a longboat after lightning struck his ship, and he once was mauled by a leopard. If a captain survived —and many did not— he “had nothing to lose and a great deal to gain from a slaving venture,” says historian Sarah Deutsch. In addition to a monthly wage, captains received a 5 percent commission on every slave sold. Many also received a bonus, or “privilege,” of four or more slaves per 104 Africans aboard. The captains were free to sell them or keep them. Some made enough to invest in later trips to Africa. Many joined the Fellowship Club, a mutual aid society, established in Newport in 1752. When the club received a charter from the Rhode Island legislature, 17 of the 88 members had made at least one voyage to Africa. By the time Hammond died, slaving captains formed a third of the society. While some captains made enough money to quit the trade and move up socially, Hammond “never left the wheel,” says Jay Coughtry in THE NOTORIOUS TRIANGLE. “Lack of capital, ambition, or, perhaps, the lure of the sea” prevented men like Hammond “from rising into the ranks of the merchant class,” he says. The Rev. Ezra Stiles arrived in Newport to assume the pulpit of the Second Congregational Church in 1755, about the time Pollipus Hammond quit the slave trade. A bookish man who studied Latin and physics at Yale, Stiles declared Newport “an agreeable Town,” a place of “leisure and books,” and a choice spot to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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continue “my Love of preaching.” He drank cider, tea and claret, and planned future books, including a history of the world. In 1761, six years after he arrived in Newport, the minister paced off its streets to map the town. Evidence of the town’s booming sea and slave trade was everywhere. He counted 888 houses, 16 rum distilleries and 61 shops near the waterfront. Some of the town’s biggest slave traders belonged to Stiles’ Clarke Street church. Eleven members were either slave traders or captains, including Caleb Gardner, William Ellery and William and Samuel Vernon. Newport was a far cry from New Haven, where Stiles grew up and attended Yale. While New Haven had been settled by strict religious leaders, Newport had been settled by “men who chafed at the economic, as well as religious, restrictions of Puritan society,” says historian Lynne Withey. They “wanted to build prosperous towns and personal fortunes out of the wilderness.” Those attracted to Newport included the Quaker merchant Thomas Richardson, who had moved from Boston in 1712; Daniel Ayrault, a French Huguenot, who arrived around 1700, and Godfrey Malbone, who moved from Virginia at about the same time. William and John Wanton, shipbuilders from Massachusetts, arrived a few years later. These entrepreneurs — or their sons or in-laws — added slave trading to their business ventures. Yet another group of investors arrived between 1746 and 1757, among them Ellery, the Champlins and Lopez. Stiles read the BIBLE in the morning and visited some of the slave traders as their pastor in the afternoon. He socialized with them, too. He dined often with William Vernon, who bought a mansion three doors down on Clarke Street. An ardent gardener, Stiles wrote his name on an aloe leaf on Abraham Redwood’s country estate. Eventually, the pastor was named librarian of the new Redwood Library. While he talked philosophy with Newport’s slave merchants, he also ministered to the town’s slaves. By the mid-1770s, he was preaching to dozens of slaves. Often, he preached to them in small groups in his home. “I directed the Negroes to come to me this Evening,” he wrote in 1771. “I discoursed with them on the great Things of the divine Life and eternal Salvation....” Three days after Pollipus Hammond died, the temperature plunged to 5 degrees. Ice clogged the harbor. That winter, the spindly trees above the waterfront were “full of crystals or frozen sleet or icy horror,” noted Stiles. It was so cold his window had frozen shut. “I can not come at my thermometer which is usually left abroad all night,” he complained. Head down, his long nose poking forward, Stiles trudged through Newport’s icy streets to attend Hammond’s burial in the Common Burying Ground, on a hill near the edge of town. A prominent stone mason had carved a final thought for the slave captain. His headstone, topped with an angel, said, “Here Lieth the Body of the Ingenious Capt. Pollipus Hammond.” It was Stiles’s habit to visit his church members and their families at least four times a year. Stiles had visited Hammond 10 times before his death. If the two men discussed slavery, Stiles did not note it in his diary. Then again, the pastor had written little about his own ties to the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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slave trade. His father, Isaac, had purchased an African couple to work in the fields of the family’s 100-acre farm in North Haven. And a year after he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church, Stiles put a hogshead of rum — 106 gallons — aboard a ship bound for the coast of Africa. The captain, William Pinnegar, returned with a 10-year-old African boy. Stiles kept the slave for 22 years, and freed him only after he accepted a job as president of Yale in 1777. In 1756, Stiles gave the boy a name. He called him Newport.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project President Ezra Stiles HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE REVEREND EZRA STILES PRESIDENT EZRA STILES
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: April 1, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT EZRA STILES THE REVEREND EZRA STILES
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, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
PRESIDENT EZRA STILES THE REVEREND EZRA STILES
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process 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 requests with