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Samuel Cranston, Rhode Island’s 30-Term Governor

Rhode Island’s Governor Samuel Cranston won election as Rhode Island’s governor 30 times, once twice in one year. No other governor surpassed Cranston’s record.

During his eventful life, Cranston was captured at sea by pirates, won office at the same time his nemesis came into power and prevented Connecticut from swallowing Rhode Island. He also fathered 15 children with two wives.

This is his story.

Samuel Cranston

Samuel Cranston was born in Newport in August 1659, and he was well educated and well connected. His father, John Cranston, served as governor of Rhode Island for two terms. His mother was the daughter of Rhode Island’s colonial president Jeremy Clarke .

Cranston went to work as a merchant and goldsmith to support himself. He married the granddaughter of Roger Williams, Mary Hart. After doing so, he decided to go to sea.

Pirates, however, captured Samuel Cranston and held him for seven years. His wife gave him up for dead and planned to marry another man in an evening wedding ceremony. As fate would have it, Cranston got away from his pirate captors and made his way to Newport just in time to stop the wedding vows.

Samuel Cranston and his wife, Mary, had four children before her death in 1710. He then married his late brother’s wife, Judith Parrott, in 1711. They had 11 more children.

Governor of Rogues Island

Nearing 40, he won an appointment as governor when his brother-in-law, Walter Clark, resigned. Cranston would then win election as governor 29 times.

As governor, he handled problems with patience and diplomacy, saving the colony’s independence and endearing him to the residents of Rhode Island.

In colonial times, people called Rhode Island ‘Rogues Island,’ early and often. Cotton Mather called it the ‘sewer of New England’ because it welcomed heretics and Quakers banished in Massachusetts.

Cotton Mather

It was also called ‘the perverse sister,’ ‘the evil genius’ and ‘the receptacle of riff raff” all the way to the Constitutional Convention. Rhode Island wouldn’t send delegates convention–and then, when it came to ratification, Rhode Island held out until the other states threatened an economic embargo.

Almost all of these accusations against the state have proven true, according to Terry D’ Amato Spencer in Rhode Island’s Rogues and Rascals. Rhode Island, for example, was a haven for pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy.

Almost as soon as he became governor, Samuel Cranston faced his nemesis: the Royal Governor of New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Lord Bellomont.

Bellomont was bound and determined to end Rhode Island’s freedom and place it under Royal Authority specifically–his Royal Authority. Once again Cranston navigated through his traps (need little bit of explanation). An act of Providence made that problem go away in 1701 when Bellomont died.

Lord Bellomont

Pirates of the Narragansett

Piracy was an ongoing problem in Rhode Island waters. So much so that none other than James Fenimore Cooper wrote a book about the pirates in these waters called the The Red Rover. Among the pirates Governor Cranston had to deal with was Capt. William Kidd.

Kidd came to the colony and anchored off of the island of Jamestown in Narragansett Bay. Cranston sent his tax collector along with an armed escort to arrest him. Two warning shots fired by cannon thwarted their effort.

Willim Kidd

King William’s War (1688-1697) ended the year before Cranston became governor. Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) would break out in 1702 and finally end in 1713. In both wars, France and England vied for control of North America.

During these Anglo-French Wars, the warring nations would issue letters of marque, essentially licenses, to attack and capture enemy shipping. The letters were issued to private people, making them privateers, sometimes called corsairs. Herein lies the problem: When the wars ended, so did their licenses. Then the privateers and their crews had no work. But that didn’t stop them. They just carried on as usual. Rhode Island, and Narragansett Bay in particular, had hundreds of nooks and crannies they could hide in from local and royal authorities.

Privateers were popular in Rhode Island, because they had to share some of their plunder with the government. That eased the burden on taxpayers. So Samuel Cranston for many years turned a blind eye to piracy while assuring officials in London he went after them. But public sentiment turned against pirates, and in 1723 Rhode Island hanged 26 pirates under the command of the notoriously cruel Edward Low.

Threats From North and South

After Lord Bellomont died, new threats to Rhode Island’s independence arose. The tiny colony’s existence was tenuous at best. Governor Cranston kept Rhode Island in existence with a combination of political astuteness and luck.

Connecticut and Massachusetts both coveted the colony because of Narragansett Bay. Maritime trade was their lifeblood, and the Connecticut shoreline was blocked by Long Island. Ships from Boston had to navigate around Cape Cod and then face unfriendly currents.

Narragansett Bay, however, had clear access to the sea and, perhaps more importantly, a clear sail to the Caribbean.

Fending Off Threats

Cranston fended off Massachusetts’ governor, Joseph Dudley, who tried to take command of Rhode Island’s militia. He demonstrated to the colonial overseers in London that Rhode Island was capable of governing itself. And he settled the boundary line between Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Samuel Cranston was able to checkmate threats to Rhode Island’s sovereignty and bring it into an acceptable relationship within the imperial scheme. He also transformed a group of tiny villages into a stable colony on its way to eventual statehood.

Partly because of Samuel Cranston, no other land had been granted the freedom Rhode Island had, government by majority rule and freedom of conscience.

He died on April 26, 1727. According to Rhode Island historian George Washington Greene, he left ‘no public man so universally loved behind.’

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. We miss him greatly. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Image of grave medallion: CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32582013. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Great Puritan Periwig Controversy

Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall were close and lifelong friends. They moved in the same Boston social circles, shared companions, dined together and discussed politics. But on one important matter they parted company: the periwig.

Cotton Mather

Mather, the Puritan minister, wore a long, brown, curled periwig that emphasized his large nose. Sewall, the judge and printer, wore a black skullcap to hide his bald pate. Mather defended the periwig in a sermon, while Sewall denounced it whenever he got the chance.

The two Puritans weren’t alone. Across the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 17^th century, the controversy raged over the periwig, a new fashion from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Supporters called it a harmless fashion and accused the anti-periwig faction of hypocrisy.

The Periwig

During the English Civil Wars, the followers of the Stuart kings wore periwigs. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan supporters did not. When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his courtiers enthusiastically adopted the periwig.

Curly, shoulder-length hair had been fashionable among European men since the 1620s. The periwig mimicked that fashion with human hair, animal hair or even flax.

The first generation of Puritans who came to New England abhorred fashionable excess. In 1634, the Plymouth General Court banned such showy fashions as slashed sleeves, silver and gold lace, girdles and hatbands.

But the second generation of Puritans, to which Mather (born in 1663) belonged, began to embrace such degeneracy. Sewall, born a decade before Mather, couldn’t stand the sight of the periwig.

Samuel Sewall Rails

Sewall peppered his diary with disapproving observations of people who wore the periwig. In a eulogy for a schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever, he ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

When Sewall learned Josiah Willard, the son of his minister, had taken to wearing a periwig, he marched over to the young man’s house and lectured him. Willard complained his hair was too straight, but he agreed to leave off his wig when his hair grew out. The gesture didn’t appease Sewall. He visited the sins of the son on the father and attended another church.

Sewall wasn’t alone. Massachusetts magistrates in 1649 had protested that long hair ‘after the manner of ruffians and barbarous Indians, hath begun to invade New England contrary to the rule of God’s word.’

In 1654, Thomas Hall wrote an essay called The Loathsomeness of Long Hair. He denounced elaborate hairstyles as ‘against the modest, civil, and commendable custom of our nation, til lately that we began to follow the French and Spaniards, who yet are known Papists and Idolaters.’

Another reason to detest the periwig: As a sign of wealth and status, it might allow poorer people to impersonate the gentry. “It removes a means of distinguishing one man from another,” wrote Nicholas Noyes, a minister who, like Sewall, presided over the Salem witch trials.

Such a toppling of the social hierarchy was profoundly disturbing to some Puritans.

Samuel Sewall, getting a little thin on top

The Pro-Periwig Faction

The Rev. Samuel Stoddard preached in favor of the periwig, arguing ‘God allowed man “by art to supply the defects of nature.”

Others said it kept their heads warm.

Cotton Mather himself delivered a sermon defending the wig. He defined hypocrisy as ‘to be zealous against an innocent fashion’ and yet to ignore ‘great immoralities.’

“I expected not to hear a vindication of periwigs in Boston Pulpit by Mr. Mather,” wrote Sewall.

Losing Battle

In 1679, however, the Massachusetts General Court passed a series of laws intended to turn the people back to the Lord ‘from whom we have departed with a great Backsliding.’

The lawmakers directed local grand juries to present men wearing long hair or periwigs to the court. They authorized the local magistrates to proceed against such delinquents either by ‘Admonition, Fine, or Correction, according to their good discretion.”

Times were changing, though, and as the colonies grew more prosperous and more cosmopolitan, the periwig didn’t go away.

Chief Ornament

And Samuel Sewall found himself on the defensive. In October 1720, one of Sewall’s colleagues on the Executive Council noted his balding head. He suggested Sewall get a wig. Sewall replied that his bald head was his ‘chief ornament.’

After Sewall’s first wife died, he tried, often without success, to woo a new one. One of his targets, Catherine Winthrop, told him he needed a wig. He declined the wig and she declined him.

The wearing of the periwig persisted until the last decades of the 18^th century. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of John Adams shows him in a periwig. But by the time his son became president in 1825, the periwig had finally disappeared.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Margaret Rule and the ‘Smutty’ Cotton Mather

In September of 1693, just after the Salem witchcraft hysteria, a Boston girl, Margaret Rule, convinced the town that demons possessed her. It very nearly restarted the witch hysteria.

Rule belonged to the Rev. Cotton Mather’s North End church in Boston. Mather, instrumental in instigating the Salem witch trials, believed in the power of spirits. When he learned of Margaret Rule’s afflictions, he went to visit.

John and Emma Rule of Saco, Maine, had been forced south to Boston because of the fighting between colonists and Indians in the north. Mather believed them a sober and honest family. But their daughter Margaret had an uneasy relationship with an older woman in their North End neighborhood. In September the older woman scolded Margaret. The woman had previously been accused of casting spells, but the Rules chose not to make any public accusation against her.

Witchcraft

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Margaret grew ill, experiencing fits and falling into a trance. She was feverish and seemingly delusional. Demons tormented her, she said, probably summoned through witchcraft.

Margaret could identify several women among her tormentors. Rule was bedridden and a group of friends stayed with her constantly, praying. The visitors reported some sort of demon, roughly the size of a rat, would occasionally brush against them. One group of visitors swore that while they were with Margaret, she levitated, hovering over her bed.

Margaret Rule Overheats

On September 13, Margaret had attracted the usual crowd at her bedside. The room grew overheated. Margaret fainted, and Mather fanned her with his hat. Margaret had begun to sense information via her spiritual connections, and she correctly predicted the near drowning of a local boy. Cotton Mather had grown irritated that 17 pages of a sermon had been misplaced, and Rule told him that the spirits had told her demons had taken it, but that it would be returned.

In the community, some believed Margaret an oracle, and they wanted to question her more about her visions. Mather stepped in and forbade it. He advised Margaret to stay quiet, fast and pray. She then revealed the names of the people she thought tormented her. She even suggested that Mather might be a witch.

Cotton Mather

For his part, Mather avoided calling Margaret Rule’s illness a case of witchcraft. He probably believed the visions Rule saw were demons. However, he did caution that she might just have delusions.

On September 19, Mather visited Margaret Rule once again. She still felt sick, but she felt she was getting the upper hand in expelling the demons.

Robert Calef Tells a Story

Robert Calef, a Boston cloth merchant, grew weary of the popular obsession with witches. He believed the Mathers, Cotton and his father Increase, and others were dangerously whipping up public hysteria to gain attention for themselves. So he decided to write his own account of the Margaret Rule affair.

In Calef’s retelling (published as More Wonders of the Invisible World), the scene at Margaret Rule’s bedside becomes rather more tawdry. In Calef’s version of events, Margaret Rule looks more like an attention-starved young woman. And the Mathers come off as more manipulative. And, Calef included a shocking detail. He hints that the Mathers put their hands on Margaret when she didn’t have proper covering while she lay in bed. Calef then sent his manuscript to Mather to seek comment. Cotton Mather fired off a letter:

“A false representation it is that I rubbed Rule’s stomach, her breast not being covered,” Mather objected. “You cannot but know how much this representation has contributed to make people believe a smutty thing of me.”

While Calef suggested Mather hoped to whip up another round of witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts, Mather defended himself. He pointed out that he used all his influence with Rule to stop her from naming anyone as a witch.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Nathaniel Eaton, the Sadistic Puritan Who Made Harvard Disappear for a Year

Harvard University got off to a rough start in 1638, when Nathaniel Eaton and his wife led such a reign of terror the school closed down for a year.

There wasn’t much to close down. Harvard was little more than half of John Harvard’s library, a farmhouse and a one-acre cowyard in the middle of Cambridge cow country. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote the college smelled like a stockyard.

“The ammoniacal streams emanating from yarded cattle mingled not inappropriately with odors from Mistress Eaton’s cooking,” wrote Morison.

For the handful of Harvard students, it was hard to say which was worse: beatings from Nathaniel Eaton or dinner from his wife.

Nathaniel Eaton

On Oct. 28, 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Great and General Court ordered the establishment of a college to train ministers. Two years later, a minister named John Harvard died childless and left his library and half his property to the college. For that, the school took his name.

The school also took his friend, Nathaniel Eaton. Eaton, a well-educated Puritan, had just arrived in Massachusetts in 1637 at the age of 28 with his family. His older brother Theophilus Eaton moved on to Connecticut and started the colony of New Haven. Nathaniel Eaton stayed behind in Massachusetts because he had a job as ‘schoolmaster’ at Harvard.

Nathaniel Eaton, mistakenly identified as John Harvard on a cigar box

Cotton Mather called him a rare scholar. Of his students, Mather said, ‘their Education truly was In the School of Tyrannus.”

One student said Eaton was “fitter to have been an officer in the inquisition, or master of an house of correction, than an instructer (sic) of Christian Youth.”

But it was Mrs. Eaton who got him fired.

Court

At the beginning of the second academic year in 1639, Eaton beat his assistant Nathaniel Briscoe for two hours with a cudgel ‘big enough to have killed a horse.’ A neighbor rushed in to save Briscoe’s life, and the victim thanked God that he didn’t die. Eaton then began beating Briscoe again for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

The beating of Briscoe got Nathaniel Eaton hauled into court. And then the airing of students’ complaints began.

It came to light that he routinely whipped his students with 20 to 30 lashes. But the Puritan magistrates, all familiar with the rod, didn’t have much concern about Nathaniel Eaton’s sadistic beatings.

They did, however, find Mrs. Eaton’s cooking inexcusable.

The students accused her of serving hasty pudding laced with goat dung, which she denied. But she did admit she made bread with sour meal. She also served spoiled fish and never, ever served beef, an Englishman’s birthright. Even worse, she would go for an entire week without serving the students beer.

The magistrates dismissed Nathaniel Eaton, and Harvard shut down for the 1639-40 academic year.

The students went home, or studied with a tutor or had fun. Only nine would graduate in 1642. Of those, three would return to Europe.

Nathaniel Eaton spent the rest of his life moving around the world, first to New Hampshire, then Virginia, then to Italy and England, where he died in debtor’s prison.

Henry Dunster took over Harvard as president and put the college on sounder footing, though he, too, had a penchant for beating students.

Images:Nathaniel Eaton on a cigar box: By The Image itself was taken from Harvard’s official website. The individual webpage is presently located at: [1], and the image’s properties there presently are: [2]., PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3082248.

This story about Nathaniel Eaton was updated in 2021.

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Seven of the Best New England Hoaxes

The worst thing about the many hoaxes played upon New Englanders throughout history? How many people fell for them.

Though many hoaxes worked because of their victims’ greed, some were so preposterous it’s hard to understand how anyone could fall for them. One hoax in 1673 was aimed at inflaming religious disputes. Other hoaxes didn’t start off as hoaxes at all.

Here, then, are seven hoaxes that caused plenty of red faces throughout New England history.

The 1773 Old Librarians’ Almanac Hoax

Old Librarians Almanac, one of New England’s bookish hoaxes

The 1773 Old Librarians Almanack included Enoch Sneed’s recipe for cockroach poison and warnings against letting women near the books. It had a preposterous cure for rattlesnake bites and advocated the gallows for book thieves.

Librarian Jared Bean supposedly published the book in New Haven, Conn., following the traditional format of Poor Richard’s almanac. But rather than advice for farmers, Bean’s almanac contained advice for librarians about burning books, protecting books and setting rules for who should be allowed to take out books.

“Be suspicious of Women,” the almanac advised. “They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little.”

One quick read through the Old Librarians Almanack and you might think: This is too good to be true. And you’d be right. The almanac was a work of satirical fiction written in 1910 by librarian and author Edmund Lester Pearson who was born in Newburyport, Mass., served on the library board of trustees there and later lived in New York.

The Outlook magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and the New York Sun praised the rediscovered gem. The Bulletin of Pharmacy even reprinted the snake bite remedy as historical fact. Pearson and his publisher, John Cotton Dana of Woodstock, Vt., disingenuously insisted they didn’t intend the librarians’ almanac as a hoax. R-i-i-i-ght.

To read more about the Old Librarians Almanack hoax, click here.

New England Gold Hoax of 1898

In December of 1897, the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company announced its plans to the world, along with offices in New York, Boston and London. Newspapers quickly spread the news that the company was accepting investors. Soon, it would harvest tons of gold from the sea.

A disillusioned Baptist minister, Prescott Jernegan relentlessly pursued investors among his former schoolmates and acquaintances. The money poured in, mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. The company set up shop and started operations in Lubec, Maine, mostly because of its remote location. There they leased a grist mill, constructed a series of underwater “accumulators” to harvest the gold and employed more than 100 men.

New England Gold Hoax Illustration, New York Herald

To entice investors, Jernegan would take them to the end of a pier and show them his special zinc-lined bucket. The investors would pour mercury into the bucket, and Jernegan would lower it into the ocean. He would then activate a battery that he said would produce the current to allow the mechanism to extract gold from the ocean water.

In actuality, Jernegan’s childhood friend Charles Fisher, a skilled diver, waited underwater. He would follow a line to the bucket and replace the investors’ mercury with mercury infused with gold.

By summer of 1898, the company had taken in nearly $1 million. Even counting the costs of the operation, Jernegan and Fisher were ahead by several hundred thousand dollars.

But when a co-conspirator ratted out Jernegan and Fisher, the jig was up. Fisher disappeared, but the authorities caught up with Jernegan. A good lawyer kept him out of prison, and he spent the rest of his life teaching school in the American West and in the Philippines.

The Secret of the Astor Fortune

Not all hoaxes start off as hoaxes. In 1892, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin Head published a fanciful story in 1892 about the true origin of John Jacob Astor’s fortune. He did it just for fun.

According to the story, the pirate William Kidd buried treasure on land in Deer Isle, Maine, owned by Frederick Law Olmsted’s ancestors. (The landscape architect actually did own land in Deer Isle, and spent one summer there at the end of his life.)

Some hoaxes aren’t really meant to be hoaxes.

According to the story, a trapper stole the treasure chest and, not knowing its actual value, sold it to Astor. William Kidd’s stolen treasure therefore became the basis for the Astor fortune.

In Head’s account, generations later the Olmsteds discovered the theft and sued Astor for compensation. That included back rent on all the Astor Manhattan real estate, which the family could not have purchased without the stolen treasure.

References to Olmsted ancestors Cotton Mather Olmsted and Oliver Cromwell Olmsted suggested the book was a fraud. Nevertheless, Liberty Magazine published the story as true, and it would be told and reprinted many times over the years.

The story surfaced again in 1926 when a California historian presented it as true, and it made its way into newspapers around the world. Not to be outdone, newspapers in the state of Maine even postulated that the state might entitled to recover the treasure, since it would be illegal to sell stolen goods.

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

Charles Lewis Tiffany (left), victim of one of the 19th century’s biggest hoaxes

Two con men came up with a simple ruse: They acquired some industrial grade diamonds and began showing them around as evidence that they had discovered a major diamond mine. As word spread, investors jumped aboard.

Typical of any Ponzi scheme, they took their first investors’ money, about $20,000 worth, and used it to buy more diamonds – scraps from the diamond cutting rooms of Antwerp.

The investors, eager to know exactly what they had found, sent the diamonds to Charles Lewis Tiffany for appraisal. He valued them at an astounding $150,000.

With this new information, the investors, who now included Tiffany himself, pressured the men to sell their mine. The two crooks went to a remote spot in Colorado and salted the area with more cheap diamonds, and then brought the investors to the spot. The investors watched with delight as they pulled diamond after diamond from the ground.

In the end, the investors paid $450,000 for the rights to the mine. By the time a government geologist made a survey and gave them the truth, the con men had long gone.

Though the investors recovered some of their money via the courts, the incident remained an embarrassment for Charles Lewis Tiffany. It was not damaging to his store, however, which remained a symbol of luxury. Read more about Tiffany, a son of Connecticut, here.

The Moon Hoax of 1835

On August 25, 1835, Springfield, Mass., native Benjamin Day began a series of articles in his New York Sun describing life on the moon. Richard Locke, a short, pock-marked editor at the Sun cooked up the idea. To give his stories the whiff of authenticity he claimed they were gleaned from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

Life on the moon, as depicted by the Sun in one of the more preposterous hoaxes ever

In his articles, Locke described the living conditions on the moon as seen through an enormous telescope constructed in South Africa. Sir John Herschel and Dr. Andrew Grant were the scientists who made the observations about life on the moon. Wildlife of all manner populated the moon, which contained lakes and fields. And all of it was overseen by a species of winged man-bat. The scientific inquiry came to an untimely halt when the great telescope the men used caused a fire in their observatory.

The story dragged on for six days, complete with illustrations, and Day’s news hawkers had quite an edge. While competitors were flogging slow news from the dog days of August, the Sun was selling an illustrated look at the moon. Other newspapers began reprinting the story, and it made its way across the country.

Several weeks after publication, the great moon hoax was exposed. But the Sun stuck to its story, never apologizing and never correcting the hoax. The newspaper retained a considerable edge in circulation as its loyal readers returned for more fantastic news. Read more about Benjamin Day and the New York Sun here.

The Roger Williams Portrait Hoax of 1844

In 1844, Daniel Jones published an article about Roger Williams in a Welsh-language journal, and along with it he published a print he said was a likeness of Williams. Thus a legend was born: While in England in 1644 Roger Williams had had a portrait painted of himself. Following the turmoil of the English Revolution, the portrait had made its way to America, along with other belongings of the Duke of York, and been auctioned in New York.

The so-called portrait of Roger Williams

Daniel Jones bought the painting, or so he believed, and offered to give it, along with $500, to any group that would also put up $500 to create a memorial to Roger Williams.

Jones, an enthusiastic admirer of Roger Williams, probably didn’t want to deceive people. Though his claims about the portrait were invariably questioned, it made it into a number of books about Roger Williams.

Rhode Island historian Sidney Rider had his doubts. He undertook an inquiry to examine the facts. Could the portrait be real?

Eventually, Rider and others concluded the painting was a hoax. The portrait undoubtedly celebrated Williams’ life; it showed him seated with the Rhode Island charter and had his books in the background. But a number of problems with the painting – including misspelling in one of the titles of his books – led them to conclude the painting was not authentic.

The painting was perhaps, some conjectured, a poor portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been augmented with the background designed to make it look like a painting of Roger Williams. To read more, click here.

The Mysterious Death of the Rev. Josiah Baxter

In 1673, disturbing news reached London about the ruthless murder of the Rev. Josiah Baxter in Boston.

Baxter was an Anglican minister who had gotten caught up in a public debate with a group of Baptists over their interpretations of the Bible. Baxter had gotten the better of the argument, but his opponents would not let the dispute end there.

Four men followed Baxter to his home. They tied up his wife and children and tortured Baxter in revenge. They literally stripped the skin from his scalp and body until he died.

Benjamin Baxter was so appalled by the murder that he published a pamphlet about the crime to keep his brother’s memory alive in London and warn about the treacherous nature of Baptists.

Publication of the pamphlet triggered a shock wave in England, which was at the time going through wrenching debates over religious tolerance.

Parliament had stymied proposals to give dissenters greater freedom despite considerable support. The broadside against the Baptists reinforced the notion that these Baptists were a threat to civil society.

Two Bostonians arrived in London then, and told the mayor that not only had the murder not occurred, no one had been murdered in Boston. What’s more, the Rev. Josiah Baxter didn’t exist.

Samuel Parker, bishop of Oxford, admitted he published the pamphlet, but couldn’t produce Benjamin Baxter. He denied he had anything to do with any hoaxes, but only conceded he had accepted the story as true too quickly.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The High Tide Storm of 1723: ‘Ye Mightyest Overflowing of Ye Sea’

During the High Tide Storm of 1723, the waters rose so high and so fast that worshipers were marooned in their meeting houses. In the Massachusetts towns of Marblehead and Salem, people climbed trees to avoid drowning.

Cotton Mather

The extraordinary tide overflowed marshes, changed the coastline and swept mighty haystacks out to sea.

Cotton Mather wrote a paper on the High Tide Storm for the Royal Society of London. In it, he called the damage to Boston ‘inexpressible.’

But the Boston News-Letter gave such a ridiculous explanation for the high waters that young Ben Franklin had a field day mocking it in his own New England Courant.

Franklin (center) working on a printing press. Reproduction of a painting by Charles Mills.

High Tide Storm of 1723

Mather noted in his paper that the moon had reached its perigee, that is, nearest to earth, on Feb. 23, 1723, the day before the storm.

The tide came in at night, and the next day rose two feet higher than anyone could remember. Mather’s fellow Puritans made it to the meeting house for Thursday Lecture, but couldn’t leave because seawater surrounded the building.

“There was a great fall of snow and rain, the temper of the air was cool and moist, and such as contributed unto a mighty descent of vapours,” wrote Mather. He speculated that ‘a cloudy atmosphere’ may have helped the waters swell, and he noted a high wind blew hard and long from the south. That pushed a vast quantity of seawater to northern shores.

Then the wind veered eastward, and brought the water from that direction. Finally the high wind moved north, bringing still more water.

The High Tide Storm ‘raised the tide unto an height which had never been seen in the memoray of man among us,’ Mather wrote. In fact, the tide in Boston reached a record 15.5 feet, a height not exceeded for 125 years.

Dedham minister Samuel Dexter in his diary called it “ye mightyest overflowing of ye sea.”

The tide rose two feet or three feet above Long Wharf, flowed over all the other wharves and rose to such a surprising height that Bostonians could sail in boats from Rowe’s Wharf to Merchants Row near what is now Faneuil Hall. The waters filled all the cellars and the floors of the lower rooms of houses and warehouses in the town.

Boston around 1730, several years after the High Tide Storm inundated the town.

Big Four

The High Tide Storm caused the Bay side of Cape Cod to rise four feet and the Atlantic side to rise a dozen feet higher than ever recorded, Mather wrote. It destroyed Chatham Harbor and filled the cut in Gloucester (now the Blynman Canal). The cut remained closed for a century.

Rhode Island and Portsmouth, N.H., fared as badly as Boston. In Portland, the storm caused so much damage to wharves and warehouses that merchants didn’t recover financially for almost a lifetime, wrote Edward Rowe Snow.

Snow called the High Tide Storm of 1723 one of the ‘big four’ New England storms. They also included the Colonial Hurricane of 1635, the Great September Gale of 1815 and the Hurricane of 1938.

Hampton, N.H.

In Hampton, N.H., the sea broke over the sand dunes for many miles and continued running over for hours. Joseph Dow, in his history of Hampton, described how the High Tide Storm destroyed miles of flats and swept enormous hay ricks out to sea.

On a tract known as Huckleberry Flats, he wrote, hassocks had firmly frozen, and then the High Tide Storm struck.

“The surging waters soon found a way under the thick, hard-frozen crust on the flats, and raising and breaking up a large portion of it,” he wrote. Then they bore the fragments over the marshes, until they found a resting place, or swept them into the ocean.

The storm created a pond of several acres over the former Huckleberry Flats.

Weather Report

When the tides finally receded, the Boston newspapers reported on the High Tide Storm. To Ben Franklin’s delight, the Boston News-Letter speculated that Boston’s wharves had displaced so much water they contributed to the ‘Rise of Water.’

Franklin retorted, “some begin to blame the Dutch for damming out the sea, and sending the Tide over the Atlantic upon us.

“Some more reasonably conclude,” he wrote, “that a large Fleet of Ships have been sunk in the Storm off our Coast…which occasion’d the rising of the tide.”

This story about the High Tide Storm of 1723 was updated in 2023.

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