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great awakening

Thomas Prince, New England’s First History Nut

[jpshare]Perhaps Thomas Prince can be forgiven for taking eight years to write about the first decade of New England’s history, since he started with Adam, as in Adam and Eve.

He was a Puritan minister in Boston who became infatuated with history at a young age. He is considered a pioneer of historical writing because he relied on original texts and strove for accuracy. He influenced future historians such as Jeremy Belknap and Thomas Hutchinson (who was also governor of Massachusetts Bay).

Thomas Prince was born May 15, 1687 in Sandwich, Mass., the fourth child of Samuel Prince and Mercy Hinkley. He graduated from Harvard in 1707 and then began work on his master’s degree.

Thomas Prince, Historian

Thomas Prince

When he was in Harvard, he happened to read about the Cottonian Library, a private book collection that formed the foundation of the British Library. It excited in Prince ‘a zeal of laying hold of every book, pamphlet, and paper, both in print and manuscript, which are either written by persons who lived here, or that have any tendency to enlighten our history.’

In 1709 he began two years of travel, to the West Indies and Madeira, then went to England where he preached until 1717. Homesick, he returned to Boston, where he was ordained in 1718. He was appointed pastor of the Old South Meeting House.

During his foreign travels, he wrote that he ‘found the want of a regular history of this country every where complained of,’ and he decided to write it himself.

He began work on A Chronological History of New England, in the Form of Annals in 1728. He didn’t finish the first volume until 1736, which only recorded events to Sept. 7, 1630. His publisher told him the book was getting too big to be published. It did not sell.

Prince soldiered on with a second three-volume set, which went up to 1633. “I have done my utmost, first to find out the truth, and then to relate it in the clearest order,” he wrote. “I have laboured after accuracy, and yet I dare not say that I am without mistake.”

His work contains painstaking detail once it finishes with the history of mankind. He worked hard at pinning down exact dates. For example, on May 16, 1631: “An alarm to all our towns in the night, by a piece shot off; [but where, could not be known] and the Indians having sent us word the day before that the Mohawks are coming down against them and us.”

On July 22, 1631, “The White Angel comes into the bay, (and) lands their twenty-one heifers.”

His history ends in 1633. In the 1740s he got involved with the First Great Awakening, inviting George Whitefield to preach in Boston.

Prince spent his life collecting historical manuscripts, which he stored in the steeple of Old South Meeting House. During the American Revolution, British soldiers scattered the invaluable collection in the streets of Boston before evacuating the city.

The town of Princeton, Mass., was named after him because of his reputation and his ownership of land within the town.

Thomas Prince died on Aug. 22, 1758.

This story was updated in 2017.

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The Puritan Divorce Allows Escape From the Chain of Matrimony

When Elizabeth Luxford found out her husband James already had a wife, she went straight to the Court of Assistants in Massachusetts Bay Colony. She then got the first-ever Puritan divorce in December 1639.

A Puritan economic unit

Only the very privileged could obtain a divorce back in England because the Anglican church viewed marriage as indissoluble. Henry VIII was the rare person who could get four marriages dissolved. In England, the only way out of a troubled marriage was a ‘bed-and-board’ separation.

Not the Puritans. They rejected the Anglican and Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament, thinking it a ‘popish invention, with no basis in the Gospels.’ They redefined marriage as a civil matter only. If a marriage partner violated the marriage agreement, the injured party could escape the chains of matrimony with a Puritan divorce.

Magistrates often ordered harsh punishments for the guilty party in a divorce, including fines, whipping or time in the stocks. The guilty party could not marry again, though the injured party could.

The Puritan Divorce

In 1620, Plimoth Plantation leaders decided marriage belonged to the courts, not to the church. Therefore, they concluded, the courts could grant a Puritan divorce. As governor, William Bradford said marriage should be ‘performed by the magistrate, as being a civil thing.’

The Massachusetts Bay Puritans gave the governor’s council, known as the Court of Assistants, the power to decide divorce cases.

That’s where Elizabeth Luxford went to ask for the first divorce in Massachusetts Bay, but also in colonial America. She already had a daughter with James Luxford, and she was pregnant with their second child.

A magistrate not only granted the divorce, but seized James Luxford’s property and gave it to Elizabeth. Luxford probably left his first wife in England, which wasn’t all that unusual. The court would not have given his property to Elizabeth if his first wife lived in Massachusetts, because that would reduce the first wife to poverty.

The magistrate gave a harsh sentence to James Luxford for his Puritan divorce.

He could not come within sight of Elizabeth, and he had to sit in the stock for an hour. He also had to pay court fines of 100 pounds. Finally, the court banished him from Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Luxford, who changed her name back to Albone, was well rid of him. He later was later found guilty of ‘forgery, lying, and other foul offences.’ The court sentenced him to a whipping, to have his ears cut off and to be –again — banished. He fled to Plimoth Plantation, where he lived in extreme poverty and distress. She remarried and enjoyed the beneficence of the church in Cambridge.

New England Divorces

The guilty party in a Puritan divorce.

The next Puritan divorce didn’t happen for another five years, when Anne Clarke’s husband deserted her to live with another woman. The grandfather of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards got a divorce.

Massachusetts granted 31 of the 40 petitions for divorce or annulment in the 53 years after 1639, when Elizabeth’s Luxford got divorced.

Most divorces resulted from desertion or infidelity. Lovelessness could not be grounds for divorce. If husband and wife didn’t love each other, Puritans expected them to stick together as an economic unit.

Uncleane Yoake-Fellow

A woman had a harder time than a man to get a Puritan divorce for adultery. In 1655, Joan Halsall got a divorce after she charged her husband George with ‘abusing himself with Hester Lug.’ She also called him ‘an uncleane yoake-fellow.’ Four years later, George Halsell appealed the divorce to the General Court. The General Court sided with George, voiding the divorce and declaring he could ‘have and enjoy’ Joan Halsall again.

Connecticut had the most liberal divorce policy in the British empire. The General Assembly ordered that ‘no bill of divorce shall be granted to any man or woman lawfully marryed but in case of adultery, fraudulent contract, or willfull desertion for three years with totall negelect of duty, or seven years’ providentiall absence being not heard of after due enquiry made and certifyed.’

Rhode Island in 1650 passed a law allowing divorces on the grounds of adultery, and later on the grounds of desertion and impotence. Rhode Island would later emerge as the divorce capital of New England.

In New Haven, the law granted divorce for adultery, desertion or a husband’s failure to perform his ‘conjugall duty’ to his wife.

No Wife-Like Affection

John Vffoote’s wife Hannah Beard divorced him for ‘insufficiency’ (impotence) in 1657. Later he went to court on charges he fornicated with his father’s servant, Martha Netleton. Vffoote defended himself by saying Hannah didn’t act ‘toward him as she ought.’ Martha, on the other hand, restored his faith in himself, he said.

Testimony revealed Hannah thought John a ‘foole’ and felt no ‘wife-like affection for him.’ John and Martha had to pay a fine for fornicating, but they could marry (and then fornicate).

An African-American in Massachusetts could get a Puritan divorce. In 1768, a free African-American woman named Lucy Purnan asked for a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Her husband had kidnapped her by force and sold her as a slave. She got the divorce.

With thanks to Divorce: An American Tradition By Glenda Riley. This story about the Puritan divorce was updated in 2023.

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Jonathan Edwards Loses His Pulpit Over Bad Books

Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan theologian, helped ignite a religious revival known as the First Great Awakening across the 13 colonies. He converted ‘many hundreds’ to his church – and then he got fired from his job.

Jonathan Edwards

It all started when he tried to discipline some young men in his church. He caught them with bad books that ‘promoted lascivious and obscene Discourse among the young People.’

Those same young men had been among Edwards’ first converts. Apparently they fell back asleep.

The 1st Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening made it exciting to go to church. It drew the colonies together in the first major event they all shared. And it challenged established authority, preaching that God viewed all as equal.

Those two developments get credit for paving the way for the American Revolution.

Benjamin Franklin, commenting on the impact of the First Great Awakening, wrote,

…it seem’d as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street…

Jonathan Edwards helped start it all.

Beginnings

Jonathan Edwards was born Oct. 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Conn., the only son of the 12 children of a minister and a minister’s daughter. He entered Yale at 12 and graduated at 17, then studied theology for two more years.

From his boyhood, he struggled with the Puritan idea that God predestines people for salvation. His own conversion experience solved the problem for him. He described how he experienced a personal, emotional connection to God:

…in my father’s pasture, I looked up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God that I know not how to express it. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything, in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers and trees, in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind.

In 1727 he married 17-year-old Sarah Pierpont, who possessed remarkable piety and common sense. Edwards wrote of her,

She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly and seems always to be full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what!?

They then had 11 children.

Northampton

Jonathan Edwards

That same year he became assistant pastor to his grandfather’s church in Northampton, Mass. Two years later his grandfather died and he found himself sole pastor of one of the largest and most influential parishes in New England.

In 1733, his sermons sparked a revival in Northampton that resulted in 300 converts to the church over the next few years. The religious fervor spread up and down the Connecticut River Valley.

The revival took a dark turn in 1735, when the revivals unsettled some New Englanders, but didn’t convert them. They grew despondent over their inevitable damnation, and at least two took their own lives. One suicide was Jonathan Edwards’ own parishioner and uncle, Joseph Hawley. The revival cooled for a while.

In 1740, Edwards helped arrange a visit to America by George Whitefield, the British evangelical minister who spread the First Great Awakening throughout the American colonies.

The First Great Awakening again gathered momentum, and on July 8, 1741 Jonathan Edwards preached one of his greatest sermons, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in Enfield, Conn. Today it is considered a classic of American literature.

“Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering,” he preached. His voice was mild but his message was so powerful his listeners gripped their pews.

Though vast multitudes of God’s enemies lock arms together, they are easily broken in pieces. They are like dandelions blowing in the wind, or a large dry field in the path of a wild brush fire. It is easy for us to step on and squish a worm that we see crawling on the ground, or cut a tiny thread holding something together. It is that easy for God, when He pleases, to cast His enemies down to hell.

‘Didn’t Care a Turd’

In the spring of 1744, Edwards learned about 10 young men who had passed around a midwifery book detailing the anatomy of women. Worse, they made lewd wisecracks about what nasty creatures women were. Edwards brought the matter to the church brethren, who appointed a committee. The committee deliberated while the young men waited in an anteroom. They played leapfrog, climbed a ladder to peek at women waiting upstairs and finally left to drink flip at a tavern. One of the young men said he would not ‘worship a wig,’ that he didn’t ‘care a turd’ for the committee because they were ‘nothing but men, molded up of a little dirt.’

Several of the young men confessed to disrespecting authority, and the matter seemed closed.

But it wasn’t.

The incident showed how Jonathan Edward’s influence was waning, for he had converted the young men in the first years of the Great Awakening. He made matters worse by refusing to continue his grandfather’s practice of allowing communion to anyone who had been baptized. Edwards only served communion to converts. For four years, no one joined his church.

Finally, a candidate came forward to join the church in 1748. Edwards insisted he meet formal tests that he had devised, and the candidate refused. The church backed the candidate, and on June 22, 1750 a vote was taken on whether Jonathan Edwards should continue as pastor. By a vote of 230 to 23, he was fired.

Jonathan Edwards 2.0

After he lost his pulpit in 1750, he was named pastor to the church in Stockbridge, Mass., and missionary to the Housatonic Indians. There he wrote the book The Life of David Brainerd, a missionary who died in his home. The book inspired thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century.

In 1758, Jonathan Edwards accepted the position of president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) to replace his son-in-law, the Rev. Aaron Burr, who died. He moved to Princeton, N.J., in January 1758. As the town required, he was inoculated against smallpox, but died of the disease March 22, 1758.

His descendants include his grandson, Aaron Burr, Yale College President Timothy Dwight, First Lady Edith Roosevelt, writer O. Henry, Margaret Van Horne Dwight Bell and poet Robert Lowell.

George Whitefield preaching

This story about Jonathan Edwards was updated in 2022.

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Elizabeth Whitman – The Mysterious Coquette of 1788

Elizabeth Whitman arrived at the Bell Tavern in Danvers, Mass., in the late spring of 1788. Refined, pleasant and beautiful, she was also pregnant. Whitman checked into the tavern under the name of Walker.

Elizabeth Whitman, as depicted in The Coquette.

She came from Connecticut, she told the innkeeper, and said her husband would join her. On July 25, she died in childbirth. She and her stillborn baby were buried.

Her true identity was only discovered when an acquaintance read of her mysterious death in the Salem Mercury. He then came forward to untangle the mystery of her passing.

Her father, Elnathan Whitman, preached as a minister at the Second Church in Hartford until his death in 1777. She had one brother. Sympathetic friends had probably helped her travel to Danvers via Watertown, Mass.

Did the 36-year-old expectant mother expect to be joined there by the father of her child? Poems that she left behind suggest she was waiting for someone. But who?

Elizabeth Whitman, Coquette

Outside of a few nervous households in Connecticut, the story dropped out of sight. But Whitman’s cousin decided not to let it lie. In 1797, Hannah Webster Foster published The Coquette or, The History of Eliza Wharton. Many recognized the personalities involved, as the novel only thinly disguised the death of Elizabeth Whitman. The book, a bestseller, went through multiple printings. But not until 1864, well after her death, did Foster’s name appear as the author.

The book tells the tale of Eliza Wharton. Engaged to a young minister, Eliza becomes infatuated with a rakish womanizer called Major Sanford. Sanford also feels an attraction to Wharton. He decides to marry a wealthier girl, but continues showing attention to Eliza.

Eliza’s fiancé breaks off the engagement, and leaves her with a warning about her lover: “Banish him from your society if you wish to preserve your virtue unsullied, your character unsuspicious. It already begins to depreciate. Snatch it from the envenomed tongue of slander before it receive an incurable wound.”

The book follows the true story as far as Eliza goes. The girl dies pregnant, much mourned by her friends. Major Sanford, meanwhile, is left by his wife and slinks off to some place where his name is not known. His final word: “Let it warn you, my friend, to shun the dangerous paths which I have trodden.”

The wildly popular book, the first American novel written by a woman, was seen as a powerful lesson against the loose morals that led Eliza and Sanford to ruin.

The Real Story

Portrait of Pierpont Edwards

The real life story ended quite differently from the book, however. While Elizabeth Whitman did in fact break her engagement to a minister, and died much mourned, the fate of Major Sanford took a very different course from the book.

Who was Sanford in real life? Pierpont Edwards, son of the firebrand preacher Jonathan Edwards. Pierpont Edwards was second cousin to Elizabeth Whitman and undoubtedly charming. He married long before the events of the story took place, but he had a reputation for loose morality.

While theologian Jonathan Edwards helped instigate the Great Awakening of 1735, preaching and practicing morality, his offspring sowed plenty of wild oats.

Some have questioned whether the younger Edwards actually fathered Elizabeth Whitman’s child. Connecticut state librarian Charles Hoadley theorized the father was U.S. Sen. James Watson, president of the New England Society in the City of New York. Others suggested Aaron Burr, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, who had other illegitimate children.

Pierpont Edwards

But The Coquette‘s introduction naming Edwards as the father seems very much in character. Edwards’ escapades were well documented. He had two illegitimate children with his sister-in-law. He apparently started the affair with his wife’s sister while the girl hadn’t gotten out of her teens.

The matter seemed not to trouble the family much, except when the man who Edwards hired to raise one child began to extort him. He threatened to return the child if Edwards didn’t pay him.

Edwards turned to Burr and Timothy Dwight, future president of Yale, to help with the cover-up and to find a new home for the child.

Nevertheless, neither the shame of that incident nor the death of Elizabeth Whitman hindered his career. Pierpont attained great success as a member of the Continental Congress and U.S. Senate. Among other achievements, Thomas Jefferson appointed him to a seat on the U.S. District Court.

Tourists for many years visited the grave of Elizabeth Whitman in the Old South Cemetery in what is now Peabody, Mass. They chipped away so much of the stone that a new tombstone was erected next to it, and now belongs to the Literacy Trail of Massachusetts.

This story about Elizabeth Whitman was updated in 2024.

Image of the Bell Tavern from The Elizabeth Whitman mystery at the old Bell tavern in Danvers by Charles Knowles Bolton via the Internet Archive.

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