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Plymouth Mass.

Abigail Adams Vents to Mercy Otis Warren About John

In the spring of 1776, Mercy Otis Warren received a letter from her good friend Abigail Adams complaining about her husband John.

Though she loved John, Abigail resented her subordinate position to him. She had included her now-famous reminder, “Remember the ladies,” in a letter to him. Perhaps she expected a sympathetic response. Instead, John Adams made fun of her.

Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley. Courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Abigail shared her hurt with her friend Mercy Otis Warren.

Though 16 years younger than Mercy, she had much in common with her. Both witnessed and recorded the American Revolution. They both made passionate commitments to the cause. And both lived on the South Shore of Massachusetts: Abigail in Braintree, Mercy in Plymouth.

Mercy Otis Warren

Mercy Otis Warren was born Sept. 25, 1728 in Barnstable, Mass., where a statue of her now stands in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse. Her parents educated her with her Harvard-bound brother James Otis. When she married James Warren, her brother and her husband encouraged her to write poetry and essays satirizing the colonial government. That she then did.

The Warren home frequently attracted such patriot leaders as Sam Adams, his cousin John and Mercy’s brother-in-law, Joseph Warren.

Abigail Adams met Mercy Otis Warren in the spring of 1773, when she accompanied John to a court session in Plymouth. Like Abigail, the elegant and erudite Mercy had five children. Abigail and Mercy hit it off, and the Adamses and Warrens would meet often in the coming years.

Abigail Adams

At that first meeting, Abigail was 28 and Mercy was 44. Mercy then wrote to Abigail afterward, which flattered her and began a long friendship and correspondence.

Correspondence

In 1776, John Adams represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Abigail wrote to him on March 31, eager to hear about the new code of laws she presumed he worked on. She then urged him to remember the ladies.

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

“That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute,” she wrote. But, she added, those of you who wish to be happy can give up the “harsh title of Master” for the “more tender and endearing one of Friend.”

“‘Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams’ most famous comment, didn’t impress her husband. Not one little bit.

‘I Cannot But Laugh’

In his reply on April 14, 1776, he mocked her plea for women’s rights:

As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient — that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent — that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.–This is rather too coarse a Compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

Bronze sculpture of Mercy Otis Warren in front of the Barnstable County Courthouse

Sausy John

Abigail didn’t think much of her husband’s reply. On April 27, 1776, Abigail vented her frustration about John to Mercy Otis Warren.

“He is very sausy to me,” she wrote. “I think I will get you to join me in a petition to Congress.”

She indignantly repeated his comments, then wrote,

I will tell him I have only been making trial of the Disintersstedness of his Virtue, and when weigh’d in the balance have found it wanting.

Her friend’s reply — if she did reply — disappeared.

Abigail waited 10 days after she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren to compose her reply to her husband:

I can not say that I think you very generous to all the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining and absolute power over Wives.

And then she reminded him that arbitrary power, like most other very hard things, can be broken.

…notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet –

This story about Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams was updated in 2022. Image of Mercy Otis Warren statue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32733257.

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Mad Jack Oldham Starts the Pequot War

War between the early English colonists of New England and the Native Americans already here was perhaps unavoidable, though it wasn’t the goal of the Pilgrims when they crossed the Atlantic. But then Mad Jack Oldham changed everything.

John Oldham was an early arrival to the new colony in 1623. He, his wife and his sister arrived aboard the Anne, and religious intentions did not drive him to America. Rather, at age 21, it was ambition that fueled him. He had come to make a fortune in the new world.

William Bradford

Men unaffiliated with the Pilgrim religious cause had come to America “on their particular,” Plymouth’s governor William Bradford would write. Without an affiliation with the Pilgrims, Oldham and others like him agreed to abide by the Pilgrims’ laws. They would pay taxes and participate in defending the burgeoning colony. They would also refrain from trading with the American Indians.

In the Pilgrims’ plan, peaceful trade with the Indians would support their economy. It would provide the profit England wanted, and they had to handle it delicately. Men like Jack Oldham and the other ‘particulars’ were to keep to selling and reselling goods to the settlers in Plymouth and along coastal New England.

Jack Oldham, Troublemaker

The Mayflower

Oldham and 10 other “particulars” almost immediately started trouble. Oldham refused to stand watch, provoked Miles Standish and raged at him as a ‘beggarly rascal.’ With little in common with the Pilgrims, Oldham’s pugnacious nature came to define him.

Shortly after arriving, Oldham and other malcontents wrote to England of their complaints against the Pilgrims. He criticized the new, godly world they were trying to construct. And he complained of their religious practices, the bad water, thievery in the community and too many mosquitoes.

Bradford intercepted Oldham’s letters. When they were shipped to England a reply to the complaints from Bradford accompanied them. He wrote a point-by-point rebuttal and the sarcastic observation that men like Oldham were “too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies . . . till at least they be mosquito-proof.”

Jack Oldham was furious when he learned Bradford had intercepted his letters, and his angry and quarrelsome nature sealed his fate.

Banishment

While the Pilgrims needed manpower and knew there was strength in numbers, they weren’t desperate enough to need a man like Oldham. They banished him from Plymouth in 1624. At first, Oldham flourished under his new freedom. Liberated from the Pilgrims’ taxes and rules, he settled at Nantasket and would go on to be one of the founders of Wethersfield, Conn.

He traded profitably with the Indians, as well as other settlers, and even gained positions in Massachusetts’ early government. But his demeanor got the best of him. Fellow outcast Thomas Morton described him as “a mad jack in his mood.”

In July 1636, American Indians, probably Narragansetts, waylaid his ship on a trading trip to Block Island. They killed Jack Oldham and several members of his crew. His two nephews returned to land.

The death of Mad Jack Oldham was a flashpoint in the ongoing friction between some of the Indians and the colonists over trade and other matters.

Gov. Endecott invades Block Island

The Narragansetts convinced the colonists that the Pequot tribe harbored the Indians who killed Jack Oldham. Though it was perfectly plausible that Jack Oldham provoked the fight that killed him, ministers throughout Massachusetts spoke out against the murders. Massachusetts Governor John Endecott was ordered to retaliate.

Ninety men invaded Block Island, and killed one Indian there. Thus started the Pequot War, which wouldn’t end until 1638.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Story of How Hebrew Almost Became the Official U.S. Language

Just after the American Revolution, an English essayist named William Gifford reported that some Americans planned to substitute Hebrew as the official language of the United States.

Ezra Stiles

Gifford got the story from an aide to Comte de Rochambeau, Marquis de Chastellux, who had traveled in America in 1780.

“In the rebellion of the Colonies, a member of that state seriously proposed to Congress the putting down of the English language by law, and decreeing the universal adoption of Hebrew in its stead,” Gifford wrote.

There were good reasons to believe his story. For one, some people believed a linguistic separation would follow the political separation of the United States from Great Britain.

For another, the New England Puritans brought with them a prejudice toward the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament.

New World Israelites

William Bradford

The New England Puritans identified with the Israelites who escaped Pharoah’s oppression by crossing the sea. They viewed the Scriptures as the ultimate authority, and they took their laws from the Old Testament.

William Bradford taught himself Hebrew because he wanted to read the Scriptures in their original language. His gravestone says, in Hebrew, “The Lord is the help of my life.”

And, of course, the Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Appropriately, Plymouth’s Jewish community in 1913 built a synagogue three blocks from Plymouth Rock.

Newport

Newport, R.I., became a center of Jewish settlement in the late 17^th century. George Washington in 1790 wrote a letter to the congregation of Newport’s Touro Synagogue. In it, he pledged ‘no assistance to persecution.’

Clement C. Moore, a Hebrew scholar, spent summers at his home in Newport. He wasn’t happy that his reputation rested on his poem A Visit From St. Nicholas. Moore put more store in his first American Hebrew dictionary, which he published in 1809.

Clement Moore

Ezra Stiles served as pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Newport before he became president of Yale College. He befriended Rabbi Haim Isaac Carigal, who helped him improve his Hebrew.

Stiles sometimes gets credit for proposing that Hebrew replace English as the official language of the United States of America.

Hebrew Schools

As Yale president, Stiles made a course in Hebrew a freshman requirement. By then, the Hebrew words Urim and Thummim (the oracular will of God) were already on the Yale seal, along with the Latin Lux et Veritas (light and truth).

Harvard also taught Hebrew since the 1720s, and so did William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Columbia College in New York required all teachers to know Hebrew.

Noah Webster

During the American Revolution, feelings against the English ran high. As part of a new nation some Americans wanted to establish a separate identity from England.

“The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority,” wrote H.L. Mencken.

Mencken believed that the Englishman William Gifford, as editor of the Quarterly Review, started the story. Gifford hated the United States and, Mencken thought, wanted to mock the new country by claiming it supported Hebrew as its official language.

The story persisted, though, and appeared in The Cambridge History of American Language.

In the end, Noah Webster helped create a uniquely American language. He set the standard for American English with his blue-backed speller and dictionary.

Wrote Mencken,

Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect.

This story about Hebrew replacing English as the official U.S. language was updated in 2022. You may also want to read about the oldest synagogues in New England each state here.

Image of Touro Synagogue By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527504.

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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 2022.

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Tiny Militia Captures Crew of Huge British Warship HMS Somerset

In one of the most remarkable engagements of the American Revolution, the tiny militia of Truro captured more than 400 sailors and marines from the massive British warship HMS Somerset.

It was probably the smallest military unit to take one of the biggest prizes of the war.

The militiamen had some help from Mother Nature. A fierce nor’easter that killed several dozen Cape Codders also hurled the Somerset onto the dreaded shoals near what is now Highland Light.

HMS Agamemnon, similar to the HMS Somerset

HMS Somerset

The Somerset had a long and storied history in North America before crashing on shore outside of Provincetown on Nov. 2, 1778.

Launched in 1748, she was one of the British Navy’s ships of the line. She had 64 cannons and her crew of about 480 included Royal Marines.

Somerset saw action in the French and Indian War at the capture of the Fortress at Louisbourg and Quebec City.

During the American Revolution, the HMS Somerset played a role documented in part by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Then he said ‘Good-night!’ and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Somerset rescued British troops from the American militias.

She was the flagship of the British fleet at the Battle of Bunker Hill, though the broadsides she fired at patriot forces didn’t do much harm.

Somerset bombarding Bunker Hill

In 1777, Somerset took part in the Siege of Fort Mifflin, in which British ships captured forts along the Delaware River in order to provision the British forces holding Philadelphia.

The Wreck

By the autumn of 1778, Cape Codders had suffered at the hands of the British fleet. Fishing and whaling vessels stayed in harbor rather than risk capture by the British and having their crews pressed into service by the navy. The British also blockaded the import of staple goods like cloth, flour and sugar. Most able-bodied men were fighting the war or serving on privateers.

Somerset, under the command of Capt. George Ourry, was sailing from New York to confront the French fleet in Boston Harbor.

Highland Light, near the site of the Somerset wreck. By Edward Hopper, courtesy Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund.

Then, on Monday, Nov. 2, 1778, Somerset got caught up in a deadly nor’easter. Waves crashed over her decks and her sails ripped to shreds. The ship ran aground on Peaked Hill Bars. Then she lost her rudder and broke open at the stern.

Somerset sat 600 feet from the beach as huge waves crashed over her decks. The crew cut away the masts and threw cannons overboard, hoping to lighten the ship enough so it would float off the sandbar and closer to shore.

By Tuesday morning, everyone in town knew about the wreck, but the surf was so high, no one could board it. By afternoon, three boats came from Somerset, but one sank, drowning 21 men. Capt. Ourry, in the second boat, asked for the principal man. When told it was Isaiah Atkins, a selectman, Ourry handed him his sword and said, “Save the men and the ship will be yours.”

Plunder

By Wednesday the storm subsided enough that the Somerset crew could come ashore safely. Several hundred men and women of Truro, eager to plunder the wreck, met them on shore. Schoolteacher John Greenough described the scene:

Almost all the inhabitants of Truro came down to the wreck, they say as militia, although I could never learn that they were in any military arrangement nor under any command, order or discipline…Others were trading with the seamen for clothing, etc., brought from the ship; and a great number cutting up and carrying off sails, rigging, etc.

Paul Revere

The warship, one of the two biggest British ships destroyed in the American Revolution, made quite a prize. Massachusetts authorities stepped in before the Cape Codders could pick the wreck clean. Two schooners and four sloops sailed to Cape Cod to salvage what they could for the war effort. Sixteen cannons were entrusted to Lt. Col. Paul Revere for fortification at Castle Island in Boston.

Today, houses built with timbers from the ship that once bombarded Bunker Hill still stand on Cape Cod.

The Long March

On Wednesday night, three or four unarmed militia men under the command of Capt. Enoch Hallett escorted the 400-odd sailors and marines off the beach. They went to the homes of Truro’s 250 families for shelter during the night.

Massachusetts gave the Somerset officers the courtesy of taking them to Boston by ship. However the men – many bleeding and hurt – had to march 120 miles from the tip of Cape Cod to Boston in the winter cold. They had little food, and the storm had soaked the Somerset’s provisions. When asked how to feed them, the Governor’s Council responded,

If you have not bread for the prisoners
let them live without as many better
men have done before them.

Local militias escorted the prisoners off the Cape, and the towns bore the cost of feeding them. The ragged horde passed through Eastham, Harwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich. Once they left Sandwich, the Cape militiamen decided their part of the journey had ended. Plymouth raised a company of 28 men to guard the prisoners, but some managed to wander off to freedom.

Sheriffs were dispatched to round up the missing sailors and marines. Traffic sentinels stood guard from the outskirts of Plymouth to Boston.

Fate of the Somerset Crew

When they arrived in Boston, a special guard set up at Boston Neck took them to their new home: a decrepit old French hulk called the Penet.

1886 photo of the wreck of the Somerset

The Somerset’s purser, Edward Cyron, was an old man injured in the wreck. He collapsed during the march and disappeared for several days. On December 5 he petitioned for his release, which was granted. Many of the British sailors and marines were exchanged for American prisoners. Fourteen volunteered to join the American forces and were accepted.

The wreck was buried in the sands, its skeleton exposed by storms and erosion only three times: in 1886, 1973 and 2010. The last time it happened, the National Park Service assumed the timbers would slip beneath the sands again. It recorded an image of the remains using three-dimensional imaging technology.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Epitaphs Tell More Tales in New England’s Graveyards

The epitaphs in New England’s graveyards tell many tales. Carved into the chiseled stone are stories of people who lived long rich lives and babies who breathed only hours; lives tragically cut short by accident or misfortune and lives that grew weary.

Old Town Burying Ground, Sandwich, Mass.

Such a one was Roswell Stowell who died Dec. 2, 1875, age 60, in Chesterfield, N.H. His epitaph reads,

Let no one stand behind my grave,
Now that I am called to rest,
Nor shed a tear that I am gone,
For what I need is rest.

Rest from the weary load of care,
Rest from the wearing pain:
For Death shall ever be to me
An everlasting gain.

I know the road was bright and fair
Or once it seemed to be.
But it has changed so much of late,
It has few charms for me.

Soon Rotten

Mary Fowler probably wouldn’t have appreciated her epitaph upon her death at age 24 in Milford, Conn.

Molly tho’ pleasant in her day
Was suddenly seized and went away
How soon she’s ripe, how soon she’s rotten
Laid in her grave and soon forgotten.

Capt. E. Griffin, 1767, Madison, Conn., lies under this verse on his tombstone:

The Boreas’ blasts and Boistrous waves
Have tost me too and fro
In spite of both, by God’s decree
I harbor here below.

While I do now At Anchor ride
With many of our Fleet
Yet once again I must set Sail
My Admiral Christ to meet.

Another ship captain, Augustus N. Littlefield, who died at 75 in 1878 in Newport, R.I., had something else to boast about. His tombstone reads,

An experienced and careful master
Mariner who never made a call upon
Underwriters for any loss.

Ephraim Wales Bull, who developed the Concord grape, received no rewards for his effort — something his epitaph reflects:

Ephraim Wales Bull
The originator of the Concord Grape
Born in Boston March 4, 1806
Died in Concord September 26, 1895
He sowed, others reaped.

One epitaph in a Boston burying ground recounts the patriotic career of a Son of Liberty:

Here lies buried in a
Stone Grave 10 feet deep
Capt Daniel Malcom Mercht
Who departed this Life
October 23d 1769
Aged 44 Years.

A true son of Liberty
A Friend to the Publick
An Enemy to oppression
And one of the foremost
In opposing the Revenue Acts
On America

Editorializing

This epitaph is an artifact of the baby boom that populated the colonies:

Litchfield, Conn.
Here lies the body of Mrs. Mary wife
Of Dea. John Buel Esq. She died
Nov. 4 1768 AEtat. 90
Having had 13 children
101 grand-children
274 great-grand-children
49 great-great-grand-children
410 Total. 336 survived her.

And in Duxbury, Mass, a gravestone reads:

Asenath
Widow of
Simeon Soule
Died
Feb. 25, 1865
Aged
87 years, 11 mo.
19 days.

The Chisel can’t help her any.

Score-settling epitaphs were not uncommon. In Boston, one gravestone reads:

Here lies ye body of
Mrs. Ammey Hunt wife of
Mr. Benjamin Hunt
Who died Nov. 26, 1769
Aged 40 years.

A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,
Whom I did love most Dear,
And now her Soul hath took its Flight
And bid her Spightful Foes good Night.

Childrens’ Epitaphs

The many, many infants who died young sometimes inspired whimsical commentary:

Ezra Thayer Jackson died after 25 days in Plymouth, Mass., in 1783.
What did the Little hasty sojourner
Find so forbidding & disgustful in
Our upper World to occasion its
Precipitant exit.

In Manchester, Vt., a stone marked the grave of three children who died in 1821, 1823 and 1824:

Here in the dust 3 babes we
Sleep by our Father here
our Mother Brothers
Sisters dear have left us
alone to moulder here.

This epitaph was reported in Lincoln, Maine:

Sacred to the Memory of Mr
Jared Bates who Died Aug. the 6^th
His Widow aged 24 who mourns
as one who can be comforted lives
at 7 Elm street this village
and possesses every qualification for a good wife.

Before the American Revolution, epitaphs modeled after the medieval Edward the Black Prince’s were common. They said, essentially, “I may be dead, but you will be too.”

One such example is the tombstone of Daniel Noyes, who died in Newbury, Mass., on March 15, 1716 at the age of 42:

As you were, so was I
God did call and I did dy
Now Children all whos name is Noyes
Make Jesus Christ
Your only choyes.

Read more old New England epitaphs here.

With thanks to Over Their Dead Bodies, Yankee Epitaphs & History, by Thomas C. Mann & Janet Greene. This story was updated in 2022.

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