Charles Francis Adams

“ Women, and young women in particular, would be inclined to brood over things unknown save to those who participated in them, and think to find in confession only a means of escape from the torment of that hereafter concerning which they entertained no doubts; hence perhaps many of these records which now seem both so uncalled for and so inexplicable.
So far, however, what has been said relates only to the [Pg 29] matter of public confession; it remains for others to consider how far a morbidly excited spiritual condition may also have been responsible for the sin confessed. ”

“ The records in question cover the history of the Braintree church during the whole of the theocratic period in Massachusetts; and, for reasons which will appear in my forthcoming history of Quincy, the loss of these records causes not only an irreparable but a most serious break, so far as Braintree is concerned, in the discussion of one of the most interesting of all the problems connected with the origin and development of the New England town, and system of town-government. There is room for hope that the missing volume may yet come to light. ”

“ Like Shem and Japhet, approaching it with averted eyes we are disposed to cover up with a garment the nakedness of the progenitors; and the severe looker after truth, who wants to have things appear exactly as they were, and does not believe in the suppression of evidence,—the investigator of this sort is apt to be looked upon as a personage of no discretion and doubtful utility,—as, in a word, a species of modern Ham, who, having unfortunately seen what ought to have been covered up, is eager, out of mere levity or prurience, to tell his “brethren without” all about it. ”

“ Elliott, for instance, in his chapter on the manners and customs of the New England people, contents himself with some pleasing generalities like the following, the correctness of which he would have found difficulty in maintaining:—
“With this exalted, even exaggerated, value of the individual entertained in New England, it was not possible that men or women entertaining it should yield themselves to corrupt or debasing practices. Chastity was, therefore, a cardinal virtue, and the abuse of it a crying sin, to be punished by law, and by the severe reproof of all good citizens.” ”

“ The compelling cause to the confessions referred to was therefore the parents’ desire to secure baptism for their offspring during a period when baptism was believed to be essential to salvation, with the Calvinistic hell as an alternative. The constant and not infrequently cruel use made by the church and the clergy of the parental fear of infant damnation—the [Pg 21] belief “that Millions of Infants are tortured in Hell to all Eternity for a Sin that was committed thousands of Years before they were born”—is matter of common knowledge. ”

“ So far the relations then prevailing between the young of the two sexes may have been, and probably were, innocent enough, and nothing more needs be said of them; but coming now to the facts revealed in the church records, I venture to doubt the correctness of the inference as to general laxity which would naturally be drawn from them. The situation as respects sexual morality which prevailed in New England during the eighteenth century seems to me to have been peculiar rather than bad. In other words, though there was much incontinence, that incontinence was not promiscuous ”

“ The study of this material caused me to use in my sketch the following language:—
“That the earlier generations of Massachusetts were either more law-abiding or more self-restrained than the later, is a proposition which accords neither with tradition nor with the reason of things. The habits of those days were simpler than those of the present; they were also essentially grosser. The community was small; and it hardly needs to be said that where the eyes of all are upon each, the general scrutiny is a safeguard to morals. It is in cities, not in villages, that laxity is to be looked for.” ”

“ Small and bound in leather, the paper of which this volume is made up is of that rough, parchment character in such common use during the last century, and the entries in it, in five different handwritings, are in many cases scarcely legible, and frequently of the most confidential character. In the main they are records of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths; but some of them relate to matters of church discipline, and these throw a curious light on the social habits of a period now singularly remote. ”

“ Green, both by education and professional experience more versed in these subjects than I, to say whether a period of sexual immorality should not be looked for as the natural concomitant and sequence of such a condition of moral and religious excitement as prevailed in New England between 1725 and 1745. I merely now call attention to the fact that in Braintree the Hancock pastorate began in 1726 and ended in 1743, and that it was during the Hancock pastorate, also the period of “the Great Awakening,” that public confessions of fornication were most frequently made in the Braintree church ”

“ Though the historians of New England, whether of the formal description, like Palfrey and Barry, or of the social and economic order, like Elliott and Weeden, have little if anything to say on the subject, I think it not unsafe to assert that during the eighteenth century the inhabitants of New England did not enjoy a high reputation for sexual morality. ”

“ Haven, the pastor of the church there, alarmed at the number of cases of unlawful cohabitation, preached at least as late as 1781 “a long and memorable discourse,” in which, with a courage deserving of unstinted praise, he dealt with “the growing sin” publicly from his pulpit, attributing “the frequent recurrence of the fault to the custom then prevalent of females admitting young men to their beds who sought their company with intentions of marriage.” ”

“ One cannot conceive of an adulterer or adulteress now doing public penance in a white sheet before a whole congregation assembled for the public worship of God, nor of a really respectable young married couple standing up under the same circumstances and confessing to the sin of fornication. ”

“ The connection between the animal and the spiritual natures of human beings taken in the aggregate, though subtile, is close; and while it is well known that camp-meetings have never been looked upon as peculiar, or even as conspicuous, for the continence supposed to prevail at them, there is no doubt whatever that in England the license of the restoration followed close on the rule of the saints. ”

“ This same state of affairs doubtless then prevailed in Braintree, and indeed throughout New England. The whole community was in a sensitive condition morally and spiritually,—so sensitive that, as the Braintree records show, the contagion extended to all classes, and, among those bearing some of the oldest names in the history of the township, we find also negroes,—“Benjamin Sutton and Naomi his wife,” and “Jeffry, my servant, and Flora, his wife,”—grotesquely getting up before the congregation to make confession, like their betters, of the sin of fornication before marriage. ”

“ Dr. Lunt states that the earlier records of the church had never been in the possession of either of its then ministers, the Rev. Peter Whitney or himself; and he adds: “In a conversation with Dr. Harris, formerly the respected pastor of Dorchester First Congregational Church, I understood him to say that Mr. Welde, formerly pastor of what is now Braintree Church, had these records in his possession; but when he obtained them, and for what purpose, was not explained. They are probably now irrecoverably lost. As curious and interesting relics of old times, their loss must be regretted.” ”

“ The next entry of a case of church discipline is of a wholly different character. The individual subjected to it bore the [Pg 8] same family name as the earliest minister of the town, the Rev. William Tompson, who was the first to subscribe the original covenant of Sept. 16, 1639, but was not descended from him. Neither must this Samuel Tomson, or Tompson, be confounded with Deacon Samuel Tompson, who, born in 1630, lived in Braintree, and whose name is met with on nearly every page of the earlier records. ”

“ Our young People, when they met, were wont to spend the time in talking of the Excellency and dying Love of JESUS CHRIST, the Gloriousness of the way of Salvation, the wonderful, free, and sovereign Grace of God, his glorious Work in the Conversion of a Soul, the Truth and Certainty of the great Things of God’s Word, the Sweetness of the Views of his Perfection &c. ”

“ In reading the following extracts from the records, it is also necessary to bear in mind that during the eighteenth century the whole social and intellectual as well as religious life of the Massachusetts towns not only centred about the church, but was concentrated in it. The church was practically a club as well as a religious organization. An inhabitant of the town excluded from it or under its ban became an outcast and a pariah. ”

“ Yet nowhere in New England does the custom of “bundling” seem to have prevailed more generally than on Cape Cod; and according to Dr. Stiles (p. 111) it was on Cape Cod that the practice held out longest against the advance of more refined manners. It is tolerably safe to say that in a time of constantly developing civilization such a custom would originate nowhere. ”

“ Adams, describing how the passengers all lived in the common cabin, adds:—“Necessity has no law; but what should I have thought on shore to have laid myself down in common with half a dozen gentlemen? We have curtains, it is true, and we only in part undress,—about as much as the Yankee bundlers.” [21] Mrs. Adams was then writing to her elder sister, Mrs. Cranch; they were both women of exceptional refinement,—granddaughters of Col. John Quincy, and daughters of the pastor of the Weymouth church. ”

“ Street customs, manners and language are, to a very considerable extent, outward exponents of the moral condition within. It would not be possible to find any place in Europe now where women could be seen going about the streets in the condition as respects raiment which Josselyn, Winslow and Roger Williams seem to intimate was not unusual with the British females of their time; nor would a strumpet even, much less any decent woman, from a foreign land, be treated in the streets of any civilized city as Madame Riedesel describes herself as having been treated in the streets of Bristol in 1777. ”

“ The Hancock pastorate lasted eighteen years, ending with Mr. Hancock’s death on the 7th of May, 1744; and no record of cases of church discipline seems to have been kept by any of his successors in the pulpit of the North Precinct church. In the year 1750 Braintree probably contained some eighteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, and during the half-century between 1725 and 1775 there is no reason to suppose that any considerable change took place in their condition, whether social, material or religious. ”

“ But in the case of history, as with medicine and many other branches of science and learning, there are, as I have already said, many matters which cannot be treated freely in works intended for general circulation,—matters which none the less may be, and often are, important and deserving of thorough mention. ”

“ Nevertheless, an examination of the church records of Boston, Salem, and more especially of Plymouth, would be interesting, with a view to ascertaining whether the spirit of sexual incontinence prevailed during the last century in the large towns of New England to the same extent to which it unquestionably prevailed in the rural districts. ”

“ It has of course been noticed that a large proportion of the entries I have quoted relate to discipline administered in cases of fornication, in many of which confession is made by husband and wife, and is of acts committed before marriage. The [Pg 20] experience of Braintree in this respect was in no way peculiar among the Massachusetts towns of the last century. While examining the Braintree records I incidentally came across a singular and conclusive bit of unpublished documentary evidence on this point in the records of the church of Groton ”

“ Lord’s Day. After the public service the Church being desired to stay voted—that Benjamin Neal, David Bass and Joseph Neal jun. members in full communion have discovered such a perverse spirit and been guilty of such disorderly behaviour in the House and Worship of God that they deserve to be suspended from communion with us at the Lord’s table.
“February 9. Lord’s Day evening. David Bass acknowledging his offensive behavior and promising to be more watchfull for time to come, the brethren signified their consent that he be restored to full communion with them. ”