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Chapter XIII: Other Phases of Culture.

IN the opening years of the new century there seems to have been a revival of intercourse between New Englanders and representative men in England. Joseph Dudley, who returned to Boston in 1702 as Governor, after a nine years’ residence in England,¹ had during those years become a close friend of Sir Richard Steele, who was private secretary to Lord Cutts, Governor of the Isle of Wight, when Dudley was Lieutenant-Governor. The following extract from a letter written by Steele to Dudley shows their intimacy.

S^r,— I have your kind raillery of the 4^th and shall not pretend to answer it: you may excuse my not doing that in your observation of the losse of my brains, . . . .²

Benjamin Colman’s four years in England³ gave him the opportunity to form many friendships which he continued by correspondence. Among his correspondents were Thomas Hollis, Isaac Watts, Daniel Neal,⁴ Edward Calamy, Bishop White Kennett of Peterborough,⁵ Sir Richard Blackmore⁶ and Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe (”Philomela”).⁷

Cotton Mather established a correspondence with men

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not only in England but on the Continent. On May 23, 1711, he made the following entry in his diary:⁸

Having some epistolar Conversation with Mr. De Foe, I would in my Letters unto him, excite him to apply himself unto the work of collecting and publishing an History of the Persecutions which the Dissenters have undergone from the Ch[urch] of E[ngland].

In September of the same year he named Sir Richard Blackmore among the “eminent Persons beyond-sea” who “take notice of me, and such as I myself never have written unto, send me their Letters and their Presents.”⁹ In December he recorded an idea:

I would write unto Sir Richard Blackmore, my Desires, that His incomparable Pen may make its furthest Efforts, in paying an Homage to our admirable JESUS; in celebrating His Beauties, before which those of the whole Creation languish and vanish; in uttering the awakened Songs of His Love to the Children of Men; in describing the illustrious Exemple of all Goodness, which He has given us; in asserting His Government over the Works of God; and Painting out the Grandeurs wherein He shall come to raise the Dead and judge the World, and the Delights of the new Heavens and the new Earth, which shall succeed the Resurrection.¹⁰

Mather also corresponded with Dr. Franckius, in Lower Saxony,¹¹ with Anthony W. Boehm of Halle, who had written to him in regard to a copy of the “Magnalia” which had come into his hands,¹² and with certain other professors at the University of Halle.¹³

In 1713 Mather’s paper on “Curiosa Americana” was read before the Royal Society and he was proposed for membership. Soon after he was elected, but his name did not appear

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upon the rolls of the society for a decade because at the time members had to qualify in person, which he was unable to do as he did not visit England. In 1723 arrangements were made whereby his name appeared upon the rolls as a regular member.¹⁴

William Brattle was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society March 11, 1714.¹⁵ Paul Dudley, many of whose articles were published in the Transactions of the Society, was elected a Fellow on November 2, 1721.¹⁵ Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who was the first in America to experiment with inoculation for smallpox, was invited by Sir Hans Sloane, the court physician, to visit London. He received flattering attention from the scientists of England, being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, before which he read a paper on the subject of inoculation. This paper was published in London in the year 1726, being dedicated by permission to the Princess of Wales.¹⁶

John Winthrop, son of Wait Winthrop, generally referred to as John Winthrop, F. R. S., to distinguish him from the other John Winthrops, also corresponded with the members of the Royal Society. He wrote to Cotton Mather in April, 1721,

W^t is become of the Doct^r at Gresham?¹⁷ I am making an other sett of rarieties & curiositys for the Royall Society, w^ch I am thinking to present w^th my owne hands.

In 1726 he did go to England, and there became an active member of the Royal Society, the 40th volume of the Society’s

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Transactions being dedicated to him.¹⁸ Winthrop enjoyed English life so much that he never returned to New England.

Thomas Robie, Harvard 1708, later a tutor and Fellow of the Corporation, had several papers on mathematical and physical subjects published in the Transactions of the Royal Society, but does not seem to have been a member.¹⁹ He died in 1729 at the age of forty-one; had he lived longer he might have been chosen a Fellow. Dr. William Douglass, a Scotch physician (best known perhaps because of his strong opposition to the practice of inoculation and its sponsor, Cotton Mather,) accepted Robiers observations of eclipses, latitude, longitude, etc.²⁰

Others than Winthrop went to England to reside during this period. Henry Newman, Harvard 1687, went about 1707. For a time he lived in the family of the Duke of Somerset, in what capacity is not known, and later acted as the agent of Harvard College, from 1709 to 1741, and also as agent of New Hampshire.²¹ Jeremiah Dummer, Harvard 1699, after studying at Utrecht,²² settled in England, where he acted for a time as the agent of Connecticut.²³

While such Americans living in England formed a bond between the old and the new, other links were formed by the Governors sent out from England and their trains, and by those who still turned to the new world to better their fortunes. The latter included such men as Dr. William Douglass, who, in spite of his very conservative attitude toward smallpox inoculation, was interested in science. In a letter to Dr. Cadwallader Colden of New York he sent a complete report of the weather for the year past—that is, as complete as he could keep it with “no other instruments

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than the naked eye, pen, ink, and paper, I know of no Thermometer nor Barometer in this place.”²⁴ He added that there was a “good Quadrant and Telescope in the College about four miles from this,” whereby he hoped to take observations of the sun, study eclipses, and so on. Some time after this he was one of the organizers of the Boston Medical Society.²⁵

Another who came in search of a fortune was Thomas Lechmere, younger son of Edmund Lechmere, Esq., and grandson of Sir Nicholas Lechmere, a distinguished judge. Thomas Lechmere’s older brother, Nicholas, became the Attorney-General of England and was raised to the peerage as Lord Lechmere in 1721. Lechmere brought with him money with which to trade, and soon added to it by marriage with Anne Winthrop, sister of John Winthrop, F. R. S.²⁶

Of wealth and luxury in New England at this time one illustration will perhaps be sufficient. The expenditure at the time of the funeral of Fitz-John Winthrop, in 1707, amounted to over £600, the modern equivalent for which would be somewhat over $10,000.00. The single item of sugar for the burnt wine was £2.09.06, or about $50.00!²⁷

There are evidences that the “worldliness” noticed in the second period²⁸ was increasing. In 1714 Samuel Sewall found it necessary to write to Isaac Addington:

There is a Rumor, as if some design’d to have a Play acted in

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the Council-Chamber, next Monday; which much surprises me: And as much as in me lyes, I do forbid it. The Romans were very fond of their Plays: but I never heard they were so far set upon them, as to turn their Senat-House into a Play-House. Our Town-House was built at great Cost and Charge, for the sake of very serious and important Business; . . . . Let it not be abused with Dances, or other Scenical divertisements . . . . Ovid himself offers invincible Arguments against publick Plays.²⁹

The next year Wait Winthrop, writing to his son John, mentioned the fact that “Molle . . . . is well and brisk, and goes to dancing.”³⁰ The Boston News-Letter for August 22-29, 1715, published the following notice:

This is to give Notice that at Cambridge on Wednesday the 21st day of September next, will be Run for, a Twenty Pound Plate, by any Horse, Mare or Gelding not exceeding Fourteen and an half hands high, carrying 11 Stone Weight, and any Person or Persons shall be welcome to Run his Horse &c, entering the same with Mr. Pattoun at the Green Dragon in Boston, any of the six days preceding the Day of Runing, & paying Twenty Shillings Entrance.³¹

For Tuesday night, January 7, 1717-8, Judge Sewall recorded,

“The Gov^r has a Ball at his own House that lasts to 3 in the Morn.”³² Such items show the tendency of the time, as do also the growing popularity of the taverns and coffee-houses, the increase in numbers and wealth of the silversmiths, and the laments of such men as Cotton Mather over the degeneracy from the better days of old.

These years saw also the establishment and development of the newspaper upon English models. A single issue of a paper called Publick Occurrences had appeared before the end of the previous century, but the paper was promptly suppressed by the authorities. On Monday, April 24, 1704,

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appeared the first number of The Boston News-Letter, published by John Campbell, postmaster. When William Brooker succeeded Campbell as postmaster, one of his first acts was to establish a new weekly, The Boston Gazette, begun December 21, 1719. These were poor enough as newspapers, printing little but news items taken from London papers whenever the latter were accessible, and at other times filling in with local news, reports of speeches in provincial legislatures, or anything available.³³

James Franklin was the printer of Brooker’s Gazette. After forty numbers Brooker sold the paper to Philip Musgrave, who succeeded him as postmaster. When Musgrave employed Samuel Kneeland as printer instead of Franklin, the latter, “encouraged by a number of respectable characters, who were desirous of having a paper of a different cast from those then published . . . . began the publication, at his own risk, of a third newspaper, entitled, The New England Courant.”³⁴ This paper was not founded just to furnish news; its purpose was to provide readable essays on the order of those which had made the Spectator and its successors popular. Franklin had served his apprenticeship in London previous to the year 1717, when he set up his press in Boston, and thus had come in touch with the English journalism and literature of the day. The nature of the articles published in the Courant must be left until the next chapter for discussion. The point that should be emphasized here, as the last evidence of the culture reached at this time in New England, is the fact that Franklin felt that there was sufficient interest in literature, as apart from news, in the neighborhood of Boston, to warrant the establishment of a paper without news, and in competition with two established newspapers. The success of his paper proved that he was right. Thus we find within a year after

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the close of the first century of New England, if we reckon from the founding of Plymouth, and several years before the end of the first century of Boston’s existence, a deliberate and recognized literary organ which reflected the growing literary culture of the colonists, even if it did not, as we shall see, accurately mirror contemporary literary taste.

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