century there was little in New England that could properly receive the
name of music. Musical instruments and books of musical instruction were
rare. I have told the deplorable condition of church music in "The
Sabbath in Puritan New England." A feeling of revolt rose in ministers
and congregation. In 1712 Rev. Mr. Tuft's music-book appeared. The first
organ came to Boston about 1711. The first concert of which I have read
was advertised thus in the _New England Weekly Journal_ of December 15,
1732:
"This is to inform the Publick That there will be a Consort of
Music Perform'd by Sundry Instruments at the Court Room in Wings
Lane near the Town Dock on the 28th of this Instant December;
Tickets will be deliver'd at the Place of Performance at Five
Shillings each Ticket. N.B. No Person will be admitted after Six."
In 1744 a concert was given in Faneuil Hall fol the benefit of the poor,
and after 1760 concerts were frequent. The universal time for beginning
was six o'clock, and the highest price of admission half a dollar,
until after 1790.
Singing-schools, too, were formed, and the bands of trained singers gave
concerts. The story of the progress of New England concert-giving has
been most fully given by Henry M. Brooks, esq., in his delightful book,
"Olden Time Music."
Lectures on pneumatics, electricity, and philosophy were given in Boston
as early as 1740, and soon acquired a popularity which they have
retained to the present day.
A very doubtful form of diversion was furnished to New Englanders at the
public expense and in the performance of public duties. Not only were
offenders whipped, set in the stocks, bilboes, cage, or pillory on
Lecture-day, but criminals were hung with much parade before the eyes of
the people, as a visible token of the punishment of evil living. In all
the civil and religious exercises previous to the execution of the
sentence, publicity was given to the offender; petty and great
malefactors were preached at when sentenced, and after condemnation were
made public examples--were brought into church and made the subject of
discourse and even of objurgation from the pulpit. Judge Sewall
frequently refers to this meretricious custom. Under date March 11,
1685, he says: "Persons crowd much into the old Meeting House by reason
of James Morgan (who was a condemned murderer) and a very exciting and
riotous scene took place." This was at a Thursday lecture, and in the
gloomy winter twilight of the same day the murderer was
executed--"turn'd off" as Sewall said--after a parting prayer by Cotton
Mather, who had preached over him in the morning. Cotton Mather's sermon
and others on Morgan and his crimes, which were preached by Increase
Mather and Joshua Moodey, were printed and sold in vast numbers, passing
through several editions. Morgan's dying words and confessions were also
printed and sold throughout New England by chapmen.
Captain Quelch and six other pirates were captured on June 11, 1704;
were brought to Boston on the 17th, sentenced on the 19th, and, "the
silver oar being carried before them to the place of execution," were
hung on the 30th. An "extra" of the _News Letter_ says that "Sermons
were preached in their Hearing Every Day, And Prayers made daily with
them. And they were Catechized and they had many Occasional
exhortations;" but the paper also states, "yet as they led a wicked and
vitious life so to appearance they died very obdurately and impenitently
hardened in their sin." Sewall gives this painfully particular account
of the execution:
"After Dinner about 3 P.M. I went to see the Execution. Many were
the people that saw upon Broughtons Hill But when I came to see
how the River was covered with People I was amazed; Some say there
were 100 boats. 150 Boats & Canoes saith Cousin Moody of York. He
Told them. Mr. Cotton Mather came with Captain Quelch & 6 others
for Execution from the Prison to Scarletts Wharf and from thence in
Boat to the place of Execution. When the Scaffold was hoisted to a
due height the seven Malefactors went up. Mr. Mather pray'd for
them standing upon the Boat. Ropes were all fastened to the Gallows
save King who was Reprieved. When the Scaffold was let to sink
there was such a Screech of the Women that my wife heard it sitting
in our Entry next the Orchard and was much surprised at it, yet the
wind was sou-west. Our house is a full mile from the place."
In another entry Sewall tells of brazen women jumping up on the cart
with a condemned man.
A note was appended by Dr. Ephraim Eliot to the last page of a sermon
delivered by his father, Dr. Andrew Eliot, on the Sunday before the
execution of Levi Ames, who was hung for burglary October 21, 1773. Ames
was present in church, and the sermon was preached at his request. The
note runs thus:
"Levi Ames was a noted offender--though a young man, he had gone
through all the routine of punishment, and there was now another
indictment against him where there was positive proof, in addition
to his own confession. He was tried and condemned. His condemnation
excited extraordinary sympathy. He was every Sabbath carried
through the streets with chains about his ankles, and handcuffed,
in custody of the Sheriff officers and constables, to some public
meeting, attended by an innumerable number of boys, women and men.
Nothing was talked of but Levi Ames. The ministers were
successively employed in delivering occasional discourses. Stillman
improved the opportunity several times and absolutely persuaded the
fellow that he was to step from the cart into Heaven."
One Worcester County murderess was hanged on Boston Common, and to the
delight of beholders appeared in a beautiful white satin gown to be
"turn'd off."
I think, in reading of the past, that next to executions the most vivid
excitement, the most absorbing interest--indeed, the greatest amusement
of New Englanders of the half century preceding and that succeeding the
Revolutionary War--was found in the lottery. An act of Legislature in
1719 speaks of them as just introduced; but this licensed and highly
approved form of gambling quickly had the sanction and participation of
the entire community. The most esteemed citizens not only bought
tickets, but sold them. Every scheme of public benefit, the raising of
every fund for every purpose, was conducted and assisted through a
lottery. Harvard, Rhode Island (now Brown University), and Dartmouth
College thus increased their endowments. Towns and States thus raised
money to pay the public debt. Congregational, Baptist, and Episcopal
churches had lotteries "for promoting public worship and the advancement
of religion." Canals, turnpikes, bridges, excavations, public buildings
were brought to perfection by lotteries. Schools and academies were thus
endowed; for instance, the Leicester Academy and the Williamstown Free
School. In short, "the interests of literature were supported, the arts
encouraged, the wastes of wars repaired, inundations prevented, the
burthen of the taxes lessened" by lotteries. Private lotteries were also
carried on in great number, as frequent advertisements show; pieces of
furniture, wearing apparel, real estate, jewelry, and books being given
as prizes. Much deception was practised in those private lotteries.
Though many lotteries were ostensibly for charitable, educational, or
other beneficial purposes, the proportion of profit applied to such
purposes was small. The Newbury Bridge Lottery sold ten thousand
dollars' worth of tickets to raise one thousand dollars. The lottery to
assist in rebuilding Faneuil Hall was to secure one-tenth of the value
of tickets. Harvard College hoped to have twelve and a half per cent.
The glowing advertisements of "Rich Wheels," "Real & Truly Fortunate
Offices," "Lucky Numbers," "Full Drawings," appealed to every class; the
poorest could buy a quarter of a ticket as a speculation. New England
clergymen seemed specially to delight in this gambling excitement.
The evil of the system could not fail to be discovered by intelligent
citizens. Judge Sewall, ever thoughtful, wrote his protest to friends
when he found advertisements of four lotteries in one issue of the
_Boston News Letter_. Though I have seen lottery tickets signed by John
Hancock, he publicly expressed his aversion to the system, and Joel
Barker and others wrote in condemnation. By 1830 the whole community
seemed to have wakened to a sense of their pernicious and unprofitable
effect, and laws were passed prohibiting them.
The sports and diversions herein named, of the first century of the
Puritan commonwealth, were, after all, joined in by but a scanty
handful of junketers. We see in our picture of the olden times no
revellers, but a "crowd of sad-visaged people moving duskily through a
dull gray atmosphere," who found, as Carlyle said, that work was
enjoyment enough. The Pilgrim Fathers had been saddened with war and
pestilence, with superstition, with exile, still they had as a contrast
the keen novelty of life in the picturesque new land. The sons had lost
all the romance and were more narrow, more intolerant. But we must not
think them unhappy because they thought it no time for New England to
dance. There be those nowadays who care not for dancing, nor for the
playing of games, yet are not unhappy. There be, also, I trow, those who
fare not at fairs, and show not at shows, and would fain read sober
books or study their Bible as did the Puritans, and yet are cheerful.
And perhaps also there is a singular little band of those who love not
the play--a few such I wot of Puritan blood yet are not sorrowful.
Hawthorne said: "Happiness may walk soberly in dark attire as well as
dance lightsomely in a gala-dress." And I cannot doubt that good Judge
Sewall found as true and deep a pleasure--albeit a melancholy one--in
slowly leading, sable-gloved and sable-cloaked, the funeral procession
of one of the honored deputies through narrow Boston streets, as did
roystering Morton in marshalling his drunken revellers at noisy
Merrymount.
XI
BOOKS AND BOOK-MAKERS
There was no calling, no profession more reputable, more profitable in
early colonial days than the trade of book-selling. President Dunster,
of Harvard College, in his pursuance of that business, gave it the
highest and best endorsement; and it must be remembered that all the
book-sellers were publishers as well, books being printed for them at
their expense. John Dunton, in his "Life and Errors," has given us a
very distinct picture of Boston book-sellers and their trade toward the
end of the seventeenth century. He landed at that port in 1686 with a
large and expensive venture of books "suited to the genius of New
England," and he says he was about as welcome to the resident
book-sellers as "Sowr ale in Summer." Nevertheless they received him
cordially and hospitably, and he in turn was an equally generous rival;
for he drew eulogistically the picture of the four book-dealers which
that city then boasted. Mr. Phillips was "very just, very thriving,
young, witty, and the most Beautiful man in the town of Boston." Mr.
Brunning, or Browning, was a "complete book-seller, generous and
trustworthy." Dunton says:
"There are some men will run down the most elaborate peices only
because they had none of their Midwifery to bring them into public
View and yet shall give the greatest encomiums to the most Nauseous
trash when they had the hap to be concerned in it."
But Browning would promote a good book whoever printed it. Mr. Campbell,
the third book-dealer, was "very industrious, dresses All-a-mode and I
am told a young lady of Great Fortune is fallen in love with him." Of
Mr. Usher, the remaining book-trader, Dunton asserts:
"He makes the best figure in Boston. He is very rich, adventures
much to sea, but has got his Estate by Book selling."
Usher was a book-maker, undertaker, and adventurer, doubtfully
attractive or desirable appellations nowadays; but what higher praise
could have been given in colonial tongue? He would have angrily resented
being dubbed a publisher; that name was assigned to and monopolized by
the town-crier. Usher died worth £20,000, a tidy sum for those days.
Happy, indeed, were all the Boston book-sellers; blessed of the gods!
rich, witty, modish, beloved, beautiful! The colony was sixty years old,
opulent, prosperous, and fashionable; but a book-seller cut the best
figure. Surely the book trade had in Boston a glorious ushering in, a
golden promise which has not yet deserted it.
Book-printing, too, was a highly honored calling. The first machine for
the craft and mystery of printing was set up at Cambridge in 1639, and
for twenty-three years the president of Harvard College was responsible
for its performances. Then official licensers were appointed to control
its productions, and not till a decade of years before the Declaration
of Independence were legal restraints removed from the colonial press.
The first printer in the colony, Steeven Daye, was about as bad a
printer as ever lived, as his work in the Bay Psalm-Book proves; and he
spent a term in Cambridge jail, and was altogether rather trying in his
relations with the godly ministers who were associated with him in his
printery. The second printer had to sleep in a cask after he landed, but
he died with a fortune, a true forerunner of the self-made men of
America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was
"brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the
affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who
tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making--the printing
and binding--were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a
worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by
another, and rich, too, in spite of the thirty Green olive-branches; and
Judge Sewall, also, as Cotton Mather said, "edified and beautified with
many children"--fourteen in all. Truly, book-making did prosper a man
mightily both at home and abroad in colonial days.
In a book-printer's wife, the mother of the nineteen children, did
Dunton find his ideal New England wife; in a book-printer did he find
his most agreeable companion.
"To name his trade will convince the world he was a man of good
sense and understanding. He was so facetious and obliging and his
conversation such that I took a great delight in his company."
So it may be seen that the book-sellers were rivalled by the
book-printers--equally rich and witty though not so beautiful. To the
credit of both callings, then and for a century to follow, redounds the
fact that almost to a man they were deacons in the church. Mayhap their
worldly and family prosperity was the reward of their piety. As
nine-tenths of the authors were ministers, and the publishers all
deacons, the church had at that time what might be called a monopoly of
the book trade.
Dunton had a vast interest in the fair sex, owning plainly that he had a
"heart of Wax, Soft, and Soon mellowing," though he was careful on every
page to make everything seem perfectly straight and proper for the
suspicious perusal of his English wife; but any nineteenth-century
reader can read between the lines. His famous long-winded eulogies of
the Boston virgin, the wife, the widow, "Madam Brick the flower of
Boston," and the half widow "Parte per Pale, Madam Toy," whose husband
was at sea; and his long rides with one or the other of them
a-pillion-back behind him, and his tedious conversations with them on
platonics, the blisses of matrimony, and the chief causes of love, show
plainly that he had a "wandering eye." He had a deal to say also of his
lady customers (who were much the same in olden times as nowadays)--one
simple soul who turned over his books rather vacantly till he asked her
"in Joque" whether she wanted "Tom Thumb" (a penny chapbook). To his
surprise she answered, "Yes;" and he said, still guying, "in Folio and
with marginal notes?" and the dull creature replied, "Oh the best."
Another hectored him by constantly changing her mind:
"Reach me that book, yet--let it alone; but let me see it however,
and yet its no great matter either."
Another sedate Boston dame wished "The School of Venus," to which he
reprovingly answered that he had best give her instead "The School of
Virtue." Another, to whom he gave a sad setting off (more than hinting
at a painted face, though she were a Puritan), wanted plays and romances
and "Books of Gallantry." He adds:
"But she was a good Customer to me. Whilst I took her money I
humoured her pride, and paid her (I blush to say it) a mighty
observance."
He speaks plainly too of the men book-buyers. One Mr. Gouge, who was
also "a Secret Friend to the Fair Sex," bought to give away two hundred
copies of a book written by Parson Gouge, his father. Another "young
beau who boasts more Villany than he ever committed bought a many of
books;" hence Dunton tolerated the "Young Spark's" demoralizing
acquaintance. Mr. Thorncomb, another book-dealer from London, also
bought of him, and, with the ever prevailing luck was "Acceptable to the
Fair Sex, so extremely charming as makes 'em fond of being in his
Company. However he is a virtuous person and deserved all the Respect
they shewed him." Nor can I doubt, from the pervasive spirit of his
books, that Dunton too found favor with the fair.
Though he spoke so warmly of individual purchasers and so positively of
the wealth of his ilk in Boston, his own venture was not vastly
prosperous. He took back to England but £400. He gave the Boston
Yankees, too, rather a bad name in commercial transactions, saying:
"There is no trading for a stranger with them but with a Grecian
Faith which is not to part with your own ware without ready Money;
for they are generally very backward in their payments; great
censors about other Mens manner but Extremely Careless about their
own. When you are dealing with 'em you must look upon 'em as at
cross purposes and read 'em like Hebrew backward; for they seldom
speak & mean the same thing but like the Watermen Look one way &
row another."
Josselyn gave them no better name, saying:
"Their leading men are damnable rich, inexplicably covetous and
proud; like Ethiopians, white in the teeth only; full of
ludification and injurious dealing."
Of Dunton's patrons the majority were ministers, and I hope all the
reverend gentlemen were as prompt payers as they were liberal
purchasers. Since Dunton called ministers "the greatest benefactors to
Booksellers," I think they were not included in his black list. Surely
Cotton Mather was not, for he gave away one thousand books in one year,
and I know he paid for them too. One Boston schoolmaster, however,
bought £200 worth of books, and when we consider the excessively small
pay of members of that calling at that time, we feel that he showed a
liberal interest in promoting in every manner the spread of learning,
and only trust that he paid the bill promptly.
In 1719 there was but one book-shop in New York, but of cultured Boston
Neal wrote at that date: "The Exchange is surrounded with booksellers'
shops which have a good trade. There are five Printing Presses."
Succeeding years did not change the luck of the craft in Boston, nor dim
its honors, still wealth and love poured in on its members. The names of
Henchman and Hancock show the opulence; while Knox, in war and love
alike prospered, winning the wealthy "belle of Massachusetts" for his
bride, and winning equal glory with his sword in the Revolution. In
other New England towns did book-publishing succeed, though Boston's
earlier start, its leading position, and its more carefully preserved
history give it place as a type of the whole province.
And now, what was the fruit of all this fairly garnished and richly
nourished tree? What did these prosperous New England book-merchants
bring forth in the first century of book-printing in the province? What
return did they make for all the romantic and material support given
them? No love-poems or mild tales of gallantry, as you might expect from
their alleged fascinating traits, but, instead, an almost unvaried
production of dreary and dull funeral, execution, wedding, election, and
baptismal sermons, and of psalm-books, with here and there a "two penny
jeering gigge," or perhaps an anagram or acrostic or "pindarick," on
some virtuous citizen or industrious dame, recently deceased. In
business relations the deacon prevailed powerfully over the gallant. If,
as Tyler says, the New England theocracy was a social structure resting
on a book, that corner-stone was the Bay Psalm-Book and the walls above
it were built of sermons. These sermons seem to us technical, sapless,
and jejune, "as soporific as a bed of poppies," but they show the
intelligence, energy, and assiduity of the writers just as plainly as
they show the gloomy theology and sad earnestness of the time. And
though no one now reads them, we profoundly respect them, for they have
been conned by our honored forefathers with more studious and loving
attention than falls to the lot of most modern books, no matter what
their subject or who their author.
I have told at length the story of the publication of the Bay Psalm-Book
and of other psalm-books printed and used in New England, in "The
Sabbath in Puritan New England" and I need not dwell upon it here.
The first book or tract printed in Boston was in 1675--an execution
sermon, by Increase Mather, "The Wicked Man's Portion." The first book
printed in Connecticut was the "Saybrook Confession and Platform," in
1710. The first book of any considerable size printed in Rhode Island
was "An Apology for the True Christian Divinity," issued in 1729.