Child Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

The religious aspect of the life of children, especially in early colonial days, and most particularly in New England, bore a far deeper relation to the round of daily life than can be accorded to it in these pages. The spirit of the Lord, perhaps I should say the fear of the Lord, truly filled their days. Born into a religious atmosphere, reared in religious ways, surrounded on every side by religious influences, they could not escape the impress of deep religious feeling; they certainly had a profound familiarity with the Bible. The historian Green says that the Englishman of that day was a man of one book, and that book the Bible. It might with equal truth be said that the universal child's book of that day was the Bible. There were few American children until after the Revolution who had ever read from any book save the Bible, a primer, or catechism, and perhaps a hymn book or an almanac.

The usual method at that time of reading the Bible through was in the regular succession of every chapter from beginning to end, not leaving out even Leviticus and Numbers. This naturally detracted from the interest which would have been awakened by a wise selection of parts suited to the liking of children; and many portions doubtless frightened young children, as we have abundant record in the writings of Sewall and Mather. J. T. Buckingham stated in his Memoirs that he read the Bible through at least a dozen times before he was sixteen years old. Some portions, especially the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, filled him with unspeakable terror, and he called the enforced reading of them "a piece of gratuitous and unprofitable cruelty." He was careful, however, to pay due tribute to the influence of the Bible upon his literary composition and phraseology. The constant reading of the beautiful English wording of the Bible influenced not only the style of writing of that day, but controlled the everyday speech of the people, keeping it pure and simple.

Mrs. John Hesselius and her Children, John and Caroline

There was one important reason for the unfailing desire of English folk for the Bible and the employment of its words and terms; it was not only the sole book with which most English readers were familiar,—the book which supplied to them sacred hymns and warlike songs, the great voices of the prophets, the parables of the Evangelists, stories of peril and adventure, logic, legends, history, visions,—but it was also a new book. The family of the seventeenth century that read the words of the small Geneva Bibles in the home circle, or poorer folk who listened to the outdoor reading thereof, heard a voice that they had longed for and waited for and suffered for, and that their fathers had died for, and a treasure thus acquired is never lightly heeded. The Pilgrim Fathers left England for Holland before King James' Bible, our Authorized Version, had been published. The Puritans of the Boston and Salem settlements had seen the importation of Geneva Bibles forbidden in England by Laud in 1633, and the reading prohibited at their meetings. They revelled in it in their new homes, for custom had not deadened their delight, and they were filled with it; it satisfied them; they needed no other literature.

Though Puritanism in its anxious and restricted religionism denied freedom to childhood, yet the spirit of Puritanism was deeply observant and conservative of family relations. The meagre records of domestic life in Puritan households are full of a pure affection, if not of grace or good cheer. The welfare, if not the pleasure of their children, lay close to the heart of the Pilgrims. Their love was seldom expressed, but their rigid sense of duty extended to duty to be fulfilled as well as exacted.

Governor Bradford wrote in his now world-famous Log-book, in his lucid and beautiful English, an account of the motives of the emigration from Holland, and in a few sentences therein he gives one of the most profound reasons of all, their intense yearning for the true welfare of their children:—

"As necessitie was a taskmaster over them, so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants but in a sorte, to their dearest children; the which as it did not a little wound ye tender harts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise sundrie sad and sorrowful effects. For many of theier children, that were of best dispositions and gracious inclinations, having lernde to bear the yoake in their youth and willing to beare parte of their parents burden, were often times so oppressed with their hevie labours, that though their minds were free and willing yet their bodies bowed under ye weight of ye same, and became decrepid in their early youth, the vigor of nature being consumed in ye very budd as it were. But that which was more lamentable and of all sorrows most heavie to be borne was that many of their children, were drawne away by evill examples into extravagant and dangerous coarses, getting ye raines off their necks, and departing from their parents."

This country was settled at a time when all English people were religious. The Puritan child was full of religious thoughts and exercises, so also was the child of Roman Catholic parents, or one reared in the Established Church. The diarist Evelyn was a stanch Church of England man, no lover of Puritan ways, but he could write thus of his little child:—