We find Sewall copying with evident approval a “scandalous bill” which had been “posted” on the church in Plymouth in 1701. In this a few lines ran:—
“Our churches are too genteel.
Parsons grow trim and trigg
With wealth, wine, and wigg,
And their crowns are covered with meal.”
John Adams in Youth.
Bitter must have been his efforts to reconcile to his conscience the sight of wigs upon the heads of his parson friends, worn boldly in the pulpit. He would refrain from attending a church where the parson wore a wig; and his italicized praise of a dead friend was that he “was a true New-English man and abominated periwigs.” A Boston wig-maker died a drunkard, and Sewall took much melancholy satisfaction in dilating upon it.
Cotton Mather and Sewall had many pious differences and personal jealousies. The parson was a handsome man (see his picture [here]), and he was a harmlessly and naively vain man. He quickly adopted a “great bush of vanity”—and a very personable appearance he makes in it. Soon we find him inveighing at length in the pulpit against “those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, those who were zealous against an innocent fashion taken up and used by the best of men.” “’Tis supposed he means wearing a Perriwigg,” writes Sewall after this sermon; “I expected not to hear a vindication of Perriwiggs in Boston pulpit by Mr. Mather.”
Poor Sewall! his regard of wigs had a severe test when he wooed Madam Winthrop late in life. She was a rich widow. He had courted her vainly for a second wife. And now he “yearned for her deeply” for a third wife, so he wrote. And ere she would consent or even discuss marriage she stipulated two things: one, that he keep a coach; the other, that he wear a periwig. When all the men of dignity and office in the colony were bourgeoning out in great flowing perukes, she was naturally a bit averse to an elderly lover in a skullcap or, as he often wore, a hood. His love did not make him waver; he stoutly persisted in his refusal to assume a periwig.
His portrait in a velvet skullcap shows a fringe of white curling hair with a few forehead locks. I fancy he was bald. Here is his entry with regard to young Parson Willard’s wig, in the year 1701:—
“Having last night heard that Josiah Willard had cut off his hair (a very full head of hair) and put on a wig, I went to him this morning. When I told his mother what I came about, she called him. Whereupon I inquired of him what extreme need had forced him to put off his own hair and put on a wig? He answered, none at all; he said that his hair was straight, and that it parted behind.
“He seemed to argue that men might as well shave their hair off their head, as off their face. I answered that boys grew to be men before they had hair on their faces, and that half of mankind never have any beards. I told him that God seems to have created our hair as a test, to see whether we can bring our minds to be content at what he gives us, or whether wewould be our own carvers and come back to him for nothing more. We might dislike our skin or nails, as he disliked his hair; but in our case no thanks are due to us that we cut them not off; for pain and danger restrain us. Your duty, said I, is to teach men self-denial. I told him, further, that it would be displeasing and burdensome to good men for him to wear a wig, and they that care not what men think of them, care not what God thinks of them.
“I told him that he must remember that wigs were condemned by a meeting of ministers at Northampton. I told him of the solemnity of the covenant which he and I had lately entered into, which put upon me the duty of discoursing to him.
“He seemed to say that he would leave off his wig when his hair was grown again. I spoke to his father of it a day or two afterwards and he thanked me for reasoning with his son.
“He told me his son had promised to leave off his wig when his hair was grown to cover his ears. If the father had known of it, he would have forbidden him to cut off his hair. His mother heard him talk of it, but was afraid to forbid him for fear he should do it in spite of her, and so be more faulty than if she had let him go his own way.”