It might have been offered, one might think, as some excuse, that he had so recently come from Maryland, and was probably unacquainted with the intenseness of Massachusetts politics; and that he had also been a somewhat busy and preoccupied man during his six weeks' presence in Boston, for he had been marrying a wife,—or rather a widow. In the Boston Evening Post of November 11, 1771, I read this notice: "Married, the Rev'd John Bacon to Mrs. Elizabeth Cummings, daughter of Ezekiel Goldthwait, Esq."
He retained his pastorate, however, in spite of his early mistake, through anxious tea-party excitement and forlorn war-threatened days, till 1775, with but scant popularity and slight happiness, with bitter differences of opinion with his people over atonement and imputation, and that ever-present stumbling-block to New England divines,—baptism under the Half Covenant,—till he was asked to resign.
Nor did he get on over smoothly with his fellow minister, John Hunt. In a curious poem of the day, called "Boston Ministers" (which is reprinted in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register of April, 1859), these verses appear:—
At Old South there's a jarring pair,
If I am not mistaken,
One may descry with half an eye
That Hunt is far from Bacon.
Wise Hunt can trace out means of grace
As leading to conversion,
But Hopkins scheme is Bacons theme,
And strange is his assertion.
It mattered little, however, that Parson Bacon had to leave the Old South, for that was soon no longer a church, but a riding school for the British troops.
Mr. Bacon retired, after his dismissal, to Canterbury, Conn., his birthplace. His friendly intimacy with Mrs. Deming proved of value to her, for when she left Boston, in April, 1775, at the time of the closing of the city gates, she met Mr. Bacon in Providence. She says in her journal:—
"Towards evening Mr & Mrs Bacon, with their daughter, came into town. Mr Bacon came to see me. Enquir'd into my designs, &c. I told him truely I did not know what to do. That I had thot of giting farther into the country. Of trying to place Sally in some family where she might earn her board, & to do something like it for Lucinda, or put her out upon wages. That when I left the plain I had some faint hope I might hear from Mr Deming while I continued at Providence, but that I had little of that hope remaining. Mr Bacon advised me to go into Connecticutt, the very thing I was desirous of. Mr Bacon sd that he would advise me for the present to go to Canterbury, his native place. That he would give me a Letter to his Sister, who would receive me kindly & treat me tenderly, & that he would follow me there in a few days."