Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton was pastor of the New Brick Church. He had a congregation of stanch Whigs; but unluckily, the Tory Governor Hutchinson also attended his church. Dr. Pemberton was the other minister of the two who sprung the Governor's hated Thanksgiving proclamation of 1771 on their parishes a week ahead of time, as told in [Note 3], and the astounded and disgusted New Brick hearers, more violent than the Old South attendants, walked out of meeting while it was being read. Dr. Pemberton's troubled and unhappy pastorate came to an end by the closing of his church in war times in 1775. He was of the 1721 class of Harvard College. He died September 9, 1777.
We find frequent references in the writings and newspapers of the times to this truly Puritanical dread of bishops. To the descendants of the Pilgrims the very name smacked of incense, stole, and monkish jargon. A writer, signing himself "America," gives in the Boston Evening Post, of October 14, 1771, a communication thoroughly characteristic of the spirit of the community against the establishment of bishops, the persistent determination to "beate down every sprout of episcopacie."
A negligée was a loose gown or sacque open in front, to be worn over a handsome petticoat; and in
spite of its name, was not only in high fashion for many years, but was worn for full dress. Abigail Adams, writing to Mrs. Storer, on January 20, 1785, says: "Trimming is reserved for full dress only, when very large hoops and negligées with trains three yards long are worn." I find advertised in the Boston Evening Post, as early as November, 1755: "Horse-hair Quilted Coats to wear with Negligees." A poem printed in New York in 1756 has these lines:—
"Put on her a Shepherdee
A Short Sack or Negligee
Ruffled high to keep her warm
Eight or ten about an arm."
A pistareen was a Spanish coin worth about seventeen cents.