This follows a corresponding likeness in Cotton Mather’s Parentator, Boston, 1724 (Harv. Col. lib., 10397.17). Cf. Edmund Calamy’s ed. of Memoirs of the life of the late Rev. Increase Mather, London, 1725 (Ibid., 10397.16). Engravings are noted in the Catal. Cab. MS. Hist. Soc., p. 35; and of the painted portraits in the same catalogue, no. 23 is of Mather. There is an original painting in the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which is engraved in the Mem. Hist. of Boston, i. 587.
While the provincial charter had been thus in jeopardy, the father of it died. The most conspicuous of New Englanders in his day, though his fame is somewhat overshadowed by his son’s, breathed his last, when Increase Mather died, on August 23, 1723, at the advanced age of eighty-four. When he was buried, a hundred and threescore scholars of Harvard College walked in such a procession as never before attended the burial of a New England divine. In most respects he was the greatest of a race which was born with traits of prowess. His learning was large, far better assimilated than that of the son, and his power over men far happier and more consistent. His industry was enormous; he sometimes worked in his study sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. What Cotton Mather called the “tonitruous cogency” of his pulpit discourse was often alarming to the timid, but not always effective for the mass. The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers. There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the Courant, were printing the hymns of Isaac Watts.
A year after the father died, there was a new election of president of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. Their first choice was Joseph Sewall, of the Old South, a son of the Judge; “chosen for his piety,” as the disappointed man sneeringly wrote in his diary. The “miserable” college, when Sewall declined, chose the minister of the Manifesto Church, a direct thrust at Matherism; but no choice was accepted till Benjamin Wadsworth was elected. The college had another conflict when Timothy Cutler, after receiving Episcopal ordination in England, came to Boston, and by virtue of his new position as a Church of England ministrant set up his claim to a seat in the Board of Overseers. He sought in vain. Mather meantime was contriving to fortify himself, and determined to have a synod to organize some resistance to this increasing antagonism. Dummer entertained a petition to that end, but John Checkley, one of Cutler’s friends, ferreted out the scheme, and there followed a sharp rebuke from the lords justices, who pronounced the calling of such a body the prerogative of the crown, and the movement came to naught. This same John Checkley, a polemical churchman, in Boston, who kept a toy shop, united with it the publishing of tracts, in which the prevailing theology was attacked. In 1719 he had reprinted Charles Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists, and later accompanied Cutler and his friends to England. While there he caused another edition of Leslie to be printed (1723), but added to it his own Boston imprint, and what was more important, he appended a Discourse concerning Episcopacy, which seems to have been a refashioning of another of Leslie’s treatises, by which Checkley had pointedly demonstrated the schism of all ordination except an Episcopal one. With a stock of this book he came back to Boston, and at the “Sign of the Crown and Blue gate, over against the west end of the town house,” he began to sell them. The magistrates found in some expressions “a false and scandalous libel” on themselves. A trial followed with an appeal, which dragged its slow length along; and in the midst of it Checkley delivered a memorable speech in his own defence. It ended in his being fined fifty pounds.
Checkley left Boston not long after for England; and came back again to settle in Providence, and administer the rites of the church as he believed they should be administered.
During all this wearisome contention in Boston, there is a glimpse of the humaner, and perhaps more godly, spirit in the gathering of men together under the lead of Joseph Marion to effect the insuring of neighbors’ worldly possessions from the chances of fire and the sea. It is not unlikely that this first trial of a system which to-day contributes so much to the sum of our happiness began then to indicate that mutual helpfulness might conduce as much to Christian comfort as keeping eyes alert for “scandalous libels.”
But there was no way yet, except by keeping other eyes alert along a musket barrel, to meet the dangers of the frontier. When the authorities erected (1724) Fort Dummer[253] near a spot where Brattleboro’ now stands, they made the first English settlement in what is to-day Vermont. On the 22d of August (1724), as Sewall records, “the ‘Sheerness’ comes up and Captain Harmon with his Neridgwack scalps, at which there is great shouting and triumph. The Lord help us to rejoice with trembling!” Another diary of the day makes these scalps twenty-eight, one of them Bombazeen’s, and another that of “fryer Railes,”—and this is the shape in which the tidings came to Boston of that quick onset at Norridgewock, when the Jesuit Sebastian Rasle fell among his Indian neophytes, ten days before this.[254]
In May of the next year, Lovewell the borderer made his last fight at Fryeburg in Maine, and the news reached Boston on the 13th of the same month. The ballad of Pigwacket, commemorating that bloody work, passed into the popular memory, and abided there for many a year.[255] In the following November four eastern sagamores came to Boston, and what is known as Dummer’s treaty was signed there on December 16, and the next summer (August 6) it was ratified at Falmouth (Portland). There was to be little disturbance of the peace thus consummated for a score of years to come. The war had borne heavily on Massachusetts. In such money as they had, it had during its four years’ continuance cost £240,000, and when the assembly voted an issue of another £50,000 of bills, Dummer, under royal instructions, withheld his approval. His fidelity cost him his salary for a while, which the House refused to vote until some compromise was reached.
While this quieting of the eastern frontier was in progress, the western settlements of Massachusetts were being pushed across the mountains beyond the Connecticut, and the peopling of Berkshire began at Sheffield in 1725. The leading agents in this movement were Col. Jacob Wendell, of Boston, and Col. Jonathan Stoddard, of Northampton. The occupation proved a barrier against the Dutch of New York, though it was sixteen years before the next settlement was made in the Housatonic valley at Pittsfield.[256]
