Mather Byles, Judge Danforth, and Thomas Prince supported the movement in the New England Weekly Journal. Thomas Foxcroft and others, reinforced by a large part of the country ministers, fought the battle in sermon and pamphlet. Benjamin Colman gave the movement a qualified commendation. It found various classes of opponents. Charles Chauncy condemned it for its hot-bed sustenance, its “commotion in the passions,” and its precarious growth.[269] Thomas Fleet, the publisher of children’s books, turned the wit which enlivened his evening vendu at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, into the columns of the Boston Evening Post, which he had just started. Here he held up Whitefield to ridicule, just as Joseph Green and other wits held up in the same place the pomp of Belcher to public derision. Dr. Douglass[270] reckoned up the thousand pounds sterling that were lost to the families of working people by what he called a misuse of time in attending the midday mass-meetings, to which Whitefield ministered. The passion and fervor swelled, lapsed, returned, dwindled, and died; some counted the wrecks it left, some wondered at its transient impressiveness, and a few occasionally struggled to revive it.[271] Amid all the consternation attending what William Cooper in the election sermon of 1740 called “an empty treasury, a defenceless country and embarrassed trade,” New England managed to raise 1,000 men to send off to join the fleet of Admiral Vernon in the West India waters. Scarce a hundred of them ever returned.[272]
AN ENGLISH FLEET OF THIS PERIOD.
From Popple’s great map, The British Empire in North America, 1732. Admiral Preble says in his “Vessels of war built at Portsmouth” (N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., 1868, p. 393) that the “Falkland” was built in 1690, and carried 54 guns; but in some MS. emendations in the copy of his paper in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soc., he says she was probably built between 1694 and 1696. She is considered to be the earliest man-of-war built in the colonies. Within a short time after 1743, three vessels were built in New England for the royal navy,—the “America,” “Boston,” and “Essex.” The same writer, in The United Service, January, 1884, p. 98, etc., describing the changes in armament of vessels during the 18th century, defines ships-of-the-line as carrying 50 guns or more on three decks; frigates, 20 to 50 guns on two decks. Sloops-of-war with guns on one deck, and corvettes with guns on the poop and forecastle only, came in later.
The social life of the chief town of New England passed on, meanwhile, in the shadow of these ominous uncertainties. Jeremy Gridley had as early as 1731 started The Weekly Rehearsal, and had given the more scholarly classes this to ponder upon, and that to be entertained with, in columns more purely literary than they had ever known before. If such people welcomed the poems of Isaac Watts,—and one which Watts addressed to Belcher was just now printed in Boston,—they caused Richard Fry, an English printer, freshly come to Boston, to hold a high opinion of their literary taste, because they relieved his shelves of twelve hundred copies of the poems of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire bard. In 1731 they listened at a Thursday lecture to Colman’s eulogy of Thomas Hollis as a patron of learning; and the neighboring college mourned in him the principal benefactor of this time. Lemercier, the minister of the Huguenots in Boston, published a Church History of Geneva (1732), which was a passing talk. Cox, a bookseller near the town house, got out (1734) a Bibliotheca Curiosa, describing his stock,—enormous for the times. Thomas Prince, the minister of the Old South, let his antiquarian zeal bring back the early struggles of the first settlers, when he printed (1731) the homely Memoirs of Roger Clap, of Dorchester, while the century sermons of Foxcroft in Boston (1730), and of Callender in Rhode Island (1739), made the pews slumbrous then, and command big prices to-day. Thomas Prince, moreover, was in travail with his Chronological History of New England. He published it in 1736, and the General Court paused to take note of it, and forgot for a moment money schemes and revivals to learn how in the “year 1, first month, 6th day” Adam appeared, to lead the long chronology which Prince felt bound to run down before he got to his proper theme. He had already wearied everybody so much, when he had gone far enough to embrace two or three years only of the New England story, that no one longer encouraged him, and “the leading work of history published in America up to that time” remains a fragment for the antiquaries to regret.[273]
It was in the year 1741 that the Boston Cadets came into existence as the governor’s body-guard. It was earlier, that Thomas Hancock, who had married the daughter of Henchman, the bookseller, by whom he was indoctrinated with the principles of successful trade, built the stone mansion on Beacon Hill which John Hancock, his nephew, later made more famous.[274] It was in this time of commercial distress that, according to Bennett, an observer, the reputation of the ladies of Boston suffered if they went to a dancing-assembly lately set up; but they could drive about with their negro footmen, and “neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.” And when the finest lady in Boston, his Excellency’s wife, was buried in 1736, we read of the horses of the hearse covered with broadcloth and escutcheons, and of other parade and adornment, which gave tradespeople something to do and money to earn. Artisans needed then more than now such adventitious help.
