The next general account of the New England colonies after the Magnalia, and covering the first thirty years of the present period, was Daniel Neal’s History of New-England containing an account of the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the country to 1700. With a map, and an appendix containing their present charter, their ecclesiastical discipline, and their municipal-laws. In 2 vols. (London. 1720.)[333]
Dr. Watts, writing to Cotton Mather, Feb., 1719-20, of Neal’s history, said that he had hoped to find it “an abstract of the lives and spiritual experiences of those great and good souls that planted and promoted the gospel among you, and those most remarkable providences, deliverances, and answers to prayers that are recorded in your Magnalia Christi, but I am disappointed of my expectations; for he has written with a different view, and has taken merely the task of an historian upon him.” Watts took Neal to task personally for his freedom about the early persecution; but Neal only answered that the fidelity of an historian required it of him.[334] Neal himself in his preface (p. iv.) acknowledges his freedom in treating of the mistakes into which the government fell.
Prince in the preface to his Chronological History of New England says: “In 1720 came out Mr. Neal’s History of New England.... He has fallen into many mistakes of facts which are commonly known among us, some of which he seems to derive from Mr. Oldmixon’s account of New England in his British Empire in America, and which mistakes[335] are no doubt the reason why Mr. Neal’s history is not more generally read among us; yet, considering the materials this worthy writer was confined to, and that he was never here, it seems to me scarce possible that any under his disadvantages should form a better. In comparing him with the authors from whence he draws, I am surprised to see the pains he has taken to put the materials into such a regular order; and to me it seems as if many parts of his work cannot be mended.”
Rogers and Fowle, printers in Boston, who were publishing a new magazine, begun in 1743, called The American Magazine, announced that they would print in it by instalment a new history of the English colonies. They changed the plan subsequently so as to issue the book in larger type, in quarterly numbers, and in this form there appeared in January, 1747, the first number, with a temporary title, which read: A summary, historical and political, of the first planting, progressive improvements and present state of the British settlements in North America; with some transient accounts of the bordering French and Spanish settlements. By W. D., M. D., No. 1. To be continued. Boston, 1747.[336] The author soon became known as Dr. William Douglass, the Scotch physician living in Boston,—“honest and downright Dr. Douglass,” as Adam Smith later chose to call him. He had drawn (pp. 235-38), in contrast to Admiral Warren, a severe character of Admiral Knowles, whose conduct, which occasioned the impressment riot then recent, was fresh in memory. Knowles seems to have instituted a suit for libel, which led to a rather strained amend by Douglass in the preface to the first volume, when the numbers were collected in 1749, and were issued with a title much the same as before, A Summary, historical and political, of the first planting, etc., containing—here follow five heads.[337] The character which he had given of Knowles, he says, was written out of passionate warmth and indiscretion, merely “in affection to Boston and the country of New England, his altera patria,” and then adds that he has suppressed it in the completed volume.[338] The second volume is dated 1751, and Douglass died in 1752.[339]
To his second volume (1751) he adds what he calls “a supplement to the first volume and introduction to the second volume,” in which he hints at the offence he had given Shirley and Knowles—the latter’s suit for libel forcing him to recant, as we have seen—by saying, “If facts related in truth offend any governor, commodore, or other great officer,” the author “will not renounce impartiality and become sycophant.” He further charges upon “the great man of the province for the time being,” as he calls Shirley, the “impeding, or rather defeating, this public-spirited, laborious undertaking,” as he characterizes his own book.
A large part of the work is given to New England, which he knew best; but his knowledge was at all times subservient to his prejudices, which were rarely weak. He is often amusing in his self-sufficiency, and not unentertaining; but he who consults the book is puzzled with his digressions and with his disorderly arrangement, and there is no index to relieve him.[340] Hutchinson struck the estimate which has not since been disputed: it was his “foible to speak well or ill of men very much as he had a personal friendship for them, or had a personal difference with them.”[341] Prof. Tyler in his Hist. of American Literature[342] has drawn his character more elaborately than others.[343] His book, while containing much that is useful to the student, remains a source of uncertainty in respect to all statements not elsewhere confirmed, and yet of his predecessors on New England history Douglass has the boldness to say that they are “beyond all excuse intolerably erroneous.”[344]
A wider interest than that of ecclesiastical record attaches to a book which all students of New England history have united in thinking valuable. This is the work of Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Middleborough, Mass., who published at Boston in 1777 a first volume, which was called A History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination of Christians called Baptists.[345] This volume brought the story down to 1690 only, but an appendix summarized subsequent history down to the date of the book. In the second volume, which appeared at Providence in 1784, the title was changed to A Church History of New England, vol. ii., extending from 1690 to 1784. The same title was preserved in the third volume, which was published in Boston in 1796, bringing the narrative down to that date. In the preface to this volume the author complained of the many typographical errors in the first volume, and professed that though there had been private dislikes of the work by some “because their own schemes of power and gain were exposed thereby,” he knew not of any public dispute about “its truth of facts.” The whole work has been reprinted under the title of the original first volume, with notes by David Weston, and published in two volumes by the Backus Historical Society at Newton, Mass., in 1871.[346]
Miss Hannah Adams published at Dedham, Mass., in 1799, a single volume, Summary History of New England. She does not profess to have done more than abridge the usual printed sources, as they were then understood, and to have made some use of MS. material, particularly respecting the history of Rhode Island.
