“The diaries of Increase and Cotton Mather are extant, but only extracts of them have been printed. Much in them is wisely suppressed. Increase, though a most faithful, devoted, and eminently serviceable man, was morbid, censorious sometimes, and suffered as if unappreciated. The younger Mather was often jealous, spiteful, rancorous, and revengeful in his daily records, and thus the estimate of his general worth is so far reduced through materials furnished by himself.”[379]
There is among the Sparks manuscripts in Harvard College library a bound quarto volume which is superscribed as follows: “To Mr. Samuel Savile, of Currier’s Hall, London, attorney-at-law: Dear friend,—I here present you with an abstracted Historical Account of that part of America called New England; to which I have added the History of our voiage thereto, Anno Domini, 1740.” This account presents one of the best pictures of New England life, particularly of that in Boston, from a contemporary pen.[380] There are various other diaries of lookers-on, which are helpful in this study of New England provincial life, like the journals of Whitefield, the diary of Francis Goelet,[381] the journal of Madam Knight’s journey, 1704,[382]—not to name others. Among published personal records, there are George Keith’s Journal of Travels from New Hampshire to Caratuck (London, 1706); Capt. Nathaniel Uring’s Voyages and Travels, published at London in 1727;[383] and Andrew Burnaby’s Travels through the middle settlements in North America in the years 1759 and 1760, London, 1775.[384] Burnaby passed on his way, from Bristol through Providence to Boston. The early part of the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is of exceptional value as a reflex of the life of New England as it impressed a young man.[385]
Among the modern treatises on the social condition of New England, a chief place must be given to Henry Cabot Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies, the chapters in which on the characteristics of the colonies and their life are the essential feature of a book whose title is made good by a somewhat unnecessary abridgment of the colonies’ anterior history. Lodge groups his facts by colonies. Dr. Edward Eggleston in some valuable papers, which are still appearing in the Century Magazine, groups similar, but often much minuter, facts by their topical rather than by their colonial relations. Mr. Horace E. Scudder prepared an eclectic presentation of the subject in a little volume, Men and Manners a hundred years ago (N. Y., 1876), which surveys all the colonies. The Rev. Jos. B. Felt’s Customs of New England (1853) has a topical arrangement.[386]
For Massachusetts in particular, most of the local histories[387] contribute something to the subject; and in the Memorial History of Boston there are various chapters which are useful,[388] and a survey is also given in Barry’s Massachusetts (vol. ii. ch. I).
“He that will understand,” says Bancroft,[389] “the political character of New England in the eighteenth century must study the constitution of its towns, its congregations, its schools, and its militia.”[390]
C. Finance and Revenue.—Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull in a pamphlet, First Essays at Banking and the first paper money in New England (Worcester, 1884,—from the Council Report of the American Antiquarian Society, Oct., 1884), traces more fully than has been done by Jos. B. Felt, in his Historical account of Massachusetts Currency (Boston, 1839), and by Paine in the Council Report of the same society, April, 1866,[391] the efforts at private banking previous to the province issue of bills in 1690, and with particular reference to a tract, which he ascribes to the Rev. John Woodbridge, of Newbury, called Severals relating to the fund, printed for divers reasons as may appear (Boston, probably 1681-82).[392] Dr. Trumbull attributes to Cotton Mather a paper sustaining the policy of issuing paper bills in 1690, which was published as Some considerations on the Bills of Credit now passing in New England (Boston, 1691),[393] to which was appended Some additional considerations, which the same writer thinks may have been the work of John Blackwell, who had been the projector of a private bank authorized in 1689. Similar views as there expressed are adopted by Mather in his Life of Phips, as printed separately in 1697, and as later included in the Magnalia.
In Dec., 1690, the bills of the £7,000 which were first authorized began to be put forth. Felt (p. 50) gives the style of them, and though an engraved form was adopted some of the earliest of the issues were written with a pen, as shown by the fac-simile of one in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc. (1863, p. 428). Up to 1702 there had been emissions and repetitions of emissions of about £110,000, when another £10,000 was put out. A fac-simile of one of these notes is given in Smith’s Hist. and Literary Curiosities, p. xlv. The issues for the next few years were as follows: 1706, £10,000; 1707, £22,000; 1708, £10,000; 1709, £60,000; 1710, £40,000; 1711, £65,000,—a total of £207,000.
In the following year (1712), the province bills of Massachusetts were made legal tender,[394] but the break had come. The public confidence was shaken, and their decline in value rapidly increased under the apprehension, which the repeated putting off of the term of redemption engendered.
In Connecticut the management was more prudent. She issued in the end £33,500, but all her bills were redeemed with scarce any depreciation. A fac-simile of one of her three-shilling bills (1709) is given in the Connecticut Colony Records, 1706-1716, p. 111.[395]