USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Northampton > The Northampton book; chapters from 300 years in the life of a New England town, 1654-1954 > Part 2
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36
II
The Center of Puritan Controversy
While the towns had a large amount of independence the Gen- eral Court followed this development with a watchful eye and passed laws regarding them, in religious as well as in other mat- ters. Colonial law required attendance at church. It required that every town supply itself with a minister and pay him a salary. The "ministerial rate," as this tax was called, was collected from all taxable inhabitants whether they were church members or not. The minister was chosen by the church but his appointment and his salary were voted by the town, and the tax was generally col- lected by the constable.
This is the way that the system was working at the time that Northampton was settled. Frontier posts were a little different from other towns as the organization of the town government generally came first, the forming of a church a little later. So it was that Northampton was holding town meetings and building an all purpose meeting house in 1655 though it did not settle a minister until 1659 and the church itself was not properly organized until 1661. At that time twenty-four persons, ten men and fourteen women, signed the covenant.
Eleazar Mather, the first minister, who spent ten years of his short life in Northampton, was a member of the famous family of that name. He was the son of the Rev. Richard Mather of Dor- chester, and older brother of Increase Mather, minister, president of Harvard College, and colonial statesman. In 1657 Increase Mather took part in a meeting of ministers which was called to consider a question which had become distressingly important: should the children of non-church members be baptized?
Almost a generation had passed since the first settlement of the Bay and there was less religious zeal among the younger people who had not gone through the struggles of their fathers in Eng- land. Many of them, though baptized in infancy, had failed on reaching maturity to become full church members by making a public statement of their religious experience, consciousness of sin, repentance, and conversion. In spite of this they regarded themselves as Christians and were asking that their children re- ceive baptism. To this request the assembled ministers agreed. Immediately certain questions arose. The theory of infant bap- tism rested on the assumption that children born to church mem- bers were, by that very fact, a part of the church and therefore entitled to recognition as such, by baptism. But if they failed to
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take the further step required of the adult, were they or were they not to be considered church members? If their children could in turn be presented for baptism would it be equally possible for the children of these to be received into the church in the same manner? If so, was the whole basis of church membership, as taught by the earliest Congregationalists, to be abrogated?
To decide this question a Synod was convened (1662), a meet- ing of the clergy officially summoned by the General Court. The decision of this Synod favored the liberal side of the controversy. Children of baptized persons could be presented for baptism. If these, on reaching maturity, affirmed their Christian belief and expressed their intention to lead a proper life they could be ac- cepted as church members, enjoying all privileges except that of taking part in the Lord's Supper. They were in fact given a kind of half-way church membership. The name of "Half-Way Cove- nant" was used by the opposition to describe church membership which had been achieved without a public confession of sin and a public recountal of the experience of religious conversion.
Both Eleazar and Increase Mather were members of this Synod and both stood for the strict interpretation of church membership. There is no record of Eleazar's having taken any part in the de- bate but he expressed his views in letters to John Davenport of New Haven, one of the staunchest defenders of the strict inter- pretation. Apparently the minister from Northampton stood by his principles in the face of strong arguments presented to the Synod by popular leaders. Though Increase Mather eventually went over to the liberal side, Eleazar never departed from the stand he had taken. If Eleazar had been a man of strong physique he might have created in Northampton an earlier version of the battle later waged by Jonathan Edwards. The members of his church gradually accepted majority opinion but had such a high regard for its minister that nothing was done in opposition to his stand until very near the time of his death. Rapidly growing weaker in the last months of his life he died at the age of 32. In the words of his nephew, Cotton Mather, "he was a very pious walker, and as he drew towards the end of his days, he grew so remarkably ripe for heaven in a holy, watchful, fruitful disposi- tion, that many observing persons did prognosticate his being not far from his end."
Solomon Stoddard, Northampton's second minister, was a man
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of a different stamp. After graduating from Harvard he spent two years in Barbadoes and was passing through Boston on his way to England when he was persuaded to remain in the colony and take its vacant pulpit at Northampton. From the first Solo- mon Stoddard accepted the conventional and liberal practice of the churches. At a church meeting soon after his arrival a vote was passed "That from year to year such as grow up to adult age in the church shall present themselves to the Elders, and if they be found to understand and assent unto the doctrine of faith, not to be scandalous in life, and willing to subject themselves to the gov- ernment of Christ in this Church, shall publickly own the cove- nant and be acknowledged members of this church."
As time went on practice became more and more lax, not only in Northampton but in a majority of the churches, and many who had merely given their assent to Christian doctrine were being admitted to full communion. Solomon Stoddard supplied theo- retical support to this practice by what came to be known as the Stoddardean doctrine. Believing that the Lord's Supper was in- stituted as a means of regeneration he stated that it could be used in the case of the unconverted with this very purpose.
In the meantime the old colonial government had been having its troubles with the Stuart kings of the Restoration period. The fall of the Stuarts in 1688 and the Protestant succession of Wil- liam and Mary meant religious toleration of a sort in England and gave Massachusetts a new charter. But the old colony was now to be a royal province with a governor appointed by the King. Its exclusive treatment of other sects and its franchise based on church membership were no more. After 1691 Massachusetts was forced to tolerate all Protestants, and only a property qualifica- tion limited the franchise. Well-to-do Protestant Christians were the voters in eighteenth century Massachusetts. However, the wording of the new charter did not prevent the General Court from passing laws which set up Congregationalism as the Estab- lished Church, and every town was ordered to supply itself with a "learned, orthodox minister of good conversation" and pay his salary. Solomon Stoddard continued as Northampton's minister in accordance with the law.
If the Half-Way Covenant had ever had any political signifi- cance it was not a purely religious question, but as such it con- tinued to be a central point of contention in the sermons and pam-
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phlets of the period. Public debate between Solomon Stoddard and the Mathers began in 1700. A clear statement of his position appears in a sermon of Stoddard's published in 1709, "An Appeal to the Learned, Being a Vindication of the Right of Visible Saints to the Lord's Supper, Though they be destitute of a Saving Work of God's Spirit in their Hearts." Here the controversy rested un- til, forty years later, it was taken up by Stoddard's grandson and successor, Jonathan Edwards.
Chapter Three
Jonathan Edwards
By DANIEL AARON
T O most citizens of Northampton, Jonathan Edwards is either a shadowy figure of antiquity, an earlier townsman whose name is kept alive by the city's two Congrega- tional churches, or else he is remembered as a preacher of fire and brimstone who painted the agonies of sinners writhing in the hands of an angry God. Nevertheless it is important to remind ourselves that from 1729 to 1748 the profoundest thinker in 18th century America devoted his talents and energy to the edification of 600 parishioners in an isolated river town. Many distinguished men and women have been identified with Northampton since the days when Edwards preached, but he still remains her pre- eminent genius-a restlessly speculative scientist, an acute psy- chologist, a world-famous theologian and philosopher.
Prior to his arrival in Northampton in 1726, where he had been called to assist his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, Edwards' ca- reer had not been particularly noteworthy. To be sure, as a boy of twelve he had made some astute observations on the movements and habits of spiders and a year or so later had speculated preco- ciously about rainbows and colors, but in a New England full of studious youths Edwards was not regarded as a prodigy. He spent his first years in East Windsor, Connecticut, where his fa- ther, a solicitous but not overly brilliant clergyman, gave what time he could spare from his ministerial duties to the education of his sensitive and intellectually curious son. Edwards entered Yale at thirteen, a well-disciplined and mentally tidy youth al- though somewhat unimaginative and priggish in his personal re- lationships, humorless and a little cold. He never lost his austerity, his passion for order and arrangement that made mathematics and logic so congenial to him, but the years that he spent at Yale deep- ened his mind, and his discovery of John Locke's philosophy at
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fourteen revealed to him how religious knowledge could be de- rived from physical sensation, from the impression that the senses made upon the mind.
His conversion at seventeen was not in itself remarkable; New England was full of knowing children who could be appallingly articulate about their religious experiences. However, Edwards' own story, his Personal Narrative, had nothing in common with the ordinary insipid accounts of grace. The floodgates of heaven opened upon him. He felt for the first time the intimations of a true grace, "a sweet calm abstraction of soul from all the con- cerns of this world." He would contemplate the moon and sing his "contemplations" in a low voice. "I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm," he wrote, "and I used to take the opportunity at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and aw- ful voice of God's thunder, which often times was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God."
Before his conversion, Edwards had inwardly rebelled against the Calvinist notion of God's arbitrary sovereignty, His unex- plainable decision to save some and damn others. "It used to ap- pear like a horrible doctrine to me," he says. And then his sudden understanding of God's "sweetness" and "light" (words that occur and reoccur in his writings) made him see the horror of the sinner's plight in hell, shut off from the source of light and beauty and swallowed up in darkness. Edwards later described quite literally and graphically the torments of the damned, but such celebrated renditions as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" or "The Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and In- tolerable" were fervent exercises in persuasion. By playing on the nerves of his auditors, by reducing hell to something vividly physical, he could awaken slumbering hearts. Hell-fire, one can't but feel, was only a stage property for Edwards whereas Sin was loathesome reality. The sinner by disregarding the beauty of God was committing not only an immoral act but a kind of spiritual vandalism. Edwards' horrendous picture of evil sprang from a dazzling vision of its opposite: evil was the antithesis of that per- fect harmony and virtue and Being which is God.
It is helpful to remember these things in assessing and explain- ing Edwards' career as a minister of the Church of Northampton.
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Jonathan Edwards
The long pastorate of his mother's father, Solomon Stoddard, was drawing to an end (he had served for over half a century), and the young neophyte after a brief stint in a small New York Pres- byterian church and several years as a tutor at Yale found himself in a community thoroughly accustomed to the lax and liberal doc- trines of his grandparent. In Northampton as throughout New England, the old Puritan fervor was gone. Churches no longer ex- cluded the unconverted from the sacraments, and outward de- cency was considered sufficient evidence of inward sanctity.
Edwards' first years were peaceful enough. His congregation genuinely admired their young minister and his new wife, Sarah Pierrepont; they appreciated his intense sermons enlivened by concrete and vivid illustrations. From contemporary accounts, we learn that Edwards would take solitary rides into the country while he pondered over his sermons. He would put down his ideas on small pieces of white paper which he would then pin to his clothes. When he returned from his meditations, he would be quite literally covered with his thoughts.
The period of tranquillity, however, did not last. He had learned from John Locke that men's hearts could only be touched by making the abstract become alive. "The Reason why men No more Regard warnings of Future punishment," Edwards ob- served, "is because it Don't seem real to them." He tried to make these abstractions real, and in so doing prepared the way for the great religious revival that swept through the colonies in the early 1740's, an event of tremendous consequence in the cultural and social life of the country.
In 1733, seven years before the appearance in America of the electrifying English evangelist, George Whitefield, Edwards had noted a quickening of religious zeal in his own congregation. His persuasive preaching in which he harped upon the uncertainty of life and reproved the sinfulness of his flock, had begun to take effect. With increasing sharpness, he inveighed against the ever- spreading doctrine that salvation did not depend upon the inex- plicable will of God but rather upon external respectability and good works, that man possessed the power to save himself. The omnipotent and splendid God of Calvin was being transformed into a humanized deity, genial and benevolent, who made salva- tion easy. Edwards glowingly repudiated what he deemed to be a sickening perversion of truth. Man is nothing, he preached, God
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is all. The desire to be saved is in itself God-determined, and holi- ness is only a kind of radiation from God, a reflection of his own radiance. One cannot reach God by going to church or being charitable. One must feel religion in the heart and in the emo- tions, feel it personally. Edwards never dispensed with logic or reason in his appeals. He preferred to convince rather than to play on emotions, but he felt that the spirit was as indispensable as the letter, that the scripture unilluminated by immediate ex- perience was insufficient.
During the period between 1733 and 1735, the revival fire burned in Northampton, and, as Edwards described it in his own narrative of the affair, the town was transformed into a God-in- toxicated community. Every activity, every conversation was given over to religion. "Those that were wont to be the vainest, & Loosest Persons in Town seemed in General to be seized with strong convictions," he writes, ". . . the highest Families in the Town, & the oldest Persons in the Town, and many little chil- dren were effected Remarkeably." Under his grandfather Stod- dard, five revivals had taken place between 1679 and 1718, and Northampton was known even before Edwards' ministry as an "enthusiastical" town, but Edwards' revival was the most spec- tacular in Northampton's history and certainly the most publi- cized. His report of God's "harvest," A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and the Neighboring Towns and Villages (1736), was reprinted over twenty times in three years and be- came a guidebook for revivalists during the next one hundred years.
Edwards' passionate preaching had been marvelously effective, but he had made serious enemies in the community. While the re- vival fires still burned, there was no occasion for recriminations; salvation was the only concern. Yet even before the revival had ended, powerful members of Edwards' church-leaders like Israel Williams-began to resist him as one who would set aside the opin- ions and practices of Stoddard in his uncompromising re-state- ment of old doctrines. There were those who felt that Edwards' appeal to fear, his harsh arraignments of sin, his encouragement of emotion were all unhealthy and tended to promote nervous disorders. Edwards realized this possibility and had done every- thing in his power to keep the revival within bounds and to dis-
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Jonathan Edwards
tinguish between hysteria and grace. He had devised ways by which the over-wrought could funnel off their emotions in a controlled way, and in general he had been successful. In May, 1735, however, a prominent citizen, Joseph Hawley, cut his own throat in a fit of melancholy, and others were afflicted with delu- sions of various sorts. A few months more and the "heavenly shower" had ceased.
There is no space here to dwell any further on the Great Awak- ening which followed George Whitefield's evangelical tour in America in 1740 and after. Edwards also played an important part in this new flare-up of the spirit, and his famous hell-fire sermon, delivered at Enfield, Connecticut in July, 1741, is perhaps his most widely read work; but more typical and more important for posterity were his final opinions about revivals which he em- bodied in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). Here Edwards, while admitting the excesses of religious frenzy that accompanied the great revival, reaffirmed his faith in the re- ligion of the heart and sought to bridge the gulf between the extreme enthusiasts and the extreme rationalists: passion without light might be dangerous, yet "where there is a kind of light with- out heat," Edwards wrote, "a head stored with notions and specu- lations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light."
These reflections were set down in final form when Edwards' relations with his church were steadily deteriorating. Salary dis- putes, criticisms of his wife's allegedly expensive tastes as well as his own extravagance, and finally the notorious "Bad Book" or "Granny Book" incident provided opportunities for his enemies. When Moses Lyman, one of his supporters, told him that a group of Northampton teen-agers were secretly reading a handbook on midwifery, Edwards placed this information before his church, read the names of the guilty and the witnesses from the pulpit (making no distinction between them), and set up an investigat- ing committee. Since some of the implicated children belonged to leading families in the town, Edwards alienated at one stroke a number of influential people and practically assured his subse- quent dismissal.
When Edwards' close friend and supporter, Colonel John Stod- dard, died in 1748, his position was further undermined, and the strong opposition against him-centered around Joseph Hawley,
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son of the suicide and Edwards' own cousin-finally succeeded in ousting him on June 22, 1750. It came as no surprise, but it was painful nevertheless. In his noble farewell sermon, delivered with- out malice or rancor, he left it up to God whether his enemies had acted justly. Joseph Hawley lived to repent his part in the con- troversy and to beg the forgiveness of the slandered minister. Ed- wards, now removed to Stockbridge, replied that although "That Town & Church lies under great Guilt in the sight of God," he had had "enough of this Controversy, and desire to have done with it. I have spent enough of the precious Time of my life in it heretofore."
Not much time remained for him to complete his projected work on the freedom of the will, his final answer to those who would arrogate to men the powers of God. It took courage to leave the comfortable home, the polite community where he had spent 23 years, and settle in what was little more than a frontier outpost as a catechizer of Indians. Yet it was in Stockbridge, where he resided from 1751 to 1757, that he wrote some of his finest treatises. His selection as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) was an honor and a vindica- tion that Edwards did not live to enjoy. He died in 1758 after a smallpox inoculation.
The biographers of Edwards do not agree about the real rea- sons for his defeat in Northampton. Ola E. Winslow emphasizes the social and political implications: a village democracy out of sorts with a minister who bought his clothes in Boston and put on airs and identified himself with the local aristocracy. Perry Miller sees it rather as a cabal by an "oligarchy of business and real estate" who "were out for Edwards' scalp" and egged on the ig- norant to resist him.
Interesting as these explanations are, however, it is more likely that Edwards' principal difficulties were personal and doctrinal rather than political or social. Had he been more tactful and easy- going, he would have had an easier time, but he wouldn't have been Jonathan Edwards. Reasonable in argument, he was un- compromising when it came to principle. He could not accommo- date himself to the increasing secularization or accept as genuine piety what he could only regard as the husks of religion. The townspeople were unwilling or incapable of living up to his in- flexible standards and preferred a more comfortable faith. When
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the show-down came in 1749 and he requested a chance to de- fend his views in five public lectures, his judges did not even bother to hear him out.
Thus Northampton, to quote Paul Elmer More, "has the dis- tinction of having rejected the greatest theologian and philoso- pher yet produced in this country." The curious today may see his likeness in the memorial bronze tablet in the First Church on Main Street, but his finely wrought sermons and dissertations constitute his real memorial, and these belong not to Northamp- ton alone, but to the world.
Chapter Four
Seth Pomeroy: Citizen and Soldier May 20, 1706-February 17, 1777
By ELIZABETH A. FOSTER
T HE first of the Pomeroy family to come to America was Seth's great-grandfather, Eltweed Pomeroy, born in Bea- minster, Dorset. He and his wife came to New England in 1630. They lived in Dorchester and in Windsor. The first member of the family to live in Northampton was their son, Medad Pomeroy, who moved here in 1660. By trade he was a blacksmith and gunsmith, as were his son Ebenezer, his grandson Seth, and his great-grandson Quartus.
Seth Pomeroy, born in Northampton May 20, 1706, in his will bequeathed to his second son Quartus "my bickiron (anvil) that his great-grandfather made and used 105 years ago. He is the fourth smith in the family, and Quartus is his name." This anvil descended in the family to Mr. Brenton C. Pomeroy of Pitts- field, who has recently presented it to the Northampton Histori- cal Society.
To judge by extracts from Seth Pomeroy's account book, a smith did everything from pulling a tooth (for Jonathan Hunt in March 1737) to making and repairing farm equipment, horse- shoeing, making bells and firearms. Seth Pomeroy was probably most widely known in his time as a gunsmith.
In addition to being a smith, Pomeroy became a road-builder. His military service gave him extensive training in this branch of activity. In July 1755, going from Albany on the way to Crown Point, he records in his journal that they had to clear and mend roads and bridges "that were defective." In August of the same year he notes that their progress was slow because the roads had to be cleared ahead of the army. In October, 1759, after being entrusted by Gov. Pownal with the general oversight of the fron- tier garrisons, he submitted to the Governor a plan for roads to be
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Seth Pomeroy: Citizen and Soldier
cut from Stockbridge and north along "the indian path" to join the road to Crown Point. This plan the Governor promised to put into effect "when a proper occasion offers and when the means of doing it can be come at." In September, October, and November of 1764, Pomeroy was employed in building a road at home, "the new road the west side of Rocky Hill." The construction of stockades, "mounts," and forts seems also to have been a part of his duties during his military service.
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