PERHAPS THERE is no significance in the fact that Judith Coffin’s monument in the old burying ground in Newbury, Massachusetts, is twice as large as her husband’s. Nevertheless it may represent some measure of earthly justice meted out by her descendants. In life Tristram had been honored among men. His epitaph highlights a title and a position:
To the memory of Tristram Coffin, Esq., who having served the first church of Newbury in the office of a Deacon 20 years died Feb. 4, 1703-4 aged 72 years.
On earth he purchased a good degree,
Great boldness in the faith and liberty,
And now possesses immortality.
Judith’s eminence had been private. Her epitaph celebrates her sobriety and her piety but, above all, her amazing fecundity:
To the memory of Mrs. Judith late virtuous wife of Deac. Tristram Coffin, Esqr. who having lived to see 177 of her children and children’s children to the 3d generation died Dec. 15, 1705 aged 80.
Grave, sober, faithful, fruitfull vine was she,
A rare example of true piety.
Widow’d awhile she wayted wisht for rest
With her dear husband in her Savior’s breast.1
The key metaphor in Tristram’s verse is economic—“he purchased a good degree.” In Judith’s it is organic—a “fruitfull vine was she.” Property versus reproduction—the two markers etch traditional gender distinctions, but with the order of eminence curiously reversed! Still, though Judith’s stone towers over Tristram’s, there is no explicit concern for balancing a scale. In honoring the wife, the eulogist quietly but unmistakably honored the husband as well. Judith Coffin lived and died the “virtuous wife of Deac. Tristram Coffin, Esqr.”; in widowhood she “wisht for rest/With her dear husband in her Savior’s breast.” Perhaps the monument did not celebrate a woman so much as it celebrated a concept of family that had not yet become the exclusive preserve of women.
For many New Englanders—male as well as female—the values celebrated on Judith Coffin’s stone were ascendant. She and Tristram inherited the ancient blessing of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, living to see their own seed multiply as the stars. Students of politics, economics, and religion have long known that family bonds played a significant part in the external life of the New England colonies.2 Less clearly understood have been the balances between external and internal values and between masculine and feminine roles. Precisely where in the tents of Israel stood Rachel, Hannah, and Leah? “Honoured mother”—the phrase rings through letters, diaries, wills, estate accounts, and sermons from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. What does it mean? Beneath the frozen sentiment, what were the social, biological, and cultural realities which shaped the maternal role?
FOR PURPOSES OF ANALYSIS, we might distinguish within any single family a “family of property,” a “family of reproduction,” and a “family of sentiment.” Each of these “families” must be approached in a different way. The Coffin family of property, for example, can be discerned in the will which Tristram signed in May of 1703. A family of reproduction can be sketched through the birth and death records of Judith’s 177 children and children’s children. A family of sentiment, though more difficult to define, can at least be glimpsed in the names which these children bore. By looking at such materials carefully and by relating them to larger patterns for northern New England, we can better understand the concept of motherhood magnified in that intriguing gravestone in Newbury burying ground.
Like other prudent fathers of his generation, Tristram Coffin “purchased” an earthly as well as a heavenly estate, adding additional parcels of land to his original allotment in order to provide for each of his four surviving sons.3 At their father’s death, all four sons, though grown men, remained economically beholden to their father, and each now received clear title to land which he had probably long been farming. James received part of the homestead plus other plots of land in Newbury. Stephen received “housing and upland and meddows with priviligis of Common Rights” in the neighboring town of Haverhill. Peter was given the deed to a farm in Gloucester. Nathaniel, the youngest, inherited his father’s “now dwelling house with my barnes and pastuour land a joyning.”
Judith Coffin, like many aged widows in New England, received a comfortable maintenance rather than the traditional “thirds.” Nathaniel was to “take spesshall care” of his mother to “provid for har in all Respectes.” The other sons were to help, paying their brother a fixed sum annually for their mother’s support. As for the daughters, their portions had probably long since been paid, perhaps in sheets, kettles, coverlets, or cattle given at marriage. Tristram gave Mary, Judith, and Lydia small amounts of money and promised Deborah twelve walnut trees. He also made a number of small and perhaps sentimental bequests to grandchildren—including three boys named Tristram.
The pattern is familiar: land for sons, movables for daughters, and for widows a carefully defined dependency. “Families of property” in New England, as elsewhere in the western world, revolved upon the orderly transmittal of wealth and livelihood from father to son.4
The Coffin “family of reproduction” was far more complex. When Judith Somerby married Tristram Coffin in March of 1653, she was a widow with three young children: Sarah, who was eight, Elizabeth, who was six, and Daniel, who was not yet three. (Another son had died in infancy.) In the next sixteen years Judith gave birth to ten Coffin children, all of whom survived infancy.5 There is an almost saucy irony in the family name, as though some wind of Yankee humor had swept Puritan Newbury. Death seldom visited the Coffins.
By the time Judith’s last baby was born in March of 1669 she already had six grandchildren. From 1677 until her death in 1705—twenty-eight years—at least one grandchild was born in each year. In the most prolific period, from 1686 to 1696, thirty-eight infants were born, almost four a year. Judith’s gravestone should probably be taken literally when it says she lived to see 177 descendants, for two of her four surviving sons and five of her six daughters remained in Newbury, while the others clustered in nearby communities. The oldest son, James, lived in a house separated from the family dwelling only by the dairy. If Judith made any effort to assist at these births, to help during lyings-in, to watch in sickness, and to assist with the nurture of her grandchildren, as many women did, there was little lull in her mothering. One can imagine her greeting each infant in turn, examining noses and earlobes, cowlicks or birthmarks, searching for characteristics which identified each child as a Coffin or a Somerby or a Knight. Each year her sight may have grown more dim. Near the end these children may have rocked her in the “grandmother’s” cradle which still stands in the old house.6
The Coffin family exemplifies premodern reproductive patterns under the most favorable of environmental conditions. John Coffin and his half-brother, Daniel Somerby, were killed in King Philip’s War, and Enoch died before reaching his teens, but all of the other children lived to marry. Such a demographic profile was by no means unique in northern New England, especially in the seventeenth century, though it coexisted with, and in some communities was superseded by, more traditional patterns of early death and separation of spouses and children.7 Families like the Coffins thrived in a world in which impermanence was an expectation if not always a reality.
Patterns of property and of reproduction are more easily discerned than the attitudes and feelings which accompanied them. Yet some hint of the Coffin “family of sentiment” survives in the most accessible of historical records—the names which parents gave their children. Surnames reflect the patriarchal and patrilineal structure of New England families. Given names reveal a more complex and varied world, a landscape marked by more subtle metes and bounds. A full exploration of naming patterns could tell us a great deal about family boundaries in colonial America. Even the briefest excursion substantiates two conclusions. “Families of sentiment” were matrilineal as well as patrilineal, and they were oriented toward the past.
In genealogical records an occasional “Seaborn” testifies to the existence of a new world, but most names link to a long chain of progenitors, with each generation turning toward the one just before. But chain is the wrong word to convey the complexity of such bonds. Because names came from both sides in roughly equal proportions, each new family symbolically joined two branching families of origin. The genealogist’s metaphor is better. In towns like Newbury the roots and foliage of the old families spread luxuriantly until it was difficult to distinguish kin from neighbor.
Were colonial New Englanders conscious of these extended families? Some of them certainly were. In 1722 Tristram and Judith’s nephew Stephen Greenleaf decided to tally the descendants of his maternal grandfather, the first Tristram Coffin, who had come to America in 1642 with his widowed mother, his wife, and his five children. Stephen remembered his great-grandmother Coffin. Perhaps his childhood memories helped to focus his genealogical interest on his mother’s rather than his father’s family. He counted 1,138 descendants, 570 of them tracing to his mother, Elizabeth, or to his uncle Tristram, the two Coffin children who remained in Newbury.8 For most people the concept of family was probably less expansive, though there is good evidence that consanguinity played a much wider role in ordinary life than it does today.9
Among the 142 grandchildren of Tristram Coffin and his sister Elizabeth Greenleaf, eighty-six percent were named for parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles.10 In christening their children, parents fulfilled the Biblical command: “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.” Almost as frequently they used a name to restore symbolically some lost part of the immediate family. Both impulses are amply illustrated among the grandchildren of Judith and Tristram.
Deborah Coffin and her youngest sister Mary were married on the same day in 1677. Before the year was out, each had a baby girl named Judith. In marriage they had given up their father’s name, becoming submerged in new families of property, but in motherhood each had honored her family of origin. The new little Judiths already had a three-year-old cousin, Judith Sanborn of Hampton. Before their grandmother’s death in 1704 there would be seven more namesakes—Judith Pike, Judith Clark, Judith Hale, Judith Little, and three Judith Coffins. There were almost as many Tristrams. All but one of the children named a daughter for their mother and a son for their father. The one exception is significant. Nathaniel, the youngest son, heir to the homestead and custodian of the aged mother, the child most visibly bound to the parents, was the only one who did not pass on their names. Perhaps the honored parents were simply too much with him.
But in naming his first son John and the second Enoch, Nathaniel demonstrated a second naming pattern. Both names belonged to brothers now dead. Nathaniel had been six when Enoch died; he was eight when John went off to the Indian wars. Both deaths, coming after two decades without a loss, must have been deeply felt in the family. Lydia’s first son, born in 1680, might have been named George for his paternal grandfather or Moses for his father, the usual practice. Instead he too became John. Twelve days later Deborah gave birth to her first son, named for the same lost uncle. The death of John Coffin might not account for every one of the Johns among the Coffin grandchildren—the name is, after all, a common one—but Enoch’s death certainly explains the three children by that name in the family. Among the living brothers the names of Peter and Stephen appear but once and those of James and Nathaniel not at all.
Death was only one of many possible motives for singling out a particular name. Three Coffin children named a daughter for Lydia, but only one for Deborah, though the reason is impossible to determine. Did they prefer one sister to another? Or only her name? Nathaniel’s first daughter was named Apphia, a name with a curious history in the family. His wife, Sarah, had a stepsister of that name who was about her age. Sarah married her first husband, Henry Dole, at about the same time that Apphia married Nathaniel’s brother Peter Coffin. Perhaps Apphia’s removal to Gloucester explains why Sarah named her first daughter for the now distant sister. When Sarah married Nathaniel Coffin, this Apphia was just five years old. Within a year she died. When a Coffin daughter arrived four years later, she too became Apphia, in remembrance of her mother’s stepsister and her own.
Parents frequently named one child for another who had died. In March of 1696, for example, Deborah’s John died at the age of six. When another boy was born nine months later, he received his brother’s (and his uncle’s) name. Mary had two Josephs; Stephen had two Tristrams; and Peter as well as Nathaniel had two daughters named Apphia. Such a custom may demonstrate indifference to the individual identity of young children, as some historians have suggested, but it also represents a now forgotten way of transcending death through progeny, of extending and enlarging each family’s past through a link to the living present. The custom of naming a child for a dead sibling was part of a larger pattern of remembrance. Almost all New England children, whether named for grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, or lost brothers or sisters, became carriers of the past. Each family existed in the sum of its parts.
“Families of property” were built upon the transfer of land and livelihood from fathers to sons. Within these families women were secondary and dependent. “Families of reproduction” were determined by biological cycles of birth and death. Although Providence, not individual choice, decreed how many children one would have or how long a marriage would survive, women of necessity stood at the physical center of these families, not only in youth but in middle age as the stage of mothering merged with the stage of grandmothering. At the deepest level “families of sentiment” responded to a tension between the felt need to perpetuate the clan and the apparent fragility of any individual. Birth and death, more than any sequence of action in between, directed the focus of feeling.
All three families helped to create the idealized motherhood magnified on the gravestone of Judith Coffin. “Grave, sober, faithful, fruitfull vine was she”—“grave and sober” because she stood at the bridge of life and death, “faithful” because she lived to serve rather than to own, “fruitfull” because in her 177 descendants she had surmounted mutability. Returning to her “Savior’s breast,” she would live in the memories of her children and her children’s children. Defined in private experience and in public pronouncement, these qualities characterized the maternal role in early New England.
WRITING FROM ENGLAND in June of 1688, Muriel Mosely sent word to her brother Nathaniel Saltonstall that his “dear Mother” had died. There had apparently been a breach in the family, a conflict between Nathaniel and his father over property. Despite the problem, Muriel wanted Nathaniel to know that he had lost “a praying mother, a Carfull, painfull, tender hearted, self-denying mother; who did what she could for you, and beyond her power; for she abridged her self of necessarys that she might save a little for you.”11 Saintly motherhood was not invented in the nineteenth century nor in America. It was a theme dear to devout Christians on both sides of the Atlantic. In early eighteenth-century New England it became a favorite theme of the publishing ministry. In a sermon preached at the death of his own mother Cotton Mather went so far as to consider whether the Holy Spirit might be the maternal member of the Trinity. Since there was a Father and a Son, certainly there should be a Mother as well.12 In a sermon published in 1713 Mather even suggested that through motherhood Eve became an instrument of redemption, “And that brave Woman, being Styled, The Mother of all the Living, it has induced Learned Men to conceive, That Eve was, by being the First of them all, in a peculiar manner, the Mother of all that Live unto God; and that she was on this account (Oh! most Happy Woman!) a Mother to her own Husband, and the Instrument of bringing him to Believe in the Great Redeemer.”13 Two years later Benjamin Colman reversed an ancient metaphor in proclaiming that “Adam bore the Name of the Dying Body, Eve of the Living Soul.”14
In such pronouncements the idealization of motherhood received its fullest expression. Puritan motherhood was not Victorian motherhood, however. Three crucial factors determined the particular nature of the maternal role in early New England. Mothers represented the affectionate mode in an essentially authoritarian system of child-rearing. Mothering was extensive rather than intensive. Motherhood was still closely keyed to the folk concept of fertility.
Mothers represented the affectionate mode in an essentially authoritarian system of child-rearing. Men like Tristram Coffin presided over a world of finite resources and uncertain need. In any generation, a “family of reproduction” might overwhelm a “family of property.” Most men and women had neither the ability nor the inclination to limit the first or to effect dramatic changes in the second. True, there was land beyond Pennacook and Kittery, but there were limits to what could be attained, cleared, and (especially in this era) defended. For many reasons New Englanders also had a deep fear of social disintegration. They cherished stability even when they could not attain it. To provide for succeeding generations but also to protect the needs of the whole, including the aged, the orphaned, and the widowed, patriarchal order was seen as essential. Families could not be fed on sentiment.
In such a setting, mother love or any other form of human love could never be an unqualified good. When they sought a metaphor for spiritual nourishment, ministers frequently turned to mothering and especially to breast-feeding. But such unqualified giving was potentially troublesome in life, an invitation to disorder. “Persons are often more apt to despise a Mother, (the weaker vessel, and frequently most indulgent),” one minister told his congregation. Another explained that “by reason of her blandishments, and fond indulgence” a mother was more often subject to irreverence than a father.15 Here, then, the valuation was negative. Because indulgence brought its own reward in disrespectful children, maternal love had always to be balanced by paternal government.
This distinction is beautifully developed in the “Valedictory and Monitory Writing” which Sarah Goodhue of Ipswich composed just before her death in 1681. Having a premonition that her ninth travail would be her last, she wrote a long letter of farewell, folding it up among her husband’s papers with instructions to open it “if by sudden death I am taken away from thee.” Her prescience was deemed so remarkable and her pious resignation so edifying that her letter appeared in print not long afterward. As a document “profitable to all that may happen to read the same,” it is surprisingly personal, as long passages of sober advice open into delicate vignettes of seventeenth-century family life. Sarah urged her children to obey and honor their father, “for I must testify the truth unto you, and I may call some of you to testify against yourselves; that your Father hath been loving, kind, tender-hearted towards you all.” Had the children any reason to doubt it? Sarah’s concern seems to imply that they did. Perhaps a need to govern the growing family, to suppress any tendency toward indulgence in himself, had somehow created an emotional distance between the father and the older children. The mother stood in the breach, justifying and defending the stronger parent.
You that are grown up, cannot but see how careful your father is when he cometh home from his work, to take the young ones up into his wearied arms, by his loving carriage and care towards those, you may behold as in a glass, his tender care and love to you every one as you grow up: I can safely say, that his love was so to you all, that I cannot say which is the child he doth love best.
The father’s instruction, his reproofs, his “laying before you the ill event that would happen unto you, if you did not walk in God’s ways” had all been intended for their good, Sarah told her children. How could they forget it? Their godly mother, about to give her life to bring another child into the world, had given them her solemn testimony.16
Sarah Goodhue’s letter describes a mode of parenting common in early America. Tender nurture and open expressions of affection in early childhood gave way to firm discipline and pious rule-making as the children grew. Parents reinforced their own authority with frequent reminders of the correcting power of God.17 Although both men and women may have fondled babies, spanked toddlers, and chastened teens, the affectionate side of child-rearing was symbolically linked with mothers, the authoritarian with fathers.18 It could hardly have been otherwise. Mothers were responsible for the very survival of children in their earliest and most vulnerable years, fathers for the hard decisions of emerging adulthood, the questions of land and livelihood.
When a father was missing, the town fathers stood in his place, sometimes creating visible conflicts between authority and affection as mother love struggled with economic reality. In November of 1670, for example, Wiboroe Gatchell found herself in the stocks for “abusing” Richard Prince and “offering to take away his servant.” The servant was Gatchell’s own son, an apprentice to Prince.19 In another case, Thamar Quilter tried unsuccessfully to break the contract which bound her only son, Joseph, to William Buckley of Ipswich. When Joseph became ill, the widow Quilter made frequent visits to his master’s house, becoming “greeved to the harte” at conditions there. His room was cold, she told the court, and Buckley was “harsh to him (tho the boy as is well known was in great extremytye).” When Buckley offered to let her take Joseph home, she was at first unwilling, yet with “a mothers bowel yerneing toward my child … did not turne him backe; feareing he might perish.” Though she insisted that Buckley had been the one to break the contract, the courts forced her to return her son.20 In apprenticeship cases, affection seldom out-argued authority.
In a more spectacular case, involving young Joseph Porter of Salem, mother love at least tempered justice. In March of 1664 Porter was sentenced to stand in the gallows and then to be whipped, imprisoned, and fined. He might have died. According to a contemporary, “If the mother of the said Porter had not been overmoved by hir tender & motherly affections to forbeare, but had joyned with his father in complaining & craving justice, the Court must necessarily have proceeded with him as a capitall offender, according to our law, being ground upon & expressed in the word of God, in Deut 22:20, 21.” The Biblical dictum, never applied in Massachusetts, required death for a stubborn and rebellious child. Porter had not only disobeyed his parents, he had slandered them. He had called his mother “Rambeggar, Gammar Shithouse, Gammar Pissehouse, Gammar Two Shoes, & told hir her tongue went like a peare monger.”21
Goody Porter’s tongue may indeed have run on “like a peare monger.” Our concern, however, is not with child-rearing practices as such, but with contemporary perceptions of mothering. In this regard Goody Porter’s personality and even her motives are of little consequence. In relation to her own husband she was perceived as “tender.” Like Sarah Goodhue, Thamar Quilter, and Wiboroe Gatchell, she represented the affectionate mode in a dual concept of parenting.
Mothering in early New England was extensive rather than intensive. For women like Judith Coffin, as well as for their husbands, there were also tensions between “property” and “reproduction,” though these would be focused upon the immediate rather than the future needs of the family—how to keep feathers in beds, fresh milk in porridge, or stockings on multiplying pairs of feet.22 Only in infancy were children simply children. As soon as they could pluck goose feathers or dry spoons, children were also servants. Hired servants, at the same time, were children, needing clothes of their own, firm discipline, and instruction in the Bible. Mothering meant generalized responsibility for an assembly of youngsters rather than concentrated devotion to a few. If babies were referred to as “it,” this was a sign not only of their undeveloped personalities but also of the continually changing but persistent identity of the youngest family member as one infant succeeded another.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century households were busy and cluttered places where at any given moment everyone and no one might be watching the children. When Alice Walton came in from the field after taking her husband his dinner, she found her toddler missing. “It was here Just now presently,” an older daughter exclaimed. But the mother was too late. The child had drowned in an unfenced water hole. When Thomas Newall’s child drowned in a two-foot-deep pit near his house, he sued a neighbor, who had apparently dug the pit for tanning. Other neighbors testified that the tanner had filled in the pit, but that Newall’s own son had dug it out again to keep alewives in. His mother testified that the child was out of her sight no more than thirty minutes to an hour. Within the house there were similar dangers. Nicholas Gilman’s son Tristram, five and a half years old, fell through a trapdoor in a shop chamber where he was playing. Not long afterward a Gilman cousin “narrowly escaped drowning being fallen into a Kettle of Suds,” but was “Seasonably Spyd and pulled out by the Heels.” Hannah Palmer’s daughter was not so fortunate. While her mother was still lying in and perhaps grieving over the loss of twins born five days before, she fell into a kettle of scalding water and lived but a day.23
Open fires, wash kettles, and unfenced streams and ponds competed with measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and intestinal worms as potential killers, yet mothers had little time to dote upon their children even in the most dangerous age of their life. Some parents dealt with the fragility of life through emotional disengagement, a mode which could lead to indifference if not outright neglect. For other parents, the imminence of death reinforced a concern with the salvation of their growing children. The little Maine boy who refused to go to sleep each night until his mother had heard his prayers may have been precociously pious, as his minister believed, but he had also discovered an effective way to capture and hold his busy mother’s attention.24 For many women, personal piety became a form of nurture. With heavy responsibilities, little time, and few resources, they could at least admonish and pray.
If mothers in early New England did not focus intense care and concern on any one child, they did extend the nurturing role into the community in the support of other women in childbearing, in casual surveillance of one another’s children, in the more formal tutelage of servants, and sometimes in the development of neighborhood “dame schools,” which were as much systems of communal day care as “schools” in any modern sense.25 This more general notion of mothering reached into old age. Among the gentry a young man might remember his grandmother as a “tender parent.” In rural villages any old woman was a “mother” or a “gammar.”26
The extensive nature of mothering also helps to account for the existence in rural communities of witches. If a witch was by definition a bad neighbor, she was also a bad mother. Instead of nursing babies, she gave suck to familiar spirits or to the Devil himself. Witchcraft is closely linked with fertility in its larger sense.27 Witches killed pigs, blasted babies, and cast spells on pubescent girls. Elements of this lore survived in country towns well into the eighteenth century. When Sarah Keene of Kittery discovered what appeared to be an extra nipple under one of her breasts, she worried about it enough to ask her neighbor Elizabeth Pettegrew if she thought it were possible to be a witch without knowing it. Years later the aura of witchcraft still pursued her. When John Spinney was rowing home from the tavern one evening in 1725, he struck at a specter in the water, telling his companions that it was “Mother Kene or the Devil.”28
Witchcraft belief confirms the social nature of the maternal role. Because women were perceived to have real, though mysterious, power, they could become the focus of communal fear and anger. But it also testifies to the psychological complexity of mothering in this insecure and frightening environment. As Bruno Bettelheim has shown, fairy tales with their wicked witches, cruel stepmothers, and fairy godmothers allow children to separate the tender, all-giving, self-denying aspects of motherhood from the angry, punishing, and revengeful. Only by separating the frightening mother from the real mother can a child feel fully protected by her.29 In early New England, of course, witches were not fantasies but realities, a measure perhaps of the depth of conflict and need for security in this often incomprehensible world. There should be no surprise in finding witchcraft in the same time and place as idealized motherhood.
Even on the most sophisticated level, the concept of motherhood was closely tied to fertility. Whatever their demographic history, the values of early New Englanders were still planted in a world where most children did not survive. To bear children and, above all, to see those children bear children were accounted rich blessings. Though reproduction was uncontrollable, the source of real tensions for fathers and for mothers, it was also highly valued. To have 177 descendants was to achieve a crown on earth. Aside from any abstract quality of character or spirit, fruitfulness in itself conferred status. This is why the crown of mothering came in old age when a woman might see not only her children but her children’s children. “May [you] glorifi the Lord in helping to buld up the house of jacobe yor father,” Margaret Thatcher wrote to her ailing and presumably pregnant daughter in October of 1686. Father Jacob was of course the Biblical Jacob, but the spiritual service which this mother rendered began in biological reproduction, though of course it did not end there. Mistress Thatcher hoped to see her little grandchildren become “polished stons” in the house of the Lord. “[T] hem i do hertili inbrace,” she wrote.30
The births and deaths of grandchildren could touch grandmothers in an especially powerful way, for each one was in some sense a “remainder” of herself. During the diphtheria epidemic of 1735 Deborah Jaques of Newbury went into an upstairs chamber to fetch some candles which were kept in a bushel basket under a bed. As she leaned over to return the basket to its place, she saw what seemed to be a little hand in a striped boy’s sleeve, though there was no child to be found in the house. One week following this apparition her grandson Henry died, followed by Ebenezer, and then by Stephen.31
Philip Greven has shown the conservative effect which patriarchal longevity had upon “families of property” in early New England. Matriarchal longevity may have been equally important in sustaining and enlarging “families of sentiment.” There is suggestive evidence of this in a genealogical record from eighteenth-century Ipswich. Elizabeth Rogers Appleton was fourth in a succession of godly grandmothers descended from Dorothy Dudley. Her grandmother Patience Denison died at seventy-one. Her mother, Elizabeth Rogers, was something of a marvel to her relatives at the age of eighty. Elizabeth herself outlived both her mother and her grandmother, dying in 1754 at the age of ninety-one. Like the Coffins of Newbury, the Appletons of Ipswich were given to counting their progeny, but the demographic profile of the two families is strikingly different.
In the last years of her life Elizabeth summarized the family record which she had kept, interspersing brief sentiments among the names and dates.32 Only five of her nine children lived to marry, and among these Priscilla died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving only one child, a boy who died himself soon after his tenth birthday. Two of Elizabeth’s daughters and the wives of two of her sons lived to the end of their childbearing years, producing twenty grandsons and twenty granddaughters—but fewer than half of these children survived. The grandsons were especially vulnerable, perhaps because of some inherited disorder aggravated by the custom of intermarriage among the Ipswich elite. The family record of Daniel Appleton is especially grim. His wife gave birth to eleven children in the nineteen years between 1717 and 1736. Only three survived. One of these, an unmarried daughter named Margaret, expired at the age of twenty-two, as her grandmother said, “after 4 or 5 years weaknes and languishing.” The statistics for Daniel’s brother Nathaniel appear cheerful only in comparison. His wife bore thirteen children in twenty-one years. Six survived.
Two themes emerge from Elizabeth Appleton’s running commentary on the demographic reversals in her own family history. The first, predictably, is religious resignation. She seems to have been consoled in the belief that her granddaughter Margaret was “under great conviction and received joy and comfort” during the last stage of her illness. But there is anguish as well as piety in the grandmother’s reflections, a sense not only of communal but of personal loss as each tender shoot on her vine was blasted. “[S]o it pleased God to take away one after another of my dear children, I hope, to himself,” she wrote after the death of a grandchild. When a great-granddaughter died very suddenly at the age of two, she could only note “another bitter bereavement of a dear pleasant desirable grand child.”
At the very end of the record Mrs. Appleton brought the two themes together, summarizing her gains and losses and affirming her deepest hopes:
Hear is an account of all my posterity. 6 sons and 3 daughters, 20 grand son and 20 grand daughters, 58 in all. 33 are gon before me. I hope I shall mett them all att Christ’s rit hand among his sheep and lambs. I often look over this list with sorrow but with comfortable hopes that they which are gone are gon to rest and I desire they that survive may remember their creator in the days of thire youth, and fear God betimes.
Elizabeth Appleton considered herself the mother not only of the living but of the dead—of the Margarets, Elizabeths, Daniels, Johns, and Nathaniels who had gone before as well as of those who remained. She could not know with certainty that all had been saved any more than she could be positive of her own election. But family pride as well as religious conviction gave her “good hopes.”
In this she was not alone. Long before the Great Awakening, New England burying grounds give evidence of the optimism of orthodox parents, men and women who knew that their children were elected to salvation or damnation by the supreme will of God and that earthly baptism gave no guarantee of salvation. When Samuel Sewall’s sister Mehetable died in 1702, her marker confidently promised reunion with “her glorified son William,” a child who had died two years before.33 Three years later Mehetable’s nephew Samuel Moody, a staunch Calvinist who preached hellfire and damnation to three generations of Maine children, allowed this hopeful sentiment to be inscribed beneath the winged death’s-head on the marker of his infant daughter:
RESURRECTION
To Immortality in spotless Beauty, with all Other Bodily Perfections, after the fashion of Christs Glorious Body, is expected for the Sub adjacent Dust of Lucy Moodey Who was born, & died, July the 6, 1705 Thus Birth, Spousals to Christ, Death, Coronation All in One Day may have their Celebration.34
For tiny Lucy, “Spousals to Christ” through baptism could not ensure a crown on high, yet her bereaved parents not only hoped for but expected “Coronation.” A family in Heaven enlarged a family on earth.
WE HAVE DESCRIBED an ideal of motherhood which focused upon tenderness, self-denial, piety, and fruitfulness, and which traced a progression from the intense nurturing of infants through the haphazard but pious watchfulness of growing children to an old age characterized by economic dependency, religious resignation, and an absorbing concern with the next generation. All of these themes are realized in a graceful poem which Anne Bradstreet composed for her own children sometime after 1656.
I had eight birds hatcht in one nest,
Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest,
I nurst them up with pain and care,
Nor cost, nor labour did I spare,
Till at the last they felt their wing.
Mounted the Trees, and learn’d to sing.
The emotions of the mother bird turn on two related issues—her fears for her children and her perception of her own changing role in relation to them. She had done her best, had bred them, fed them, and with her “wings kept off all harm.” Now there was little she could do but pray that her children would avoid the “Fowlers snare.” Meanwhile she could sit in the shade and sing, contemplating her own flight into that “country beyond sight.”
But the poem did not end there. For the aging bird, immortality lay not only in the far country but in her song and in her children’s memories.
When each of you shall in your nest
Among your young ones take your rest,
In chirping language oft them tell,
You had a Dam that lov’d you well.
That did what could be done for young,
And nurst you up till you were strong,
And fore she once would let you fly,
She shew’d you joy and misery;
Taught what was good, and what was ill,
What would save life, and what would kill.
Thus gone, amongst you I may live,
And dead, yet speak, and counsel give.35
If the poet ignored the threats within the nest itself, the crowding, the screeching, the insistent demands upon the mother bird, she was only fulfilling the highest expectations of her maternal role. An honored mother was fruitful, faithful, tender, and giving. Her chief monument was in her progeny.