I'd thought to do something different but had no time this week, so you're stuck with more Pilgrim ancestor stories.
This one seemed appropriate because we recently celebrated the birthday of my mother’s cousin. Although we are close and generally get along well, she is conservative (pretty much the only one in my family) and I am liberal. In her honor, I write this week about a dispute between “conservatives” and “liberals” from the early days of the Plymouth Colony. This dispute led, pretty much directly, to the founding of the town of Barnstable, as discussed in this diary.
As I’ve mentioned before, the early Separatist congregations were progressive in the sense that they rejected hierarchical church structures in favor of congregations run democratically by their members. In virtually all else they were quite conservative. That did not mean, however, that they agreed on everything. Within fifteen years or so of the Mayflower’s arrival in Plymouth, congregations in the colony were strongly divided over a question of theology: the mode of infant baptism.
The hardline position in this dispute was that infants could only be baptized by total immersion in water. The “liberal” position was that mere sprinkling of water on the infant would suffice. Frankly, this dispute seems silly to me, but to the Puritans of early New England it was a question of paramount importance. In this instance, the liberal position was overwhelmingly favored by the population because they feared total immersion during harsh New England winters would kill their babies.
One place where this dispute played out was Scituate, Massachusetts, some twenty miles up the coast from Plymouth, a place dear to my heart.
The first English settlement in Scituate (the name derives from the Wampanoag word "satuit," meaning "cold brook") dates from 1627, when Plymouth residents joined with newly arrived immigrants from Kent to make homesteads there. After Giles Saxton, who served as minister for some time, left, the settlement had no minister for a time. 1634 saw the arrival of Rev. John Lothrop, the same Lothrop who would found Barnstable in 1639.
Lothrop had been a rector in the Church of England, but became increasingly disillusioned with the bishop’s authority. In about 1624 he moved to the first openly Puritan church in London. King Charles I, already battling Puritans in Parliament, cracked down on such churches, and in 1632 Lothrop was arrested for holding clandestine Separatist meetings in his home. The Star Chamber, after holding him in prison for two years, agreed to pardon him if he left for the New World with his followers. He agreed. Lothrop and his group arrived in Boston in September 1634 and within days moved to Scituate. Early in 1635 they adopted a covenant to form a religious community, the First Parish in Scituate, with Lothrop as their first pastor. Soon after, in 1636, Scituate became an independent town.
Lothrop, strict and dour on most issues, was a liberal on the baptism issue, but he met with significant opposition in Scituate. In 1639, fed up with the arguing and the poor sandy soil of Scituate, he took a large number of his congregants across the bay, founding the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod (the soil's not really any better). Several of my direct ancestors (some of whom were in Scituate with Lothrop) were among the earliest settlers of Barnstable: Robert Shelley, Thomas Huckins, Austin Bearse, Thomas Dimmock, John Hall, John Gardner.
Barnstable, inc. 1639. The more local history I learn, the more dates on these signs make sense.
Near Barnstable's harbor on Cape Cod Bay. The new arrivals from Scituate would have arrived here.
Lothrop’s house in Barnstable today forms part of the Sturgis Library, the town’s public library. It has a very good section on Cape genealogy and Lothrop’s own Bible. He once dropped a candle on it, burning one of the pages, and rewrote the page from memory.
The Sturgis Library in Barnstable, named for a great-great-grandson of John Lothrop. The front part of the library shown here, which houses its genealogy collection and the Lothrop Bible, is Lothrop's 1644 house. It still has the original floorboards.
A page from Rev. John Lothrop's Bible, where he filled in, from memory in his own hand, the verses burned away by his candle. It is at Barnstable's Sturgis Library.
Lothrop had thirteen children with two wives. A list of his descendants reads like a who’s who of American history. He is a direct ancestor of six U.S. Presidents (Fillmore, Grant, Garfield, FDR, Bush I & II); governors including W. and Jeb Bush, Thomas Dewey, Sarah Palin, Jon Hunstman, William Kitchin, and George & Mitt Romney; Joseph Smith and several other early Mormons; Benedict Arnold; J.P. Morgan; Longfellow; Wild Bill Hickok; Louis Comfort Tiffany; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. & Jr.; Joseph Henry Beale (founder of Harvard Law Review and the U. Chicago Law School); Allen, Avery and John Foster Dulles; Adlai Stevenson III; Michael MacConnell; Dr. Spock; founders of Post Cereal, General Mills and Fuller Brush; Cynthia Rouse and siblings; Shirley Temple Black, Brooke Shields, Clint Eastwood and Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. He did OK.
A memorial to Rev. John Lothrop in Barnstable
Back in Scituate, the “immersion-only” people got their way when the Rev. Charles Chauncy was named the pastor of the First Parish in Scituate in 1641. Chauncy, like Lothrop, had been born in England but irritated authorities there. He too was called before the Star Chamber and invited to flee to New England in 1637. Upon his arrival he was named as a minister in Plymouth, but his insistence that only baptism by full immersion was valid got him in hot water (bad pun intended) with even Pilgrim leaders there, most of whom favored sprinkling. The Plymouth elders held public debates and even asked congregations in Boston and the just-founded settlement at New Haven for their views. Everyone they asked agreed that baptism by sprinkling was equally valid, but Rev. Chauncy would not budge. Finally the Plymouth elders forced him out in 1641. He was therefore happy to land in Scituate, where the people running the church tended to agree with him on the baptism issue.
Ironically, Chauncy – the inflexible conservative on baptism – was more broadminded on virtually every other issue than Lothrop, the baptism “liberal” he replaced in Scituate. And just as not everyone in Scituate agreed with Rev. Lothrop on baptism, not everyone agreed with Rev. Chauncy either. A humorous tale illustrates this: Upon his arrival in Scituate, Chauncy was to baptize his own twin sons and another child by full immersion. One of his sons passed out under water. At that point the mother of the third child refused to let Chauncy baptize her child and, according to John Winthrop, grabbed Chauncy and damn near drowned him under the water.
Episodes like this prompted even more opposition to Chauncy’s full-immersion baptism. A number of the baptism “liberals” who had opposed Chauncy’s appointment settled in the southern part of Scituate and petitioned in 1642 for the creation of a Second Parish. Their request was granted by the sympathetic elders in Plymouth, and they invited my ancestor William Witherell to be their first pastor.
The First Parish in Norwell, formerly Second Parish in Scituate before the towns split, was founded in the 1640s to give local baptism "liberals" a church of their own
William Witherell had been born in England (most likely York) and educated at Cambridge (BA and MA from Corpus Christi College). He was highly cultured and apparently wrote poetry in his spare time. Because he adhered to Puritan beliefs he was denied a church. He became a schoolteacher in Maidstone, Kent, but as repression of Puritans in England grew worse under Charles I, he increasingly ran afoul of Archbishop Laud for passing Puritan theological ideas on to his students. Rather than face the Star Chamber himself, he left for Boston in early 1635 with his wife and three sons. He taught at Charlestown (near Boston), then Cambridge.
In about 1638 William settled in Duxbury, between Plymouth and Scituate, finding the Plymouth Colony’s churches more to his liking than those of Massachusetts Bay. He was asked in 1642 to serve as the pastor of the new Second Parish in Scituate, but was not officially ordained until 1645. By that time he had a huge backlog of baptisms from parents who refused to take their children to Chauncy’s full immersion ceremonies. Witherell baptized many children in September 1645, his first month on the job, including his own and several other of my direct ancestors. He stayed on the job another forty years, the rest of his life.
Scituate Harbor. Near Old Scituate Light, on the peninsula beyond, two local girls played a fife and drum during the War of 1812 to fool the British into thinking the town had a defending militia at the ready. It worked; the British didn't try to sack the town.
The Second Parish of Scituate later became known as the First Parish of Norwell when the southern part of Scituate split off to form a separate town. The parish still has its original records. Some 608 baptisms between 1645 and 1674 are recorded in William Witherell’s own hand. After that he continued to perform baptisms until his death in 1685, but could not write them in the book himself due to arthritis. He is believed to have performed a record number of baptisms for a small-town colonial pastor, because of the popularity of the liberal approach and his own popularity as a kindly and tolerant man. They came from far and wide.
Rev. Chauncy also was considered kind and generous, and quite progressive on issues not related to baptism. But he was autocratic and personally insulted by the formation of the Second Church in protest against him, so there was no rapprochement during his tenure. In 1654, after thirteen years in Scituate, Rev. Chauncy became the second president of Harvard. When he was offered the job, it was on the condition that he not discuss his views on the baptism issue, which were wholly out of the mainstream, with the students.
A memorial to Scituate's early ministers in the Men of Kent cemetery at the site of the first meetinghouse. The first five names on this stone appear in this diary.
The outgoing (first) president of Harvard, Rev. Henry Dunster, took over for Chauncy as pastor of the First Parish in Scituate. He and Chauncy were friends, so he too disdained the Second Parish. Only when Dunster died five years later did his replacement, Rev. Nicholas Baker from Hingham, establish good relations with William Witherell and the animosity between the First and Second Parishes dwindled. In the
Unitarian controversy of 200 years later both the First Parish in Scituate and the Second Parish (now First Parish in Norwell) took the “liberal” side; both are Unitarian churches today.
Scituate today: not so Pilgrim-dominated
Speaking of changes, Scituate today is known as potentially the town with the highest percentage of Irish-American residents in the nation. Long before I knew of any of these connections to its earliest days, I called it home and have a number of decidedly not-descended-from-Pilgrims ancestors who still live there. Thus it was that, before I learned I’m really a Pilgrim Paddy, my wedding reception was held in Scituate.
So, it's an open thread. Talk about what issues people in your family fight about, or whatever you like...