Mistress Bradstreet
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5. Quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 92. (back to text)
6. Ibid., 147. (back to text)
7. Ibid., 121. (back to text)
8. White, Anne Bradstreet, 98. For more information on the costs of passage, see Cressy, Coming Over, 119. (back to text)
9. Cressy, Coming Over,112-13, 115-16. The list of supplies is taken from the contemporary lists Cressy provides. (back to text)
10. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, quoted in ibid., 107. (back to text)
11. Hutchinson, Hutchinson Papers, vol. 1, 54. (back to text)
12. Cressy, Coming Over,43-44. (back to text)
13. Higgenson, Hutchinson Papers, vol. 1, 53. (back to text)
14. Dudley, “Deputy Governor Dudley’s Letter to the Countess of Lincoln,” in Young, Chronicles,324-25, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 45. (back to text)
15. Cressy, Coming Over, 85. (back to text)
16. For a fuller exposition of Dudley’s views on emigration, see Dudley, “Deputy Governor Dudley’s Letter to the Countess of Lincoln,” in Young, Chronicles,324-25. Aware of the stringent requirements that Dudley, and even the more gentle Winthrop, placed on all applicants, those who wrote recommendations for prospective emigrants sounded the interrelated themes of prudence, work, piety, and plenty, with the implication that those who labored diligently and well were probably among the righteous or could be converted into faithful Puritans. The minister Nathaniel Ward, a future close friend of Anne and Simon’s in the New World, begged Winthrop “to reserve room and passage in your ships for two families, a carpenter and a bricklayer, the most faithful and diligent workmen in all our parts. One of them hath put off a good farm this week and sold all, and should be much damaged and discouraged if he finds no place amongst you; he transports himself at his own charge.” Winthrop Papers, vol. 2 (Boston, 1931-47), 192, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 47. (back to text)
17. One such letter was Robert Parke’s to Winthrop: “I would desire you to give me directions what household I shall take with me, and for how long we shall victual us.” Cressy, Coming Over,111-12. (back to text)
18. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 41. (back to text)
19. Winthrop Papers, vol. 4, 218, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 93. (back to text)
20. The unpredictable tidal water of the Witham was the main reason for the flood steps that most of the town dwellers had built to protect their homes; during storms it periodically washed through the town, although it could sometimes dry to a trickle during the summer. (back to text)
21. Mercy would also repeat the crossing, but not through her own choosing. Her husband, John, felt he had to fulfill his mission to serve God in England during the civil war, and so, at last she joined him and stayed in England with him for sixteen years. See chapters 17, 18. (back to text)
CHAPTER SEVEN:Our Appointed Time
1. This conception was popularized by the playwright Ben Jonson, who had created a ridiculous caricature of Puritans with a character named “Zeal-of-the-land-Busy” in his play Bartholomew Fair. In this wildly popular drama, “Busy” distinguished himself by traveling from stall to stall of the fair, destroying toys, trinkets, and gingerbread men (all of which he called “a flasket of idols”) because he was “moved in spirit” against the “peeping of popery.” In Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1979). (back to text)
2. “Groups of traveling puritans often walked together for several hours on their way to and from worship, discussing sermons, singing psalms, and cementing the ties that linked them together as ‘friends in the Lord.’ As a result, gadding played an important part in fostering the social cohesion of local puritan networks and providing them with opportunities for the defiant flaunting of their lifestyles before their ungodly neighbors.” Durston and Eales, eds., Culture of English Puritanism, 20. (back to text)
3. Quoted in O’Toole, Money and Morals, at www.c-span.org/guide/books/booknotes/chapter/fc081698.htm. (back to text)
4. Ibid. (back to text)
5. Quoted in Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 30. (back to text)
6. Winthrop, “Anno Domini 1630, March 29, Monday,” in Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 13-14. (back to text)
7. Cressy, Coming Over,127-28; White, Anne Bradstreet, 105. Although many scholars suggest that it was not until the eighteenth century that people understood that citrus was a vital preventative agent against scurvy, there is actually ample evidence that the Puritans were well aware of the curative power of lemons in particular. Winthrop, for example, wrote home urging his wife to remember to bring this fruit with her on her voyage to America. See Cressy, Crossing Over, 171. (back to text)
8. Richard Mather and Edward Taylor, quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 152. Cressy reports one traveler, Robert Cushman, as saying, “Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think, before we go from the coast of England.” Ibid., 155. (back to text)
9. Ibid., 157. Cressy writes, “Errors of navigation, achievements of seamanship and the fickleness of the weather could all be seen as manifestations of divine will.” (back to text)
10. Quoted in ibid. (back to text)
11. “The fact is that there was no uniform puritan identity or plan. Men and women from different parts of England had varied experiences of what constituted godly communities and how they were to be governed.” Bremer, Winthrop, 182. (back to text)
12. Cressy, Coming Over, 155. Cressy writes, “Some [passengers] diverted themselves in taverns, and felt the censure of their more sanctimonious fellow travelers.” (back to text)
13. Cotton Mather, Sailours Companion and Counsellor (Boston, 1709), vi, quoted in ibid., 165. (back to text)
14. Cressy states, “A few consulted dockside astrologers who sold them prognostications for the voyage.” Coming Over, 155. For a more complete discussion of the retention of medieval beliefs and folk customs in the Puritan mind, see David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, chaps. 1 and 2. (back to text)
15. Historians are not sure of the date of Cotton’s sermon. Francis Bremer writes: “There was a Thursday lecture at [the Church of the] Holy Rood, and Cotton and Winthrop might have been guests on such an occasion, or the church might have been made available on a different day.” Bremer, Winthrop, 431n1. (back to text)
16. 2 Sam. 7:10 (Geneva version), quoted in Morison, Builders, 71. (back to text)
17. Cotton said, “Even ducklings hatched under an henne, though they take the water, yet will still have recourse to the wing that hatched them: how much more should chickens of the same feather, and yolke.” Ibid., 72. (back to text)
18. Cotton promised the settlers “firm and durable possession” by suggesting that God had “drive[n] out the heathen before them.” John Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantations,” in Heimert and Delbanco, Puritans in America,76, 79. Andrew Delbanco, however, argues that this identification of New England with Canaan, or the promised land, happened later and originated in old England. He writes, “It was to be a very long time before New England came to think of itself as more than ‘ordinary’ in this sense.” Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 93. Although Delbanco’s point may well be true for the vast majority of emigrants, Anne’s poetry, particularly, “A Dialogue between Old England and New” suggests that she had made this symbolic leap at least by the mid-1640s. (back to text)
19. Cotton, “God’s Promise,” 80. (back to text)
20. Bremer writes that this sermon “was not delivered on board the Arbella” as historians had once thought. He believes that Winthrop preached to a larger audience than was available once they were onboard. He writes, “If delivered on shipboard it would only have been heard by that portion of the emigrants who were on the Arbella and thus had a smaller impact.” Bremer, Winthrop, 431n9. (back to text)
21. Peter Gomes, the current resident minister at Harvard College, has reflected that Winthrop’s sermon was the most important address of the millennium. Andrew Delbanco writes t
hat the speech has become a “kind of Ur-text of American literature.” Quoted in Bremer, Winthrop, 174; Peter Gomes, “Best Sermon: A Pilgrim’s Progress,” New York Times, April 18, 1999, late edition, sec. 5, 102; Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 72. (back to text)
22. Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Baym et al., Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., 40-41. (back to text)
23. Ibid., 41. (back to text)
24. Winthrop, “Thursday, 8 [April],” Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 15. (back to text)
25. Quoted in Cressy, Coming Over, 264. (back to text)
26. McGiffert, God’s Plot, 63. (back to text)
27. This was actually a repeat performance on Winthrop’s part; one contemporary reported that Winthrop “at a solemn feast among many friends a little before their last farewell, finding his bowels yearn within him, instead of drinking to them, by breaking into a flood of tears himself, set them all aweeping . . . while they thought of seeing the faces of each other no more in the land of the living.” William Hubbard, A General History of New England, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser. 5 (1815), 125, quoted in Bremer, Winthrop, 170. (back to text)
CHAPTER EIGHT:The Crossing
1. Winthrop, “Easter Monday, 29 March, 1630,” in Journal of John Winthrop (The Winthrop Society) at www.winthropsociety.org/journal.php. (back to text)
2. Winthrop left out any account of his own fear when he recorded the Dutch vessel’s story in his shipboard journal (“in passing through the Needles, [the ship] struck upon a rock, and being forced to run ashore to save her men, could never be weighed since, although she lies a great height above the water”), but still it was an ominous bedfellow to share a berth with. “Tuesday, 30 March, 1630,” in ibid. (back to text)
3. Cressy, Crossing Over, 148. (back to text)
4. Richard Mather, “Richard Mather’s Journal,” in Young, Chronicles, 449. (back to text)
5. Winthrop, “Thursday, April 1, and 2,” in Journal of John Winthrop, at www.winthropsociety.org/journal.php. (back to text)
6. A Humble Request (The Winthrop Society) at www.winthropsociety.org/doc_humble.php. (back to text)
7. This is based on Winthrop’s report that the ladies went ashore. Clearly, Winthrop meant the highly ranked women, and Anne was one of them. But he does not supply us with all of their names. Winthrop, “Tuesday, 6 [April],” in Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 15. (back to text)
8. Winthrop, “Thursday, 8 [April],” in ibid. (back to text)
9. Ibid., 16. (back to text)
10. Ibid. (back to text)
11. Ibid. (back to text)
12. Ibid., 17. (back to text)
13. Ibid. Of the English ships, three were “bound for the Straits” and three others were headed for Canada and Newfoundland. (back to text)
14. Cressy, Crossing Over, 161. (back to text)
15. Winthrop, Saturday, 10 [April],” in Journal of John Winthrop, at www.winthropsociety.org/journal.php. (back to text)
16. Winthrop, “Monday, 12 [April],” ibid. (back to text)
17. Cressy, Crossing Over, 170. (back to text)
18. Winthrop, “Saturday, 17 [April],” in Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn and Yeandle, 19. (back to text)
19. Cressy, Crossing Over, 171. (back to text)
20. Ibid., 171-72. (back to text)
21. Ibid., 149. Cressy writes, “It is not far-fetched to imagine a bonding among Atlantic travelers of the kind that is found among veterans of other intensive group experiences. Confined for eight to twelve weeks or more to a tiny wooden world, the travelers were thrust into intimacies that might never have developed on land.” Ibid., 151. (back to text)
22. Bradstreet, “Another,” in Works, 227, line 12. (back to text)
23. Cotton Mather, The Sailours Companion, 39, quoted in Cressy, Crossing Over, 164. (back to text)
24. Quoted in ibid., 172. (back to text)
25. Richard Mather, “Richard Mather’s Journal,” in Young, Chronicles,460-67. (back to text)
26. John Josselyn, Account of Two Voyages (London, 1672), 9, 8, quoted in Cressy, Crossing Over, 174. Richard Mather, “Richard Mather’s Journal,” in Young, Chronicles,460-67, quoted in Cressy, Crossing Over. (back to text)
27. Winthrop, “Saturday, 8 May,” in Journal of John Winthrop, at www.winthropsociety.org/journal.php. (back to text)
28. Psalms 107 and 136. John Cope, A Religious Inquisition (London, 1629), 59, quoted in Cressy, Crossing Over, 172. (back to text)
29. Winthrop, “Thursday, 6 May,” in Journal of John Winthrop, at www.winthropsociety.org/journal.php. (back to text)
30. Winthrop, “Tuesday, 11 May,” ibid. (back to text)
31. In his diary Winthrop did not reflect on the possible loss of the Talbot but softened the accounts of the deaths on the other two ships by reporting that the man’s demise on the Jewel was not much of a loss because he was “a most profane fellow, and one who was very injurious to the passengers.” He comforted himself that the two deaths on the Ambrose did not need to alarm anyone, because it turned out that the casualties were “sick when they came to sea; and one of them should have been left at Cowes [in England].” Winthrop, “Thursday, 27 May,” ibid. (back to text)
32. Winthrop, “Wednesday, 26 May,” ibid. (back to text)
33. Winthrop, “Thursday, 3 June,” “Friday, 4 June,” ibid. (back to text)
34. Winthrop, “Lord’s Day, 6 June,” ibid. (back to text)
35. Winthrop, “Monday, 7 June,” ibid. (back to text)
36. Winthrop, “Tuesday, 8 June,” ibid. (back to text)
37. Winthrop, “Saturday, 12 June,” ibid. (back to text)
38. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” 241. (back to text)
CHAPTER NINE:New World, New Manners
1. Thomas Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, 12 and 18 March 1631,” (The Winthrop Society) at www.winthropsociety.org/doc_bridget.php. (back to text)
2. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
3. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
4. Morison, Builders, 80. (back to text)
5. MS transcript of the original records of the First Church in Boston, 1630-87, collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, quoted in White, Anne Bradstreet, 114. (back to text)
6. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
7. Nathaniel Brewster Blackstone, “The Biography of the Reverend William Blackstone and his Ancestors and Descendants,” at www.Dangel.net/AMERICA/Blackstone/REV.WM.BLACKSTONE.html. (back to text)
8. It is not clear where Johnson died. Edmund Morgan suggests Boston. See Puritan Dilemma, 61. (back to text)
9. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
10. Ibid. (back to text)
11. Ibid. (back to text)
12. Ibid.; Cressy, Crossing Over, 195. (back to text)
13. John Pond’s letter to his father, March 1631, quoted in Cressy, Crossing Over, 195. (back to text)
14. John Winthrop, quoted in ibid., 195-96. (back to text)
15. Quoted in Morison, Builders, 81. (back to text)
16. Later in life she would describe her first son as “the son of prayers, of vows, of tears.” Bradstreet, “Upon My Son Samuel, His Going to England,” in Works, 258, line 3. (back to text)
17. Edward Everett Hale et al., eds., Note-Book Kept by Thomas Lechford, ESQ, 1638 to 1641 (1884; reprint Camden, Me.: Picton Press, 1988), 177, quoted in Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 76. (back to text)
18. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
19. Ibid. (back to text)
20. Ibid. (back to text)
21. Baym et al., Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., 22-23. (back to text)
22. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan
, The Third Book, chap. 14, in ibid., 25. (back to text)
23. Quoted in Morison, Builders,16-17. (back to text)
24. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
25. Ibid. (back to text)
26. Thomas Morton, quoted in Morison. Builders, 18. (back to text)
27. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
28. Quoted in Morison, The Founding of Harvard,184, 186. (back to text)
29. The founders of Watertown, two Puritan brethren, George Phillips and Sir Richard Saltonstall, had laid the foundations for their ambitious village on a site later known as Gerry’s Landing, and they had also claimed the acreage for half a mile downstream. Ibid. (back to text)
30. Dudley, “Letter to the Lady Bridget.” (back to text)
31. Ibid. (back to text)
32. Ibid. (back to text)
33. Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England (London, 1654), quoted in Morison, The Founding of Harvard, 189. (back to text)
CHAPTER TEN:Upon My Son
1. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
2. Ibid. (back to text)
3. Bradstreet, “Upon a Fit of Sickness,” in Works, 222. (back to text)
4. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” in Works, 241. (back to text)
5. Bradstreet, “The Prologue.” See especially the famous line “Who says my hand a needle better fits.” In Works, 16. (back to text)
6. Psalm 23 from The Bay Psalm Book in McMichael et al., Concise Anthology of American Literature, 50. (back to text)
7. See especially “An Elegy upon That Honourable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney” for her preoccupation with fame. Bradstreet, Works,189-91. (back to text)
8. Bradstreet, “Upon a Fit of Sickness,” in Works, 222, lines 1-2, 13. (back to text)
9. Bradstreet, “Autobiography,” 240-45, as well as the poems and meditations on illness and death such as “May 11, 1661,” “September 30, 1657,” “August 28, 1656,” “For Deliverance from a Fever,” in Bradstreet, Works,259, 257, 254, 247. (back to text)
10. Bradstreet, “Upon My Son Samuel,” in Works, 258, line 7. (back to text)