The first English colony in New England was Plymouth. Plymouth and the so-called Pilgrims who founded it hold a special place in American lore – one that is often more legend than history. This essay will explore the events that led to the Mayflower’s voyage. Later essays will tackle more of the legend, dispel myths, and provide context for the WASP1WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” infestation of North America.
Countless books have examined the reasons for the Puritan migration to the New World. In a nutshell, the English monarchy and the Protestant Reformation were to blame. The bloody upheavals of the Reformation and the monarchy’s on-again, off-again relations with the Pope were a perfect storm. England herself suffered a crisis of faith for nearly two centuries.
In 1517, Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses officially started the Protestant Reformation. But less than 15 years later, the decision of King Henry VIII of England to climb aboard the separatist bandwagon was utterly unrelated to theology. He needed a male heir. To get one, he needed a different wife. When the Pope refused to grant him an annulment, Henry essentially deposed the Pope in England and declared himself head of the Church. He dissolved English monasteries and confiscated their wealth.
He removed most of the clergy from the House of Lords. He prosecuted people for treason if they refused to acknowledge the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. In the space of a few months, England was no longer Catholic. Henry divorced his wife and would marry five more times. (He divorced and beheaded his non-producing wives to speed up the process of begetting a legitimate male heir.)
Henry’s successor and only surviving son, Edward VI, died at 15. He had been England’s Protestant king for six years. Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, was the daughter of his Catholic first wife, Catherine of Aragon. When Mary assumed the throne, she immediately reversed her father’s Protestant policies. Queen “Bloody” Mary embarked on a purge of British subjects who refused to accept the Pope. For the five years of her reign, Mary lit bonfires under hundreds of recalcitrant, outspoken Protestants. The fiery persecutions stopped temporarily when Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne in 1658. But when Spain threatened to invade England, Elizabeth relit the fires. She burned Catholics instead.
The Puritans wanted no part of the official English Church any more than they wanted to return to Catholicism. Elizabeth’s government enacted laws that punished people for not attending or supporting the established Anglican Church. The government executed separatist leaders for sedition. Elizabeth’s successor, James IV and I of Scotland and England, continued these policies after assuming the English throne in 1603.
To quell dissent in some measure, James commissioned an English translation of the Bible. This translation served as the official book of the English Reformation. This edition of the Bible is famous, not because of the accuracy of its translation (spoiler: it isn’t accurate), but for its poetic use of language. The Authorized King James Version is still used everywhere in the English-speaking world more than 400 years later.
In 1606, James required people to take Oaths of Allegiance to deny the Pope’s authority over the British monarch. Before he inherited the English throne, King James wrote an infamous text on witches, stoking the fires around ever more stakes throughout Britain.2Demonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, 1597. Read more about the effects of this book and the witch fears of the time in “James VI and I: the king who hunted witches,” History Extra, website (https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/king-james-vi-i-hunted-witches-hunter-devilry-daemonologie/ : accessed 7 Jan 2024), 2013.
The Puritans strongly disapproved of the Church of England trading a pope for a monarch at its head. As they saw it, the Anglican Church was only a partial reformation of the problems with Catholicism. Anglican rituals reminded the Puritans entirely too much of the Catholic Church. The established Church of England, in their minds, had not purified itself of the taint of Catholic abuses. These Puritans advocated separation from the Church of England. They wanted a completely different ecclesiastical structure.
Some separatists wanted a church controlled by elders in a presbyteral polity. The presbyterian3Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination. structure was still hierarchical but gave power to the coalition of like-minded churches to choose the people in positions of authority. Other English separatists eschewed the notion of a church hierarchy altogether. They thought each congregation should govern itself autonomously. This congregational church polity was very popular among the most zealous separatists.
By 1607, a group of Puritans led by Rev. John Robinson had grown utterly frustrated. They chafed under the English government’s religious restrictions and decided to leave England for a place friendly to religious dissent. No English settlement had yet survived in America,4The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower. so the New World was not an option. The entire congregation moved to Leiden, Holland.
The separatists did not find their answer in Holland, though. After a decade in Leiden, the expatriated Puritan community was impoverished and saw their children becoming more Dutch than English. They wanted a place where they could be entirely English, thoroughly Puritan, and completely autonomous.
Emissaries approached the Virginia Company of London. By this point, the Virginia Company had collaborated with settlers to maintain a shaky English foothold in Jamestown. However, the separatists did not want to establish a settlement near the Anglicans in Virginia. They had fled Anglican oppression when they left England for Holland and were not eager to risk it again. Nor did they want to settle near the Dutch in New Netherlands. They already knew that the influence of more libertine Dutch culture frustrated their Puritan ideals, and they did not want to compound the problem by relocating to a Dutch-American colony. The emissaries finally obtained a land patent from the Virginia Company for land at the mouth of the Hudson River, south of the inland Dutch settlements at what is now Albany, New York.
After a series of misadventures, their ship, the Mayflower, left late in the season and arrived at Cape Cod in November 1620. The ship was considerably north of where it was supposed to be; the Virginia Company had no authority to grant land patents north of Long Island Sound. Nevertheless, the separatists decided to land. Before going ashore, they drafted an agreement for governing themselves. All 41 adult males aboard the ship signed the Mayflower Compact.
William Brewster, one of the Fennig family’s colonial ancestors, was the pastor and leader of the Mayflower Puritans. William Chilton, one of my ancestors, was alive at the signing of the Mayflower Compact but died before stepping onto land. Half of the Mayflower’s passengers would die the first winter in Massachusetts. They had arrived in November without food or shelter.
Plenty of good books about the fate of those initial settlers of the Plymouth Colony exist, so I will not cover the next ten years in detail. Suffice it to say that the legends taught in classrooms across this country are inaccurate, whitewashed accounts that ignore salient facts. The only religious freedom that concerned the Mayflower Puritans was their own; they came to establish a theocracy and quickly expelled religious dissenters. The Europeans brought immense suffering and oppression to the native population, which had already been devastated by European diseases before settlements on the mainland were successful. Between more disease and enslavement, the English quickly showed the pattern of colonial abuses that they practice even today.
The story of the peopling of North America did not start with the English. The Spanish began colonizing North America in the 16th century, but even they weren’t the first. Columbus did not “discover” an empty land devoid of civilization, governments, or a recognizable economy. English settlers did not have to hack their way through a wilderness to find arable land. Native Americans were not barbarous savages without laws, diplomacy, or philosophy.
We must understand the reason for European migration to the New World, but we must also understand what the Europeans found here and why to put our ancestral history into context.
Part 2: The Great Migration and Colonial Upheaval
Select Bibliography:
Bailyn, Bernard, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Loewen, James W., Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History, New York: Viking, 2003.
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Mann, Charles C., 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, New York: Random House, 2011.
Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.
Quinn, Arthur, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, New York: Berkeley Books, 1994.
Rounding, Virginia, The Burning Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the Protestant Martyrs of London, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Footnotes
1
WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination.
4
The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower.
My dear friend and neighbor laughed like a maniac when she delivered a gift to me this morning. She’s been warning me for days that she had something special for me.
At last: ANSWERS!
“Wi-thout” – just the way your preacher says it.
Naturally, I checked with Jesus on the important issues. He said, “Apartheid and genocide are evil, racism is a scourge on humanity, there’s nothing wrong with being LGBTQIA+ (in fact, it’s perfectly normal and accepted throughout the animal kingdom), abortions should be available on demand, corporations are not people, no books should ever be banned, humans are wrecking the environment, immigrants should be welcomed and refugees should be welcomed with open arms, and everyone should all ignore all mutually consensual activity involving other people’s genitals.”
Also, he reminded me that he does not now, and never has, identified as white, Republican, or Christian.
I asked a follow-up question at the request of a friend. “Why should we worship you instead of, say, Cthulhu?”
Jesus cringed.
He said, “Don’t worship me. That’s weird and stalkerish. I just want people to stop being dicks to each other.”
Here is a construction contract for the original Henry Nichols house at the corner of 4th (called Park Street at the time) & Curran in Des Arc, Prairie County, Arkansas.
1907 Contract to build the Nichols Cottage in Des Arc
At first, I thought the contract called for construction to be completed in “Jany,” a common old abbreviation for January. However, three weeks was swift, even for the masters of yore who didn’t have to include plumbing, electricity, or modern amenities like insulation or indoor baths. I suspect it says “July” because even 115 years ago, it took six months to build a house.
Henry Isaac Nichols and Grace Pearl Reinhardt married on June 12, 1907, so they bought the property and planned the house afterward. H.W. Nesseltrager was a contractor and builder based in Little Rock. (“Plans and estimates cheerfully furnished,” according to a 1905 ad I found for his company in the Arkansas Democrat.) They bought the plans from Nesseltrager but hired someone locally to build the home.
The 1909 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map for Des Arc shows the house’s original footprint. (North is on the left in the map’s orientation.) Interestingly, the lots on the 1909 Sanborn map are numbered differently from those on the official plat of the city. On the official plat, lots 7-8 of Block 38 are in the southeast corner of Block 38, but the 1909 Sanborn map shows those as lots 6-7. (The error was corrected on the 1918 Sanborn map.)
The front of the house now faces 4th St (what was then Park St), but based on the footprint and the house numbers assigned to the lots, it initially faced Curran. The small rectangle behind the house was a shed.
I don’t know when they bought Lot 9 (Lot 8 on the 1909 Sanborn map), but they owned ¼ of the block by 1930 when they remodeled. According to my mother, her father, Shuford Reinhardt Nichols, designed the remodel in the late 1920s. Shuford was Henry and Grace’s only child. Throughout his life, he loved architecture and dabbled in it constantly. In addition to redesigning his childhood home, he built three houses for himself, all in consultation with some of the most prominent architects working in Arkansas at the time. First was the large antebellum-style house where he and his wife raised their family in Des Arc, and where my mom raised her family. It was designed by Max Meyer. Second was their lake house on his wife’s family’s Rob-Bell Plantation near Scott, Arkansas. The last was their retirement home in Little Rock, which was designed by Noland Blass, who was well known locally for his iconic Mid-Century Modern style. Both the Des Arc house and the lake house were remodeled multiple times during Shuford’s life.
The Henry Nichols cottage was expanded again after Grace died. Henry married Grace’s widowed cousin, Catherine “Feb” Harshaw Terry. I suspect the construction contract for both remodels of the cottage included extra amenities like plumbing, electricity, an indoor bathroom, and possibly even paint and paper.
Henry & Grace Nichols house, Des Arc. September 2023 (listing on Zillow)
I was 29 the first time I should have died. A century ago, childbirth killed more women than any other single cause. Broadly speaking, childbed death ranked third behind all infectious diseases and all chronic diseases but ahead of injury. Not only would I have died before modern medicine, but my baby would have. My pelvis wasn’t wide enough to allow him through. He was three weeks late and weighed more than eight and a half pounds, and I was in labor and fully dilated for several hours when the baby went into what they called “distress.” I know it’s medical jargon, but I can’t help but wonder what isn’t distressing about the birth process.
Caesarians weren’t done very often until the mid-20th century. In ancient Rome, India, and China, fetuses were cut from the wombs of dead or dying women in hopes that the child would survive. More than a millennium later, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and a Persian epic poem separately recorded that babies were sometimes delivered surgically, but doing so was rare and survival of the mother even rarer. If she did live, she would have no more children. In 1500, a Swiss veterinarian named Jacob Nufer claimed to have performed a successful caesarian on his wife. She allegedly delivered five more children naturally.
Once sterilization and handwashing became more commonplace, surgeons refined the procedure, and more women survived. With the 20th-century discovery of antibiotics to combat infections, caesareans happened more often. By 1991, they were routine. Thank you, modern medicine, for saving two lives with my first abdominal surgery. Modern antibiotics also cured both of us of the staph infections we contracted during the birth experience.
Of course, had it not been for modern medicine, I wouldn’t have been pregnant in the first place, so there’s that.
I was 32 the second time I should have died. My doctor explained what carcinoma in situ meant, and I came out of my second abdominal surgery without a cervix or most of the rest of my reproductive organs. The “in situ” covered a more extensive area than my doctor initially thought. Cancerous cells in my uterus and cysts encrusting my ovaries spelled doom for them, although the doctor scraped the cysts off my left ovary and left it in place so as not to trigger early menopause. Years later, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and was grateful for her unwitting contribution in the 1950s to my survival in 1994.
At 38, I should have died again. At a regular visit for migraine management, my neurologist asked if anyone had ever told me I had a freckle in my eye. A few months later, my optometrist asked if, beyond my usual myopia, I was having trouble seeing. I told him no but mentioned my neurologist’s comment. He picked up the phone in the examination room, called an ophthalmologist friend, and said I needed an appointment immediately, preferably that day. Three hours later, that ophthalmologist told me I would lose my eye and that we could only hope the tumor had not spread into my brain.
I was still traumatized by the first cancer diagnosis. The second utterly froze me. My sister sprang into action and found that the University of Tennessee hoped to pioneer an experimental laser surgery to excise choroidal melanomas. I was the first patient in its new program. Today, I have a blind spot and a lot of floaters, but I still have a functional right eye and the satisfaction of knowing I survived a rare cancer relatively unscathed.
My paternal grandmother, whom everyone said I strongly resembled, died at 39, three months after being diagnosed with leukemia. Medicine came a long way between 1952 and the 1980s when her brother was diagnosed with the same disease. He lived to die of something else years later. Nevertheless, when I passed my 40th birthday, I sighed with relief to still be breathing.
I might have died again at 50, but I definitely would have at 52. My first bout of diverticulitis, which felled me at my nephew’s high school graduation, resolved after a brief hospital stay and a hefty dose of antibiotics. A year later, the second episode perforated my bowel. I failed outpatient antibiotic treatment and ended up back in the emergency room. After another hospital stay, another dose of hefty antibiotics, and yet another hospital admission, I underwent my third life-saving abdominal surgery. Four days later, the spot where the surgeon reconnected the healthy parts of my bowel failed. Partially digested food seeped into my abdominal cavity. I remember screaming, screaming incoherently with the intense, burning pain, and nurses trying to restrain me.
Peritonitis, which inevitably causes sepsis within 24-48 hours, killed all its victims before modern surgical techniques and antibiotics. It killed my 24-year-old great-grand-aunt Kate Reinhardt a month after her 1902 wedding. Had I not still been in the hospital, it would have killed me in March 2014.
A week later, I woke up in the ICU after my fourth life-saving abdominal surgery. The surgeon had split my abdomen in a jagged line from the old caesarian scar to a point several inches north of my belly button. I did not leave the hospital for five weeks.
The surgeon had not stitched or stapled me back together. I had to heal “from the inside out.” In addition to a colostomy bag, I had a wound vac. My surgeon told me he didn’t know whether I had enough of a colon left to reverse the colostomy. Regardless, I would not be strong enough to survive another surgery for months.
Several weeks later, my son and I walked around our neighborhood as I tried to build strength. As we climbed Oak Street toward Hill Road, I felt something pop in my abdomen just above the bag that hung from my left side. I made an appointment to see my surgeon. Despite what was evident to me, he seemed mystified that I suspected the soft protrusion from that spot might be a hernia. Yes, I had a stoma and a still-unhealed surgical incision running most of the length of my torso, but surely the integrity of my abdominal wall had not been breached. He shrugged, pronounced me mistaken, and sent me home.
I resent gaslighting. There was no way I would allow that jackass to cut into me again. I found a different surgeon to reverse the colostomy. He assured me he would repair the hernia at the same time. I was relieved to wake up from my fifth abdominal surgery without a bag. I was disappointed that the surgeon had neglected to repair the hernia, which protruded from my belly like a cantaloupe when I stood. When I asked why, he shrugged. Doctors seem to enjoy shrugging.
I hired a personal trainer. I worked to regain core strength. Another enormous hernia popped out from the lower right side of my abdomen. Eventually, it grew to the size of a honeydew. I asked my doctor about surgery to repair them both. I was uncomfortable and limited in movement because “melons” clung to my midsection. The last thing I wanted was another abdominal surgery, but this was ridiculous. “Lose weight,” my doctor told me, and shrugged. Oddly, I could find no evidence to support weight loss as a cure for hernias. Perhaps my Google-fu was insufficient for the task.
Two years later, my gallbladder had to come out. The surgery typically takes about half an hour. Because of the extensive scarring and adhesions from the third, fourth, and fifth abdominal surgeries, my sixth abdominal surgery took over three hours.
I’ve lost weight, although I still have virtually no core strength because of these impeding hernias. I haven’t tried to die recently, and I’ve been cancer-free for over 20 years. Plus, I have a new doctor who doesn’t gaslight or fat-shame me. Last week, she ordered a CT scan of my abdomen to pave the way for a referral to a surgeon to repair three hernias – I added a third one last summer. Yesterday morning, she called me with the scan results.
I’m not going to be able to have the hernias repaired yet. First, a gynecological oncologist will have to remove the three-inch tumor the scan discovered on my remaining ovary. I wish I had endured early menopause instead, but hindsight and all that.
I’m glad I got the scan. Otherwise, it might have been too late before I learned that I had unlocked the cancer trifecta achievement and that I needed that seventh abdominal surgery to save my life for the fifth (or is it the sixth?) time.
“Good thing you’re a cat person,” my sister told me earlier this year. “You need to borrow all their extra lives.”
The research into my horse thief ancestor has gotten really crazy. I know I have bored all my friends with the minutiae of this story at every opportunity, but I swear, every new document turns up more drama and bizarre stuff. Now I’m dragging other people into it – and not just people I’m related to by blood.
See, about 35 years ago, I married this guy called Skip, and since we have a kid together, I’ve spent quality research time on his family, too. Some of our friends may remember that after Skip and Matt’s mom died, Matt and I were cleaning out the books and found a missing family bible with genealogy info in it. The Bible originally belonged to a childless woman named Averilla Hollis Franck. Back before the Bible went missing, I had copied the genealogy pages and was stumped by them. The bible recorded the births, deaths, and marriages of several families. Their names were Hollis, Franck, Humlong, Luckes, and Smith.
Here’s the twist: the Smiths, who had inherited the Bible, weren’t related by blood or marriage to any of the other people listed in it. I researched them all, though, and knew the Hollises came to Kentucky from Baltimore County, Maryland.
Actually, Matt and I found THREE family Bibles that day. One of them was a Bible belonging to Fanny Gash, their 3rd great-grandmother, who was the wife of the earliest Smith listed in that previously missing Bible. Fanny’s Bible cleared up a big mystery and confirmed her maiden surname (her full maiden name was Frances Ann Gilbert Gash) and identified her parents (Bernard Preston Gash and Isabella Barr), but I hadn’t gotten any further, and I still hadn’t figured out what connected her to the rest of the people in the big bible. Gash is a relatively rare surname; besides a couple in Virginia, I found none in her grandparents’ generation. I couldn’t find her family before they reached Kentucky. I set Fanny aside and started chasing other rabbits.
My horse thief, Elisha Perkins, was born in Baltimore County, Maryland in 1697. As I dug through the St. George’s Parish records of births, deaths, and marriages in 17th and early 18th-century Baltimore County, I kept coming across the names Hollis and Osborne. I had researched the Hollis family and knew they were connected to the Osbornes by marriage a century later.
Then I noticed that some Gilberts lived along the same small stream as my Perkins ancestors right about 1700. Huh. That was interesting. Gilbert was one of Fanny Gash’s middle names. And then I found a Gilbert-Osborne marriage in the early 1700s. I wondered if that might explain Fanny Gash’s connection to the Hollis-Osbornes a century later. If I could just find her people!
Now, you may think you see where this is heading. Or, maybe you’ve leaped to a conclusion. (Don’t. Leaping to conclusions is dangerous and you can get hurt.)
It took me a while because I’m dense and was distracted by a horse thief, but I finally decided to broaden my search to see what sorts of interactions there might have been between the Perkins and Gilbert families since they lived so close together. (And just for the merry hell of it, I included the Hollises and Osbornes, because I really ought to have fleshed that out better back when I was chasing Fanny Gash.)
I’ll be damned if I didn’t find a Gilbert-Gash wedding. And then another.
In the court records, I found a guardianship case. Thomas Gash died in 1703 leaving an orphaned toddler son also named Thomas Gash. His neighbor, Richard Perkins, was made administrator of Thomas Gash’s estate, and was therefore responsible for little Thomas Gash’s inheritance. Richard Perkins was my horse thief Elisha’s father. Then Richard died, and the horse thief’s widowed mother, Mary Perkins, became the new administratrix of Thomas Gash’s estate. Young Thomas Gash and the horse thief Elisha Perkins knew each other very well as children.
I traced the Gash family, this time in the other direction. I found young Thomas’s wedding to Johannah Ashford, and then found their son Thomas who married Elizabeth Gilbert and moved to Kentucky right after the Revolution, and then found their son Bernard, who was – you guessed it – Fanny Gash’s father.
I hadn’t initially found the Gashes in Baltimore County because they were in Virginia. Yes – I had found them several years ago and not realized it.
Young Thomas’s family and some other Baltimore County people, including Elizabeth Gilbert’s family and Elisha Perkins, had gone there after Elisha’s conviction for horse thievery. Thomas (III) and Elizabeth married there and later returned to Baltimore County. I would have found them years ago if I had broadened my Baltimore County search by a generation. Elisha died in Virginia, but his son ended up in North Carolina, where he bred horses, and the Gashes went to Kentucky.
I still can’t figure out why Fanny Gash’s son ended up with Averilla Hollis’s Bible, except that Fanny lived with Averilla’s spinster sister Martha all of her adult life – at least, after her husband left her shortly after their son, Henry Bernard/Barnet/Bernet Smith was born. Martha Hollis willed her entire estate to Henry Bernard Smith.
So, no, Skip and I aren’t related, but my 8th great-grandparents cared for Skip and Matt’s orphaned 6th great-grandfather.
I’m going to be useless for the foreseeable future. I started digging into one of my ancestors over the weekend, thinking I’d learn a few fun facts about an orphaned waif who went to live with his uncle near the Great Dismal Swamp and ended up a prosperous landowner when the Carolina backcountry opened up. I had no idea what I was in for.
Over three generations – from about 1670 to 1804 – the story covers nearly every stereotype and significant historical event in the South. It starts with a criminal transported to the American colonies and ends with a will that mentions the direct ancestor of two Triple Crown winners.
The in-between is anything but boring and sedate. Across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and both Carolinas, it’s a story of fur trading, horse thieving, adultery, multiple prison stints, prosecutions for fornication and disturbing the peace, herds of illegitimate children, Conestoga wagons, battles over inheritance, grudges, forgiveness, the Earl of Granville, a Moravian Bishop straight from Germany, wilderness explorers, the founding of Salem NC, the French & Indian Wars, murder, the State of Franklin, colonial militias, questioned patriotism, slavery, horse races, political influence including a potential run for the U.S. presidency, and a famous descendant of both the Godolphin Arabian (King of the Wind himself!) and the Darley Arabian – not to mention at least three other famous sires of what would become Thoroughbreds, Standardbreds, and American Quarter Horses.
I have never wished so much that I could plumb the depths of my aunt Laura Nichols’ equine knowledge to learn more about these famous creatures. I’m doing as much research on the horses named in John Perkins’s will as I am the people.
And every time I find another document, I find more drama.
I have two meetings, a hearing, and a doctor’s appointment this week. Other than that, I will be locked into position in front of my screen and behind my keyboard until the New Year.
You can send food, but I won’t be taking any calls. I have genealogy to do.
Since early in the months of the pandemic, four of us single, solo-dwelling women have gotten together to flex our culinary muscles and honor the china and silver inherited from various grandmothers. This is our October 2022 dinner:
Soup course: French onion soup with toasted baguette slices topped with creamy Gruyère cheese melted in a broiler for three minutes.
Salad course: Hearts of romaine with homemade croutons, coated with fresh anchovy garlic dressing in a homemade mayonnaise matrix, thinned with lemon juice and a touch of aged white wine vinegar.
Main course: Daube glacé chilled for 24 hours in a demimonde mold, accompanied by homemade mayonnaise, capers, and micro greens, with a squeeze of lemon. Toasted baguette accompanied.
Dessert: Scratch cake embellished with caramel and pecans, then topped with three layers of caramel: homemade caramel sauce, caramel icing, and another layer of caramel sauce. (We call it “the caramel cake.” A two-inch slice instantly induces a sugar coma.)
Being a humanist means taking action to make the human condition better. Action doesn’t mean sitting around and thinking about something just hoping for it to get better, which is all that prayer amounts to. (Sorry, prayer warriors, but there have been scientific studies done on this, and prayer doesn’t work.)
Action can be on a small scale – taking a tray of food to a bereaved family, offering to help a friend change bandages after surgery, helping a neighbor with home or car repairs, providing someone a ride to a job interview or watching their kids for a couple of hours, rescuing a starving cat or dog, giving a friend a hug and a compassionate ear, or simply expressing sympathy.
Humanism also means taking action on a large scale. Humanity needs us to protect nature and the threatened habitats of other species, to donate money and volunteer time to ensure that everyone in our communities has a roof over their heads and food on their plates and medical care. For the sake of our own species as well as others, we need to reduce our carbon footprints, advocate for more humane policies and laws, and vote out lawmakers who make life harder, not easier, for marginalized people.
Being a humanist means being kind to other people and to the world around us. Religious people can do this, too, and often do.
I sincerely wish they’d keep their wishful thinking to themselves, though. Offering nothing beyond vague “thoughts and prayers” sounds insulting to me. The person saying it has noticed there’s a situation, but absolutely refuses to do anything about it – and tells us so. That’s the opposite of humanism.
One of my favorite ancestors is Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813) of Providence, Rhode Island.1Not to be confused by the famous English/American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1791. Their circles sometimes overlapped, and many genealogies conflate the two. That’s his marble bust at the top of the page. Brown University has it.2It was recently restored.
The 1822 obituary of my 5th great-grandmother, Mary “Polly” Smith West Pearce, referred to her father as “the eminent Dr. Benjamin West” of Providence. I had not known who her parents were before I found that obituary. What followed were several days of frantic discovery on my part, each one better than the last. The man was phenomenal, and I don’t understand why every generation after him hasn’t continued to hold him up as the pinnacle of the Enlightenment. (Actually, there are many males named “Benjamin West” in the Robinson branch of our family, so someone clearly remembered him. My line from him has been daughter-intensive for the last four generations, so I suppose there’s a reason for it to be missing.)
Benjamin West was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American equivalent of England’s Royal Society. Although he was a merchant for about 25 years, he earned great respect as a teacher and a university professor. He taught at Philadelphia’s eminent Protestant Episcopal Academy and at the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (now Brown University) in Providence. Brown University owns his portrait.3Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813), Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy, 1786-1799. Artist unknown; Watercolor silhouette, 3½” x 7½” from the portrait collection of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Gift of the family of Dr. West. Portrait 156, Brown Historical Property No. 1853, located in the John Hay library 122. From the Brown University website: “The painter of this miniature portrait is unknown … It was a family portrait during Benjamin West’s lifetime and after his death in 1813 it was prized by his descendants for generations until it was ultimately donated to Brown.” Portrait Collection, Office of the Curator, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, website (https://library.brown.edu/cds/portraits/display.php?idno=86). His life and work are fabulous examples of the Enlightenment in North America.
Benjamin West was born in March 1730 in Rehoboth, in Massachusetts Bay, one of the New England Colonies. His father was a farmer. When Benjamin was a young child, the family moved to Bristol. At the time, both Massachusetts and Rhode Island claimed jurisdiction over Bristol.
Benjamin was an autodidact. After a mere three months of formal education and without the means to buy books, Benjamin borrowed every book he could. His most significant benefactor during his childhood was a fiery Congregationalist minister in Bristol named John Burt.4Rev. John Burt died while fleeing the bombardment of Bristol by the British on 7 October 1775, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin West had known Rev. Burt well for thirty years at that point – from his childhood to his marriage to Elizabeth Smith. We can assume that the bombardment of his hometown and the death of his friend and mentor made the war personal for Benjamin West. See Wilfred Harold Monro, The History of Bristol, Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island: J.A. & R.A. Reid, 1880, 208, digital image, The Internet Archive (www.archive.org : accessed 6 Mar 2022); and “A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (www.lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022). Around the time of his 1753 marriage to Elizabeth Smith when he was 23, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island (population ~3,3005United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/centuryofpopulat00unit/page/162/mode/2up). He lived most of the rest of his life in Providence.
By 1758, Benjamin found backers to help him open a dry goods store. A couple of years later, he opened the first bookstore ever to grace the commercial avenues of Providence, now paying for the books he wanted by selling them to other people. He published almanacs for Providence, Bristol, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, to supplement his income for nearly 40 years. His work in plotting and recording the transit of Venus across the sun in 1769 was recognized in 1770 when the College of Rhode Island, then newly established on College Hill in Providence, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
During the Revolutionary War, he manufactured clothing for soldiers in the Continental Army while publishing his almanac and pursuing his scientific studies. The Royal Society of London published his paper on the transit of Venus and Mercury. In 1781, Benjamin West became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1786 began to teach mathematics and astronomy at the College of Rhode Island. In later years he added natural philosophy to the curriculum.
His friends were early backers of the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which later became Brown University. Providence was a small town in those days, so he naturally came into regular contact with the progenitors of the school: Stephen Hopkins (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), the famous four Brown brothers (Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses), Judge Daniel Jenckes, and others. He loved mathematics and astronomy and conferred with some genuinely great minds of his day. He tutored students privately throughout his life.
Benjamin West was a member of an active abolitionist group in Providence. This position pitted Benjamin against his friend John Brown, who actively engaged in the slave trade. Except for John, the Brown brothers’ thoughts on slavery shifted after a disastrous series of events on their slave ship Sally. Of 196 people purchased on its two-year voyage to Africa, only 87 survived to be sold as slaves in Antigua. The inhumanity of the Sally debacle especially shattered Moses Brown. He manumitted the people he had enslaved and became one of the most outspoken abolitionists of his time.
Purple prose and flowery metaphors abound in the contemporary biographical accounts, some written around the time of his death. They all reach one conclusion: Benjamin West was a genius who contributed considerably to science and mathematics. He was indeed a product of the Age of Enlightenment.
Astronomical Genius
An event in 1766 opened some gilded doors for him. A comet appeared in the constellation of Taurus on the evening of April 9. Being an excellent self-taught astronomer, Benjamin took careful measurements. He wrote a letter to a Boston astronomer named John Winthrop,6The Harvard President was a direct descendant of the John Winthrop whose 1630 fleet began the Great Migration. The earlier Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the persecutor of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. who was at Cambridge College (now known as Harvard University). He had never met or corresponded with Winthrop but was so excited about his observation he simply had to share it – and shared it with one of the foremost astronomers in North America.
Providence, April 10, 1766
Dear Sir:
For the improvement of science, I now acquaint you, that the last evening, I saw in the West, a comet, which I judged to be about the middle of the sign of Taurus; with about 7 degrees North latitude. It set half after 8 o’clock by my watch, and its amplitude was about 29 or 30 degrees. Nothing, Sir, could have induced me to this freedom of writing to you, but the love I have for the sciences; and I flatter myself that you will, on that account, the more readily overlook it.
I am, Sir, yours,
Benjamin West
This flowery language essentially says, “Sorry to bother you, but wow! I saw a comet last night!” He and Winthrop became great friends and continued to write to each other. For the rest of their lives, they would share observations about the night sky.
1769 Transit of the Planets
In 1716, building on the work of Johannes Kepler a century before, Edmund Halley figured out how to apply the theory of parallax to determine the distances between astronomical bodies. With both Mercury and Venus predicted to pass between Earth and the sun in 1769, astronomers worldwide were anxious to test the theory. Since this was the first opportunity to view the transits of both inner planets since Halley’s theory was published, everyone in the field of astronomy was excited. Captain Cook would observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti on his ill-fated circumnavigation. At the time of the last transit of Venus in 1761, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who had just finished their survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, had traveled to the Cape of Good Hope to observe it. These men used astronomy as an essential tool in their lives – navigating the oceans and surveying the land required precise measurements, and measurements started with the stars.
Telescope used by Benjamin West to observe the transits of Mercury and Venus in 1769, Brown University Collection. Photo credit: Brown University
There was no telescope in Providence in 1769. Benjamin West, Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Moses Brown were determined to see the phenomenon, though, so they managed to import a telescope from England at the incredible expense of 500 pounds. The men set up on the outskirts of Providence and watched the celestial event. Transit Street in Providence is named after the spot where they viewed the transit on June 3, 1769. There are photos of the telescope on the Brown University website – the school still has it and displays it.
As was his habit, Benjamin West made careful measurements of the transit.7See a list of Brown University’s observations of the transits of the planets at the Ladd Observatory. He published a tract (and dedicated it to his friend Stephen Hopkins) about the event.8See a copy of the 27-page tract on the Brown University website, complete with diagrams.
In July 1770, he and other astronomers observed the new;y-discovered Lexell’s Comet, which passed closer to earth than any known comet before or since. His observations contributed to a theory about the tails of comets. Because of his astronomy observations and publications, Benjamin West, a man with only three months of formal education, was awarded an honorary Master of Arts from Harvard on July 18, 1770. Here’s the text of the notification letter from his friend John Winthrop:
Cambridge, July 19, 1770
Sir —
I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the government of this college were pleased, yesterday, to confer upon you the Honorary degree of Master of Arts; upon which I sincerely congratulate you. I acknowledge the receipt of your favour, and shall be glad to compare any observations of the satellites.
Yours,
John Winthrop
Honors and degrees
Benjamin West primarily worked as a merchant during the 1760s and 1770s. When the Revolutionary War finally arrived, commerce dried up. He went to work manufacturing clothing for the American troops, but he continued his studies and correspondence with the other great minds and kept publishing his almanacs. In 1772, Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary degree for his work in astronomy. Then, in 1781, he was elected in the first class of honorees to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Some of his correspondence survives in the Academy’s archives. Two articles by Benjamin West appear in the Academy’s inaugural journal. First was the three-page article, “An Account of the Observations Made in Providence, in the State of Rhode-Island, of the Eclipse of the Sun, Which Happened the 23d Day of April, 1781.” He and Joseph Brown observed the eclipse together, and they would continue to share observations of the sky their entire lives.
Mathematics seems to have been Benjamin’s first love. In 1773 he wrote to a friend in Boston of a theorem he had developed to extract “the roots of odd powers” that was probably his most significant contribution to the field of mathematics. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a copy of his letter in its first journal. This article was entitled “On the Extraction of Roots.” It caused a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. He created theorems in quadratic equations to extract the third, fifth, and seventh roots of numbers. Some skeptics claimed his theorems were no different from those already in use; others praised their clarity and simplicity.
He didn’t stop at math and astronomical observations, though. One surviving biography explains a physics problem he cogitated upon for more than two years in conjunction with John Winthrop and a Mr. Oliver. It had to do with the properties of air in a copper tube that was then placed into an otherwise airless container. The qualities of invisible gases – basically, the scientific understanding of the very concept of the physical nature and properties of “air” – were in their infancy. Benjamin West speculated about the attractive and repulsive nature of the tiny particles that made up the matter of air and how they would behave under different conditions. (We now call these particles “molecules.”) Gravity, matter, magnetism, and ultimately the behavior of the tails of comets played into his understanding of the question.
Benjamin West’s mind was at the peak of its illuminating brilliance as the world around him heaved. His most important discoveries and writings happened as the American Revolution was about to explode. By the end of the Revolution, he had returned to academic pursuits. He tutored students in math and astronomy. In 1786, the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations offered him a full professorship.
For some reason, he did not begin teaching at the college for a couple of years. Leaving his wife and family in Providence, Benjamin West moved to Philadelphia temporarily to teach at the illustrious Protestant Episcopal Academy. While there, he solidified relationships with the influential minds of that city, including Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse. He assumed his post at Brown in 1788.
Benjamin West on the Committee for the Providence Library Providence Gazette, 29 March 1783
Brown University awarded Dr. West his first non-honorary degree, his Doctor of Laws, in 1792. He taught mathematics and astronomy there from 1788 until 1799. After leaving the university, he opened a navigation school and taught seafaring men astronomy. He clearly felt called to teach other people the wonders of the universe. I found an advertisement in the Providence Gazette published 29 March 1783 in which he and other influential men of Providence were reconstituting the local library and organizing its books.
The Almanacs and Revolution
Almanacs are annual publications that include helpful information on many practical subjects. People in farming, fishing, sailing, and other trades relied on their weather forecasts, high and low tides tables, ferry times, stagecoach times, and planting dates. Astronomical events like the phases of the moon and eclipses could be found within their pages, as could folklore, proverbs, poetry, essays, recipes, religious calendars, and more. The Franklin brothers (James and his apprentice Benjamin) were famous for their almanacs. Some of the most significant competitors to Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac were the New England almanacs published by Benjamin West.
One of Franklin’s chief rivals was Benjamin West, who published his almanacs in Boston … West usually used the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff,” a name famously used by Jonathan Swift several years earlier. “Abraham Weatherwise” was also a pseudonym [used by West], and likely used by a number of different almanac printers, and he “ushered in the healthiest and most interesting period of almanac making.”9“Eleven Early American Almanacs, 1733-1795, Including Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved, 1755,” Bauman’s Rare Books, citing Sagendorph, 116. This auction offering, for $15,000, includes two (and possibly five) of Benjamin West’s almanacs.
Benjamin West’s first almanac was published for 1763 on Providence’s first printing press by William Goddard. It was published continuously for 118 years – continued under the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff” and with various titles until 1881. “From 1763 to 1781, Benjamin West was the author, with the exception of the year 1769 when “Abraham Weatherwise” took his place. From 1781 to 1881 “Isaac Bickerstaff” was given as the author, except in 1833, when the name of R. T. Paine appeared on the title page.”10Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
John Carter published the almanacs from 1770-1814.11Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23. John Carter was the father-in-law of Nicholas Brown, Jr., after whom Brown University was named. Nicholas’s uncle Joseph had secured the telescope to observe the transits of Mercury and Venus and observed them with Benjamin West in 1769.12Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 24. The two men engaged in a conflict over publication rights in 1766. Carter continued publishing (and complaining when others published the same almanac, apparently with West’s consent). Around 1781 the men resolved their conflict. Their relationship continued for the rest of Benajmin West’s life.13Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), pp. 25-26.
Benjamin West’s New England Almanack for 1775. Note the pro-liberty poem on the cover.
Benjamin West did not limit his almanacs to dry data and noncontroversial proverbs. Almanacs during the Revolution and the period leading up to it often included political essays and even propaganda. Since nearly every literate household owned and used almanacs regularly, the political leanings of the publishers and almanac writers influenced the sentiments of the people reading the almanacs. When George III ascended the throne in 1762, Benjamin West’s almanac praised him.14Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 372 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614. However, the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 changed everything, and, as it turned out, Benjamin West did not hesitate to share his passionate political opinions. He was one of the “notable patriots” publishing popular almanacs throughout this period.15 Marion Barber Stowell, “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61, 42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
Benjamin West, mathematician and Brown University professor, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. From 1763 through 1781 he published almanacs in Providence, Rhode Island. That West calculated the almanacs does not necessarily mean that he wrote the contents. The printers often hired a calculator, whose name, if it were prestigious, was given to the almanac. Frequently the printer himself furnished the additional text. For 1766 in “A Short View of the present State of the American Colonies, from Canada to the utmost Verge of His Majesty’s Dominions,” the author clearly states that his description of the general despair in English America is to propagandize: “such being the deplorable Situation of this Country, once renown’d for Freedom, it is hoped a Review thereof will excite such a universal Spirit of Patriotism in every Inhabitant, that our Liberty and Property may be yet rescued from the Jaws of Destruction.”16ibid, p. 45. The article’s author notes that “The West almanac for 1766 was printed by Sarah Goddard and her son, William. On 21 Sept. 1765 William Goddard published his sensational Constitutional Courant, a patriotic polemic for the Whig cause.” That being said, Benjamin West’s own strongly Whig sentiments are not lost to history.
His 1767 almanac contained an essay protesting strongly against the Stamp Act and is credited with being one of six critically important almanac-based essays on the topic.17Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 374 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
His 1775 almanac contained “A brief view of the present controversy between Great Britain and America, with some observations thereon.” It filled three pages of the 25-page almanac. Benjamin West’s friend and mentor, Rev. John Burt, would die on October 7, 1775, during the British bombardment of Bristol.
Rev. John Burt was the fifth pastor of the Congregational Church in Bristol, R.I. He assumed his duties on 13 May 1741. He died at the age of 50, on 7 October 1775,18Find a Grave memorial # 13165832 for John Burt, at the Congregational Churchyard cemetery in Bristol, R.I. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13165832). as the British bombarded the town in the first year of the Revolution.19During the Revolutionary War, the British Royal Navy bombarded Bristol twice. On October 7, 1775, a group of ships led by Captain Wallace and HMS Rose sailed into town and demanded provisions. When refused, Wallace shelled the town, causing much damage. The attack was stopped when Lieutenant-Governor William Bradford rowed out to Rose to negotiate a cease-fire. Bristol and the neighboring town of Warren, RI, suffered a second attack by the British on 25 May 1778, when 500 British and Hessian troops marched through the main street (now called Hope Street (RI Route 114)) and burned 30 barracks and houses, taking some prisoners to Newport.
Rev. Burt was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. After the French and Indian War of the 1750s-1760s, Burt was adamantly anti-Catholic and anti-French.19John F. Quinn, “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History, 2017, 75:56,60, accessed 6 Mar 2022. At the time of the 1790 census, only 3,211 lived in Bristol county, a little less than half of which lived in the town of Bristol.
It takes little imagination to believe that Rev. Burt’s death during the shelling of Bristol by the British inspired Benjamin West to take action on the American side, even if he had not been inclined that way before. However, Benjamin West’s published almanacs make clear that his sentiments lay strongly with the American cause long before the first official shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
Benjamin West’s Family
Since I discovered him as Mary Smith West’s father, the rest of Benjamin’s family has been a brick wall for me. “Brick walls” in genealogy research refer to those ancestors whose origins and relations are shrouded in seemingly impenetrable mystery. Of course, I may have gotten so wrapped up in researching the man that I haven’t put enough energy into the rest of the family!
Most secondary sources list Benjamin’s father as a farmer named John and his wife as Elizabeth Smith. A couple of these sources say Ben’s grandfather was an immigrant to America, but his name is not given. Several sources claim he had eight children and was survived by three of them, but as of March 2022, I have found names for only four or five: Elizabeth, Nancy (Anne?), Benjamin, Mary “Polly” Smith, and Joseph.20Rhode Island Census, 1774, p. 53, Record for Benjamin West in Providence, Rhode Island. Ancestry, website (www. ancestry.com : accessed 6 Mar 2022). In his household, there were two white males over the age of 16, one white male under the age of 16, two white females over 16, and three white females under 16. Assuming he and his wife are two of the people over 16, this report allows for two sons and four daughters in the household. Two others may have died young, been living elsewhere, or not yet born. Where his wife’s maiden surname is mentioned, it is given as Smith. His birthplace is given as Rehoboth, Massachusetts, or Bristol, Rhode Island. In 1730 Bristol was claimed by Massachusetts as part of the original Plymouth colony. It became part of Rhode Island in 1746, when the border between Rhode Island and Plymouth colonies was finally settled. Bristol was where King Philip’s War had started in 1675, and served as the primary base of operations for Metacomet, or King Philip. If Benjamin’s family was in the area at the time, they would have endured the first (and worst) of the wars between Native Americans and European colonists. The town was started in 1680, after the war.
Many online trees confuse and conflate Benjamin West the astronomer with another Benjamin West born in Rhode Island around 1730. The other Benjamin West (c. 1730-1782) was the son of William West (1681-aft 1742) of Kingstown, Rhode Island. William was the son of Susannah Soule (c. 1642-c. 1684) and Francis West (c1632 in England – 1696 in Kingstown). Susannah was the daughter of Mayflower passenger George Soule (c1601 in Holland – c. 1680 in Duxbury, Plymouth Colony). The descendant of George Soule is said to have been born in North Kingstown or Newport, Rhode Island, around 1730. He is said to have lived in Farmington, Connecticut, and died in Rensselaer, New York in 1782. The “Silver Books” of the Mayflower Society list the 1753 marriage record of Benjamin West and Elizabeth Smith as belonging to George Soule’s descendant, not to the astronomer. Since the astronomer was from Bristol, and the Soule descendant was from Kingstown, it seems more likely that the attribution of the marriage record to the Soule descendant is incorrect.
There is a marriage record for Benjamin West and “Mrs. Elizabeth Smith” in Bristol, County, Rhode Island, on 7 June 1753.21James N. Arnold, Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, pp. 50, and citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912.Rev. John Burt performed the marriage ceremony. Based on the title she was given in the marriage record, she may have been married to a man named Smith prior to marrying Benjamin West. However, no other records in Bristol show a man named Smith marrying a woman named Elizabeth in the 10 years prior to this. It is possible that she married elsewhere. It is also possible that “Mrs.” was simply an abbreviation for “mistress” and did not denote her previous marital status.
In 1767, Benjamin West was a commissioner for the insolvent estate of Joseph Smith, deceased, of North Providence (Pawtucket). He valued the estate and filed papers confirming the portion that should be allowed to Joseph Smith’s widow, Marcy or Mercy Smith.22 “Probate files, early to 1885 (Pawtucket, R.I.),” Pawtucket (Rhode Island). Court of Probate. Probate files, 1, 5-85, Estate of Joseph Smith (1768), images 363-373 of 1199, FHL Film 2364533. FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022) Joseph may have been a brother or another relative of Benjamin’s wife.
Elizabeth Smith West may have been a daughter of Anne Arnold, the widow of Benjamin Smith who married Stephen Hopkins in 1755. Hopkins was a signer of the Declaration and a colonial governor of Rhode Island, among his many other accomplishments, and was known to be a close friend of Benjamin West.
Benjamin’s wife Elizabeth died in 1810 in Providence. When Benjamin died in 1813, the probate court appointed two administrators: his daughter Elizabeth, who apparently never married, and his son-in-law Gabriel Allen, who was married to Benjamin’s daughter Nancy. Nancy was a nickname for Anne, so her name appears as both in records. It appears that Joseph, Elizabeth, and my 5th great-grandmother, Mary “Polly” Smith West Pearce, were the children who survived him.
In the first Decennial Census of the United States in 1790, Benjamin West lived next door to his son-in-law, Oliver Pearce. Oliver was married to Benjamin’s daughter Mary Smith West, who was called Polly. They were my 5th great-grandparents. In 1800, the Pearces had moved, but Gabriel Allen, who married Ben’s daughter Nancy (or Anne), lived next door. In Ben’s home were four white adults: a man and a woman over 45 and a man and a woman between the ages of 26-44. The younger couple may have been one of their children and a spouse or possibly two adult unmarried children.
Oliver Pearce and Polly West moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, sometime between 1793 and 1807. By 1800, Oliver’s brother Nathan was already living in Fayetteville, North Carolina with another adult male and two enslaved people.
A man named Benjamin West died in Providence in 1801 and may have been Benjamin and Elizabeth’s son. One of Benjamin’s sons also may have been named Joseph. Joseph West, a Revolutionary War veteran from Rhode Island, married Violetta Howard of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died there in 1840. I’ve gone a bit back and forth as to whether he’s the right Joseph Smith, and have found nothing definitive to connect him to the astronomer despite the repeated insistence of quite a few unsourced online trees.
More information is out there, but not accessible to me online. Brown University’s John Hay Library has in its special collections letters from Benjamin and Joseph West to Dr. Solomon Drowne23in the Drowne Family Papers (MS Drowne). The Rhode Island Historical Society has documents in its special collections relating to Benjamin West’s mercantile business and a narrative of his 1769 observations of the transits.24Benjamin West Papers, MSS 794. There are references to him in the papers of Moses Brown at the same repository.25MSS 313. Letters from Benjamin West to one of his granddaughters, Cecilia Pearce Newby (a daughter of my 5th great-grandmother), are in the special collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the papers of her husband, Larkin Newby.26Larkin Newby Papers, 1796-1884. Collection Number: 03247.
Bibliography:
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Website (amacad.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Arnold, James N. Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, p. 50, citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912. (FamilySearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard Press, 1967, 50th Anniversary Edition, 2017.
“Biography of Benjamin West, L.L.D. A.A.S.: Professor of Mathematicks, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in Rhode Island College – and Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, &c.”, The Rhode Island Literary Repository, Vol I, No. 7 (October 1814): 137-160 (337-360). Google Books (books.google.com : accessed 6 March 2022).
Bliss, Leonard. The History of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts: Comprising a history of the present towns of Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Pawtucket, from their settlement to the present time; together with sketches of Attleborough, Cumberland, and a part of Swansey and Barrington, to the time that they were severally separated from the original town. (Boston: Otis, Broaders, and Company, 1836). The Internet Archive (archive.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Brown University. Portrait Collection, Office of the University Curator, Providence, Rhode Island. Website (https://library.brown.edu : accessed 6 March 2022).
Find A Grave. Website, database with images (findagrave.com : accessed 6 March 2022).
Hall, Louise. “Family Records: Newby Bible”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 122 (Apr 1968): 125-128, 125. American Ancestors (americanancestors.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Newmann’s Ltd. Website (newmansltd.com : accessed 6 March 2022)
Pease, John Chauncey, and John Milton Niles. A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island, (Hartford: William S. Marsh, 1819), 331-333. Biographical entry for Dr. Benjamin West. (Google Books : accessed 6 March 2022.)
The Providence Gazette, various issues, 1763-1802.
Quinn, John F. “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History Journal, 75:56, 60 (2017). Rhode Island Historical Society (www.rihs.org : accessed 5 Mar 2022.
Raymond, Allan R. “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777.” The New England Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1978): 370–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/364614.
“A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
Rhode Island Historical Society Library. Benjamin West Papers. 121 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906.
Spencer, Mark G. Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Entry for Benjamin West (1730-1813). London: Bloomsbury (2015). pp. 1096-1097.
Stowell, Marion Barber. “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (archive.org : Accessed 6 March 2022).
Wikipedia. (wikipedia.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
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An earlier version of this post originally appeared on Aramink.com.
Footnotes
1
Not to be confused by the famous English/American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1791. Their circles sometimes overlapped, and many genealogies conflate the two.
Dr. Benjamin West (1730-1813), Professor of Mathematics, Astronomy, and Natural Philosophy, 1786-1799. Artist unknown; Watercolor silhouette, 3½” x 7½” from the portrait collection of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Gift of the family of Dr. West. Portrait 156, Brown Historical Property No. 1853, located in the John Hay library 122. From the Brown University website: “The painter of this miniature portrait is unknown … It was a family portrait during Benjamin West’s lifetime and after his death in 1813 it was prized by his descendants for generations until it was ultimately donated to Brown.” Portrait Collection, Office of the Curator, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, website (https://library.brown.edu/cds/portraits/display.php?idno=86).
4
Rev. John Burt died while fleeing the bombardment of Bristol by the British on 7 October 1775, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin West had known Rev. Burt well for thirty years at that point – from his childhood to his marriage to Elizabeth Smith. We can assume that the bombardment of his hometown and the death of his friend and mentor made the war personal for Benjamin West. See Wilfred Harold Monro, The History of Bristol, Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island: J.A. & R.A. Reid, 1880, 208, digital image, The Internet Archive (www.archive.org : accessed 6 Mar 2022); and “A Revolution is Brewing,” The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion Project, Linden Place newsletter, Bristol, Rhode Island: Linden Place (www.lindenplace.org : accessed 6 March 2022).
5
United States Bureau of the Census. A century of population growth from the first census of the United States to the twelfth, 1790-1900, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. p. 162. The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/centuryofpopulat00unit/page/162/mode/2up
6
The Harvard President was a direct descendant of the John Winthrop whose 1630 fleet began the Great Migration. The earlier Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the persecutor of Anne Marbury Hutchinson.
“Eleven Early American Almanacs, 1733-1795, Including Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Improved, 1755,” Bauman’s Rare Books, citing Sagendorph, 116. This auction offering, for $15,000, includes two (and possibly five) of Benjamin West’s almanacs.
10
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
11
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 23.
12
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), p. 24.
13
Howard M. Chapin, “Checklist of Rhode Island Almanacs 1643-1850,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 25:19-54 (April 1915), pp. 25-26.
14
Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 372 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
15
Marion Barber Stowell, “Revolutionary Almanac-Makers: Trumpeters of Sedition.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73, no. 1 (1979): 41–61, 42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24302752.
16
ibid, p. 45. The article’s author notes that “The West almanac for 1766 was printed by Sarah Goddard and her son, William. On 21 Sept. 1765 William Goddard published his sensational Constitutional Courant, a patriotic polemic for the Whig cause.” That being said, Benjamin West’s own strongly Whig sentiments are not lost to history.
17
Allan R. Raymond, “To Reach Men’s Minds: Almanacs and the American Revolution, 1760-1777, The New England Quarterly, September 1978, 51:370-395, 374 http://www.jstor.org/stable/364614.
18
Find a Grave memorial # 13165832 for John Burt, at the Congregational Churchyard cemetery in Bristol, R.I. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13165832).
19
During the Revolutionary War, the British Royal Navy bombarded Bristol twice. On October 7, 1775, a group of ships led by Captain Wallace and HMS Rose sailed into town and demanded provisions. When refused, Wallace shelled the town, causing much damage. The attack was stopped when Lieutenant-Governor William Bradford rowed out to Rose to negotiate a cease-fire. Bristol and the neighboring town of Warren, RI, suffered a second attack by the British on 25 May 1778, when 500 British and Hessian troops marched through the main street (now called Hope Street (RI Route 114)) and burned 30 barracks and houses, taking some prisoners to Newport.
Rev. Burt was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. After the French and Indian War of the 1750s-1760s, Burt was adamantly anti-Catholic and anti-French.19John F. Quinn, “From Dangerous Threat to “Illustrious Ally : Changing Perceptions of Catholics in Eighteenth Century Newport,” Rhode Island History, 2017, 75:56,60, accessed 6 Mar 2022.
20
Rhode Island Census, 1774, p. 53, Record for Benjamin West in Providence, Rhode Island. Ancestry, website (www. ancestry.com : accessed 6 Mar 2022). In his household, there were two white males over the age of 16, one white male under the age of 16, two white females over 16, and three white females under 16. Assuming he and his wife are two of the people over 16, this report allows for two sons and four daughters in the household. Two others may have died young, been living elsewhere, or not yet born.
21
James N. Arnold, Rhode Island Vital Extracts, 1636-1850, Vol. 6: Bristol County, pp. 50, and citing Bristol Marriage Record Book 1:125. Providence, Rhode Island: Narragansett Publishing Company, 1891-1912.
22
“Probate files, early to 1885 (Pawtucket, R.I.),” Pawtucket (Rhode Island). Court of Probate. Probate files, 1, 5-85, Estate of Joseph Smith (1768), images 363-373 of 1199, FHL Film 2364533. FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org : accessed 6 March 2022)
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