Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church Discipline in Colonial New England

And yet, speaking again from the material which chances to be at my own disposal, I find, so far as Braintree is concerned, nothing to justify this statement of Lord Dartmouth’s in the manuscript record book of Col. John Quincy, which has been preserved, and is now in the possession of this Society. Colonel Quincy was a prominent man in his day and neighborhood; and the North Precinct of Braintree, in which he lived and was buried, when, nearly thirty years after his death, it was incorporated as a town, took its name from him. As a justice of the peace, Colonel Quincy kept a careful record of the cases, both civil and criminal, which came before him between 1716 and 1761, a period of forty-five years. These cases, a great part of them criminal, were over two hundred in number, and came not only from Braintree but from other parts of the old county of Suffolk. Under these circumstances, if the state of affairs indicated by Lord Dartmouth’s remark, and Governor Hutchinson’s apparent admission of its truth, did really prevail, many bastardy warrants would during those forty-five years naturally have come before so active a magistrate as John Quincy. Such does not seem to have been the case. Indeed I find during the whole period but four bastardy entries, – one in 1733, one in 1739, one in 1746, and one in 1761, – and, in 1720, one complaint against a woman to answer for fornication. Considering the length of time the record of Colonel Quincy covers, this is a remarkably small number of cases, and, taken by itself, would seem to indicate the exact opposite from the condition of affairs revealed in the church records of the same period, for it includes the whole Hancock pastorate. This record book of Colonel Quincy’s I will add is the only original legal material I have bearing on this subject. An examination of the files of the provincial courts would undoubtedly bring more material to light.

I have only further to say, in passing, that some of the other cases mentioned in this John Quincy record are not without a curious interest. For instance, August 24, 1722, John Veasey, “husbandman,” is put under recognizance in the sum of £5 “for detaining his child from the public worship of God, said child being about eleven years old.” On the same day John Belcher, “cordwainer,” is put under a similar recognizance “for absenting himself from the public worship of God the winter past.” Eleazer Veasey, – the Braintree Veaseys I will say in passing were members of the Church of England in Braintree, and not members of the Braintree church, – Eleazer Veasey is, on the 20th of September, 1717, fined five shillings to the use of the town poor for “uttering a profane curse.” So also Christopher Dyer, “husbandman,” “did utter one profane curse,” to which charge he pleaded guilty, and, on the 17th of May, 1747, was fined four shillings for the use of the poor. In this case the costs were assessed at six shillings, making ten shillings as the total cost of an oath in Massachusetts at that time; but as Dyer was a “soldier of His Majesty’s service,” the court added that if the fine was not paid forthwith, he (Dyer) “be publickly set in the stocks or cage for the space of three hours.”

Returning to the subject of church discipline and public confessions of incontinence, it will be observed that in the case of the North Precinct Church of Braintree the great body of these confessions are recorded as being made during the Hancock pastorate, or between the years 1726 and 1744. This also, it will be remembered, was the period of what is known in New England history as “The Great Awakening,” described in the first chapter of the recently published fifth volume of Dr. Palfrey’s work. Some writers, while referring to what they call “the tide of immorality” which then and afterward “rolled,” as they express it, over the land, so that “not even the bulwark of the church had been able to withstand” it, – these writers, themselves of course ministers of the church, have, for want of any more apparent cause, attributed the condition of affairs they deplored, but were compelled to admit, to the influence of the French wars, which, it will be remembered, broke out in 1744, and, with an intermission of six years (1749-1755), lasted until the conquest of Canada was completed in 1760. But it would be matter for curious inquiry whether both the condition of affairs referred to and the confessions made in public of sins privately committed were not traceable to the church itself rather than to the army, – whether they were not rather due to the spiritual than to the martial conditions of the time.

I have neither the material at my disposal, nor the time and inclination to go into this study, both physiological and psychological, and shall therefore confine myself to a few suggestions only which have occurred to me in the course of the examination of the records I have been discussing.

“The Great Awakening,” so called, occurred in 1740, – it was then that Whitefield preached on Boston Common to an audience about equal in number to three quarters of the entire population of the town.12 Five years before, in 1735, had occurred the famous Northampton revival, engineered and presided over by Jonathan Edwards; and previous to that there had been a number of small local outbreaks of the same character, which his “venerable and honoured Grandfather Stoddard,” as Edwards describes his immediate predecessor in the Northampton pulpit, was accustomed to refer to as “Harvests,” in which there was “a considerable Ingathering of Souls.” A little later this spiritual condition became general and, so to speak, epidemic. There are few sadder or more suggestive forms of literature than that in which the religious contagion of 1735, for it was nothing else, is described; it reveals a state of affairs bordering close on universal insanity. Take for instance the following from Edwards’s “Narrative” of what took place at Northampton: —

“Presently upon this, a great and earnest Concern about the great things of Religion, and the eternal World, became universal in all parts of the Town, and among Persons of all Degrees, and all Ages; the Noise amongst the Dry Bones waxed louder and louder: All other talk but about spiritual and eternal things, was soon thrown by… There was scarcely a single Person in the Town, either old or young, that was left unconcerned about the great Things of the eternal World. Those that were wont to be the vainest, and loosest, and those that had been most disposed to think, and speak slightly of vital and experimental Religion, were now generally subject to great awakenings… Souls did as it were come by Flocks to Jesus Christ. From Day to Day, for many Months together, might be seen evident Instances of Sinners brought out of Darkness into marvellous Light, and delivered out of an horrible Pit, and from the miry Clay, and set upon a Rock, with a new Song of Praise to God in their mouths … in the Spring and Summer following, Anno 1735 the Town seemed to be full of the Presence of God. It never was so full of Love, nor so full of Joy; and yet so full of Distress as it was then. There were remarkable Tokens of God’s Presence in almost every House… Our publick Praises were then greatly enlivened… In all Companies on other Days, on whatever Occasions Persons met together, Christ was to be heard of and seen in the midst of them. Our young People, when they met, were wont to spend the time in talking of the Excellency and dying Love of JESUS CHRIST, the Gloriousness of the way of Salvation, the wonderful, free, and sovereign Grace of God, his glorious Work in the Conversion of a Soul, the Truth and Certainty of the great Things of God’s Word, the Sweetness of the Views of his Perfection &c. And even at Weddings, which formerly were meerly occasions of Mirth and Jollity, there was now no discourse of any thing but the things of Religion, and no appearance of any, but spiritual Mirth.”13

And it was this pestiferous stuff, – for though it emanated from the pure heart and powerful brain of the greatest of American theologians, it is best to characterize it correctly, – it was this pestiferous stuff that Wesley read during a walk from London to Oxford in 1738, and wrote of it in his journal, – “Surely this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.” Such was the prevailing spiritual condition of the period in which the entries I have read were made in the Braintree church records. In the language of the text from which Dr. Colman preached on the occasion of the first stated evening lecture ever held in Boston, “Souls flying to Jesus Christ [were] pleasant and admirable to behold.”

The brother clergyman14 who prepared and delivered from the pulpit of the Braintree church a funeral sermon on Mr. Hancock referred to the religious excesses of the time, and described the dead pastor as a “wise and skilful pilot” who had steered “a right and safe course in the late troubled sea of ecclesiastical affairs,” so that his people had to a considerable degree “escaped the errors and enthusiasm … in matters of religion which others had fallen into.”15 Nevertheless it is almost impossible for any locality to escape wholly a general epidemic; and in those days public relations of experiences were not only usual in the churches, but they were a regular feature in all cases of admission to full communion. That this was the case in the Braintree church is evident from the extract already quoted from the records, when in 1722 “some persons of a sober life and good conversation signified their unwillingness to join in full communion with the church unless they [might] be admitted to it without making a Public relation of their spiritual experiences.” It was also everywhere noticed that the women, and especially the young women, were peculiarly susceptible to attacks of the spiritual epidemic. Jonathan Edwards for instance mentions, in the case of Northampton, how the young men of that place had become “addicted to night-walking and frequenting the tavern, and leud practices,” and how they would “get together in conventions of both sexes for mirth and jollity, which they called frolicks; and they would spend the greater part of the night in them”; and among the first indications of the approach of the epidemic noticed by him was the case of a young woman who had been one of the greatest “company keepers” in the whole town, who became “serious, giving evidence of a heart truly broken and sanctified.”

This same state of affairs doubtless then prevailed in Braintree, and indeed throughout New England. The whole community was in a sensitive condition morally and spiritually, – so sensitive that, as the Braintree records show, the contagion extended to all classes, and, among those bearing some of the oldest names in the history of the township, we find also negroes, – “Benjamin Sutton and Naomi his wife,” and “Jeffry, my servant, and Flora, his wife,” – grotesquely getting up before the congregation to make confession, like their betters, of the sin of fornication before marriage. It, of course, does not need to be said that such a state of morbid and spiritual excitement would necessarily lead to public confessions of an unusual character. Women, and young women in particular, would be inclined to brood over things unknown save to those who participated in them, and think to find in confession only a means of escape from the torment of that hereafter concerning which they entertained no doubts; hence perhaps many of these records which now seem both so uncalled for and so inexplicable.

So far, however, what has been said relates only to the matter of public confession; it remains for others to consider how far a morbidly excited spiritual condition may also have been responsible for the sin confessed. The connection between the animal and the spiritual natures of human beings taken in the aggregate, though subtile, is close; and while it is well known that camp-meetings have never been looked upon as peculiar, or even as conspicuous, for the continence supposed to prevail at them, there is no doubt whatever that in England the license of the restoration followed close on the rule of the saints. One of the authorities on New England history, speaking of the outward manifestations of the “Great Awakening,” says that “the fervor of excitement showed itself in strong men, as well as in women, by floods of tears, by outcries, by bodily paroxysms, jumping, falling down and rolling on the ground, regardless of spectators or their clothes.” Then the same authority goes on to add: – “But it was common that when the exciting preacher had departed, the excitement also subsided, and men and women returned peaceably to their daily duties.”16 This last may have been the case; but it is not probable that men and women in the condition of mental and physical excitement described could go about their daily duties without carrying into them some trace of morbid reaction. It was a species of insanity; and insanity invariably reveals itself in unexpected and contradictory forms.

But it is for others, like my friend Dr. Green, both by education and professional experience more versed in these subjects than I, to say whether a period of sexual immorality should not be looked for as the natural concomitant and sequence of such a condition of moral and religious excitement as prevailed in New England between 1725 and 1745. I merely now call attention to the fact that in Braintree the Hancock pastorate began in 1726 and ended in 1743, and that it was during the Hancock pastorate, also the period of “the Great Awakening,” that public confessions of fornication were most frequently made in the Braintree church; further, and finally, it was during the years which immediately followed that the great “tide of immorality” which the clergy of the day so much deplored, “rolled over the land.”

But it still remains to consider whether the entries referred to in the church records must be taken as conclusive evidence that a peculiarly lax condition of affairs as respects the sexual relation did really prevail in New England during the last century. This does not necessarily follow; and, for reasons I shall presently give, I venture to doubt it. In the first place it is to be remembered that the language used in those days does not carry the same meaning that similar language would carry if used now. For instance, when Jonathan Edwards talks of the youth of Northampton being given to “Night-walking … and leud practices,” he does not at all mean what we should mean by using the same expression; and the young woman who was one of the greatest “company keepers” in the whole town, was probably nothing worse than a lively village girl much addicted to walking with her young admirers after public lecture on the Sabbath afternoons, – “a disorder,” by the way, which Jonathan Edwards says he made “a thorough reformation of … which has continued ever since.”17

So far the relations then prevailing between the young of the two sexes may have been, and probably were, innocent enough, and nothing more needs be said of them; but coming now to the facts revealed in the church records, I venture to doubt the correctness of the inference as to general laxity which would naturally be drawn from them. The situation as respects sexual morality which prevailed in New England during the eighteenth century seems to me to have been peculiar rather than bad. In other words, though there was much incontinence, that incontinence was not promiscuous; and this statement brings me at once to the necessary consideration of another recognized and well-established custom in the more ordinary and less refined New England life of the last century, which has been considered beneath what is known as the dignity of history to notice, and to which, accordingly, no reference is made by Palfrey or Barry, or, so far as I know, by any of the standard authorities: and yet, unless I am greatly mistaken, it is to this carefully ignored usage or custom that we must look for an explanation of the greater part of the confessions recorded in the annals of the churches. I refer, of course, to the practice known as “bundling.”

I do not propose here to go into a description of “bundling,”18 or to attempt to trace its origin or the extent to which it prevailed in New England during the last century. All this has been sufficiently done in the little volume on the subject prepared by Dr. H. R. Stiles, and published some twenty years ago. For my present purpose it is only necessary for me to say that the practice of “bundling” has long been one of the standing taunts or common-place indictments against New England, and has been supposed to indicate almost the lowest conceivable state of sexual immorality;19 but, on the other hand, it may safely be asserted that “bundling” was, as a custom, neither so vicious nor so immoral as is usually supposed; nor did it originate in, nor was it peculiar to, New England. It was a practice growing out of the social and industrial conditions of a primitive people, of simple, coarse manners and small means. Two young persons proposed to marry. They and their families were poor; they lived far apart from each other; they were at work early and late all the week. Under these circumstances Saturday evening and Sunday were the recognized time for meeting. The young man came to the house of the girl after Saturday’s sun-down, and they could see each other until Sunday afternoon, when he had to go back to his own home and work. The houses were small, and every nook in them occupied; and in order that the man might not be turned out of doors, or the two be compelled to sit up all night at a great waste of lights and fuel, and that they might at the same time be in each other’s company, they were “bundled” up together on a bed, in which they lay side by side and partially clothed. It goes without saying that, however it originated, such a custom, if recognized and continued, must degenerate into something coarse and immoral. The inevitable would follow. The only good and redeeming feature about it was the utter absence of concealment and secrecy. All was open and recognized. The very “bundling” was done by the hands of mother and sisters.

As I have said, this custom neither originated in nor was it peculiar to New England, though in New England, as elsewhere, it did lead to the same natural results. And I find conclusive evidence of this statement in all its several parts in the following extract from a book published as late as 1804, descriptive of customs, etc., then prevailing in North Wales. For the extract I am indebted to Dr. Stiles: —

“Saturday or Sunday nights are the principal time when this courtship takes place; and on these nights the men sometimes walk from a distance of ten miles or more to visit their favorite damsels. This strange custom seems to have originated in the scarcity of fuel and in the unpleasantness of sitting together in the colder part of the year without a fire. Much has been said of the innocence with which these meetings are conducted; but it is a very common thing for the consequence of the interview to make its appearance in the world within two or three months after the marriage ceremony has taken place.”

And again, referring to the same practice as it prevailed in Holland, another of the authorities quoted by Dr. Stiles, relating his observations also during the present century, speaks of a —

“courtship similar to bundling, carried on in … Holland, under the name of queesting. At night the lover has access to his mistress after she is in bed; and upon application to be admitted upon the bed, which is of course granted, he raises the quilt or rug, and in this state queests, or enjoys a harmless chit-chat with her, and then retires. This custom meets with the perfect sanction of the most circumspect parents, and the freedom is seldom abused. The author traces its origin to the parsimony of the people, whose economy considers fire and candles as superfluous luxuries in the long winter evenings.”

The most singular, and to me unaccountable, fact connected with the custom of “bundling” is that, though it unquestionably prevailed – and prevailed long, generally and from an early period – in New England, no trace has been reported of it in any localities of England itself, the mother country. There are well-authenticated records of its prevalence in parts at least of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Holland; but it could hardly have found its way as a custom from any of those countries to New England. I well remember hearing the late Dr. John G. Palfrey remark – and the remark will, I think, very probably be found in some note to the text of his History of New England – that down to the beginning of the present century, or about the year 1825, there was a purer strain of English blood to be found in the inhabitants of Cape Cod than could be found in any county of England. The original settlers of that region were exclusively English, and for the first two centuries after the settlement there was absolutely no foreign admixture. Yet nowhere in New England does the custom of “bundling” seem to have prevailed more generally than on Cape Cod; and according to Dr. Stiles (p. 111) it was on Cape Cod that the practice held out longest against the advance of more refined manners. It is tolerably safe to say that in a time of constantly developing civilization such a custom would originate nowhere. It is obviously a development from something of a coarser and more promiscuous nature which preceded it, – some social condition such as has been often described in books relating to the more destitute portions of Ireland or the crowded districts in English cities, where, in the language of Tennyson, —

“The poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine.”

Such a custom as “bundling,” therefore, bears on its face the fact that it is an inheritance from a simple and comparatively primitive period. If, then, in the case of New England, it was not derived from the mother country, it becomes a curious question whence and how it was derived.

But no matter whence or how derived, it is obvious that the prevalence of such a custom would open a ready and natural way for a vast increase of sexual immorality at any time when surrounding conditions predisposed a community in that direction. This is exactly what I cannot help surmising occurred in New England at the time of “the Great Awakening” of the last century, and immediately subsequent thereto. The movement was there, and in obedience to the universal law it made its way on the lines of least resistance. Hence the entries of public confession in the church records, and the tide of immorality in presence of which the clergy stood aghast.

But in order to substantiate this theory of an historical manifestation it remains to consider how generally the custom of “bundling” prevailed in New England, and to how late a day it continued. The accredited historians of New England, so far as I am acquainted with their writings, throw little light on this question. Mr. Elliott, for instance, in his chapter on the manners and customs of the New England people, contents himself with some pleasing generalities like the following, the correctness of which he would have found difficulty in maintaining: —

“With this exalted, even exaggerated, value of the individual entertained in New England, it was not possible that men or women entertaining it should yield themselves to corrupt or debasing practices. Chastity was, therefore, a cardinal virtue, and the abuse of it a crying sin, to be punished by law, and by the severe reproof of all good citizens.”20

According to this authority, therefore, as “bundling” was unquestionably both a “corrupt” and a “debasing practice,” “it was not possible that men or women” of New England “should yield themselves” to it; and that ends the matter.

Passing on from Mr. Elliott to another authority: in his recently published and very valuable “Economic and Social History of New England,” Mr. Weeden has two references to “bundling.” In one of them (p. 739) he speaks of it as “certainly an unpuritan custom” which was “extensively practised in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts,” against which “Jonathan Edwards raised his powerful voice”; and again he later on (p. 864) alludes to it as “a curious custom which accorded little with the New England character,” and which “lingered among the lower orders of people … prevailing in Western Massachusetts as late as 1777.” I am led to believe that the custom prevailed far more generally and to a much later date than these statements of Mr. Weeden would seem to indicate; that, indeed, it was continued even in eastern Massachusetts and the towns immediately about Boston until after the close of the Revolutionary troubles, and probably until the beginning of the present century. The Braintree church records throw no light on this portion of the subject; but the Groton church records show that not until 1803 was the practice discontinued of compelling a public confession before the whole congregation whenever a child was born in less than seven months after marriage. Turning then to Worthington’s “History of Dedham” (p. 109), – a town only ten miles from Boston, – I find that the Rev. Mr. Haven, the pastor of the church there, alarmed at the number of cases of unlawful cohabitation, preached at least as late as 1781 “a long and memorable discourse,” in which, with a courage deserving of unstinted praise, he dealt with “the growing sin” publicly from his pulpit, attributing “the frequent recurrence of the fault to the custom then prevalent of females admitting young men to their beds who sought their company with intentions of marriage.” Again, in a letter of Mrs. John Adams, written in 1784, in which she gives a very graphic and lively account of a voyage across the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel of that period, I find the following, in which Mrs. Adams, describing how the passengers all lived in the common cabin, adds: – “Necessity has no law; but what should I have thought on shore to have laid myself down in common with half a dozen gentlemen? We have curtains, it is true, and we only in part undress, – about as much as the Yankee bundlers.”21 Mrs. Adams was then writing to her elder sister, Mrs. Cranch; they were both women of exceptional refinement, – granddaughters of Col. John Quincy, and daughters of the pastor of the Weymouth church. Mrs. Adams while writing her letter knew that it would be eagerly looked for at home, and that it would be read aloud and passed from hand to hand through all her acquaintance, and this was in fact the case; so it is evident, from this easy, passing allusion, that the custom of “bundling” was then so common in the community in which Mrs. Adams lived, that not only was written reference to it freely made, but the reference conveyed to a large circle of friends a perfect idea of what she meant to describe. At the same time the use of the phrase “the Yankee bundlers” indicates the social class to which the custom was confined.