Forgotten Voices. Carolyn Wakeman
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Название: Forgotten Voices
Автор: Carolyn Wakeman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: The Driftless Series
isbn: 9780819579249
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Samuel Pierpont’s ordination took place in December 1722, presumably in the meetinghouse, “to the great satisfaction of Mr. Noyes and the people.” Three months later, in “an awful stroke of Providence,” the new minister drowned while crossing the Connecticut River, allegedly after courting a young woman in Middletown. The Boston News-Letter carried the story of his disappearance: “Essaying to pass over Connecticut River, towards Lyme, a league above Saybrook ferry, in a canoe, with an experienced Indian waterman; a sudden and unusual storm came down upon them, overwhelmed and drowned them.” In April, Pierpont’s remains washed ashore and were buried on Fishers Island. The next month the Boston News-Letter printed an elegy for the young minister composed by Samuel Sewall in Latin.
When Moses Noyes wrote to his friend in Boston, he remarked that Samuel Pierpont’s assistance would have “brought much benefit to the place” while assuring his own “ease & comfort.” Relief from ministerial duties might even have allowed him, late in life, to pay another visit to “the Bay.” Meanwhile, fears that young men at Yale College had been “infected” by Arminian notions made Mr. Pierpont’s loss the more “afflictive,” and Noyes worried how to “supply his place.” The decision for the Collegiate School to leave Saybrook had been wrong, the minister wrote, but choosing Timothy Cutler (1684–1765) as rector was worse.
Rev. Samuel Pierpont’s “lonely grave” on a bluff on the south shore of Fishers Island became a destination for sightseers, and a postcard ca. 1910 showed the slab of red sandstone that marked his burial place. The inscription “Here lies the body of ye Rev. Mr. Samuel Pierpont pastor of ye first church in Lyme” was re-carved in 1924, and the grave marker was later moved to the dooryard of St. John’s Church.
Cutler and senior tutor Daniel Browne had together overseen instruction at Yale, and less than a year after Lyme inhabitants voted to hire Browne as assistant minister, he joined the rector in openly declaring his Episcopal beliefs. At a commencement meeting in October 1722, college trustees relieved Cutler of his duties and accepted the resignation of Browne. Within a month both had left for London, where Cutler accepted orders in the Church of England and Browne died of smallpox in April 1723. As a result of Yale’s shocking “apostasy,” future rectors and tutors were required to affirm their opposition to “Arminian and prelateral corruptions” and declare their acceptance of the Saybrook Platform. A group of twelve Connecticut ministers drawn from the four counties in the colony, among them Moses Noyes and James Noyes, had drafted that detailed confession of faith and formulation of church governance and ecclesiastical discipline in 1708.
A finely detailed wood engraving by Thomas Nason conveys the graceful simplicity of the Congregational church built in 1841, overlooking Hamburg Cove, to replace the original meetinghouse in Lyme’s north parish.
When Moses Noyes wrote to Judge Sewall in 1723, his congregation was shrinking. A second church society on the town’s east side had been established in 1719, and a third parish in the north section would follow in 1724. How members of the original church viewed the diminished size of their parish is not known, but remarks by Jonathan Parsons (1705–1776), who succeeded the elderly minister after his death in 1729, have an edge of criticism. Noyes “often lamented the errors that he feared were creeping in among us,” which made him “backward to have a colleague,” Parsons wrote. After “being left of many on each side … that used to be his special charge, he went on preaching to that part of the town which is called the first parish as health and strength permitted, till he died.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Oxford and Temperance
After 1694 not only magistrates but also clergy had the legal right to perform marriages in colonial Connecticut. The only known marriage conducted by Lyme’s first minister united a “negro man” and a “molato girl.”
Oxford negro man & Temprance molato girl the two servants of Richard Lord of Lyme were married together by ye Revd Moses Noyes the 21 day of January 1725/26.
Formalizing the bond of an enslaved couple was likely unprecedented in Lyme when Moses Noyes, age eighty-two, married two servants of Lieutenant Richard Lord, age seventy-five. The union of Oxford and Temperance 1725/6 appears in the land records alongside a deed detailing Temperance’s purchase. When Lord died a year later, the married couple passed to his son Richard Lord Jr. (1690–1776), described in a later family history as a “genial man” with a “large household and many slaves.”
The couple’s passage through Lyme left faint traces. Oxford, born in 1706, may have been a son of Moses Noyes’s servant Arabella, with whom he was later baptized and admitted to the church, or a grandson of Moses, Richard Ely’s servant, or he may have been purchased elsewhere, in Boston or New London. Temperance was the daughter of a “Negro” man and a Narragansett woman named Jane who had been captured at age two in King Philip’s War. Until a week before her marriage, Temperance served Joseph Peck Jr. (1680–1757), son of the first deacon in Lyme’s church.
An account book kept by Deacon Peck’s son recorded varied financial transactions. In 1715 he sold large quantities of sugar by the pound and rum by the pint and quart, along with wheat, oats, and beef. He delivered wood by the sled load, provided hay storage in his barn, and hired out his plow, harrow, and ox team. He also hired out a slave. In 1718 he entered charges of one shilling for a “black boy one day” and three shillings for a “black boy one day [with] harrow.” The black boy may have been “Jack man servant of Joseph Peck.” Twenty years later church records noted the death of Peck’s servant.
When Joseph Peck Jr. sold the “molato” girl Temperance a week before her marriage, she “freely” consented to her purchase by Richard Lord.
When and where Peck acquired his enslaved servants is not known, but in January 1725/6 he sold “a certain molato Negro girl named Temperance, after the manner of a negro slave,” to serve Lieutenant Richard Lord “during the term of her natural life.” The deed stated a purchase price of “sixty pounds in bills of public credit of the colony of Connecticut” and included the young woman’s consent. “I Temperance the above said molato negro girl do freely consent to the above said sale & further being come to [my] years of discretion do freely so far as I have power put and bind myself and my heirs to the said Lord and his heirs for the term of our natural life.” Below Joseph Peck’s signature, “Temperance negro molato,” age twenty, marked an X.
Whether Temperance gave birth to a daughter, perhaps fathered by the manservant Jack, before her sale to Richard Lord cannot be established. But in May 1729, three years after her marriage to Oxford, Joseph Peck Jr., “in consideration of the sum of twenty five pounds,” sold to Benjamin Reed of Lyme “one certain molato girl СКАЧАТЬ