American Childhoods

2. European American Childhood

Richard Mather was born in the village of Lowton, England, in 1596, the son of a yeoman who, though not wealthy, assigned his son to a schoolmaster rather than putting him directly to work. Young Richard studied Latin and Greek, the latter through reading the New Testament, and at 15 became a schoolmaster himself. Three years later he underwent the agony and exhilaration of a conversion experience, inXuenced by Jesus’ admonition that “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” He also attended Oxford, though for only a year, departing to take holy orders despite his nonconformist views—he was a Puritan. In 1635 he left England for Massachusetts Bay with his wife, Katherine, and children. In 1639, already a highly regarded minister in Dorchester, he became the father of Increase Mather. Increase’s mother taught him to read as a small boy, and his father instructed him in Latin and Greek. The lad entered Harvard when he was 12, but his frail constitution caused him to leave after six months and study with a private tutor until he returned to the college as a senior in 1656. Already he had undergone conversion , a process initially inspired by his mother—she told him of her desire that God should give him grace—and precipitated by his serious illness. His mother’s deathbed wish was that he should become a minister . Full of dread and self-abasement, he Wnally determined that he had indeed received God’s grace, and he gave his life to Christ. Increase was the youngest of Richard’s six sons. The Wrst of Increase’s nine children, Cotton (whose maternal grandfather, John Cotton, was the outstanding Puritan divine of Massachusetts’s Wrst generation), was born in 1663. Cotton prayed as soon as he could talk, and he was able to read and write before he began school, where he thrived on the classics under a tutor before entering Harvard at 12. His religious zeal—he reproved his playmates for their wicked deeds and began fasting at 14, a facet of his lifelong habit of denial in the service of the spirit—and his intellectual fervor—he ultimately published over 400 works—belied his inability to guide the Bay Colony, in the manner of his grandfathers and father, as it lurched from Puritanism to Yankeedom. 2. European American Childhood 02Chap2.qxd 4/25/02 3:12 PM Page 18 Despite an early speech impediment, he decided on the ministry, delivering his Wrst public sermon at 17 in Dorchester and joining Increase at Boston’s Second Church, where he remained with his identity linked to his father; even the threat of Increase’s absence produced such anxiety that the impediment would usually reappear. At 23 he married the Wrst of three wives, who produced 15 children, 6 of whom died young and only 2 of whom survived him. In 1699 he published A Family Well-Ordered, or an Essay to Render Parents and Children Happy in One Another, in which he depicted the model parent as intrusive and persistent , never missing an opportunity to teach, yet compassionate, “so tempered with kindness, and meekness, and loving tenderness” that their children would fear them only “with delight.” His principles were put to the test by his Wrst son to survive infancy, Increase, born in 1699, whose undisciplined ways, dissolute manner, and death at sea were the source of disappointment and anguish. Indeed, just as Cotton found it difWcult to separate from his own father, so he often overidentiWed with his own children and always had trouble respecting their autonomy. He did have the satisfaction of seeing his youngest son, Samuel (born 1706), graduate from Harvard and enter the clergy in the manner of previous Mathers.1 The Europeans who settled along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century were mostly English, immigrants from a society where their small world centered upon home. “Time was,” writes Peter Laslett of preindustrial England, “when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size.” The term “family” connoted the independent nuclear unit of dominant father, subordinate wife/mother, and submissive children ; it might also include apprentices and servants. Seventeenthcentury England was not, Laslett reminds us, a “paradise or golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness.” Most people were exploited and oppressed; the nation was controlled by a small minority of the literate , wealthy and...