Child Life in Colonial Days

The matter read by those children is clearly indicated by their commonplace books. One entry shows evidence of light reading. It is of riddles which are headed "Guesses"; they are the ones familiar to us all in Mother Goose's Melodies to-day. The answers are written in a most transparent juvenile shorthand. Thus the answer, "Well," is indicated by the figures 23, 5, 12, 12, referring to the position of the letters in the alphabet.

The usual entries are of a religious character; extracts from sermons, answers from the catechism, verses of hymns, accompany stilted religious aspirations and appeals. In them a painful familiarity with and partiality for quotations bearing on hell and the devil show the religious teaching of the times.

CHAPTER IX

CHILDISH PRECOCITY

The seventeenth century was in Europe a period of eager development and hasty harvesting; English boys were made serious-minded by the conditions they saw around them, as well as by a forcing-house system of education, begun at very early years. This early ageing is reflected in the writings of the times. The Religio Medici, apparently the composition of a man of the large experience and serene contemplation of extreme age, was written by Sir Thomas Browne when he was but thirty.

There are many records of the precocity of children, preserved for us many times, alas! through the sad recounting of early deaths. One of the most pathetic records of a father's blasted hopes may be found in the pages of the diary of John Evelyn. In December, 1658, died his little son, Richard, five years and three days old. He was a prodigy of wit and learning, as beautiful as an angel, and of rare mental endowment. His father's account of his acquirements runs thus:—

"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old; he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in any thing he said or did."

Of course this is not given as an ordinary education of an every-day child. It is an extraordinary record of a very unusual child, but it shows what an intelligent child could be permitted to do. Evelyn was a man of great good sense; not the sort of man who would force a child; indeed he averred that he abhorred precocity. But in truth it was a time in England's history when such a child could easily be overstimulated, when public events, the course of history, was so exciting that every child of keen wit must have felt the effects.

The crowding of young minds did not end with the seventeenth century. A striking example of the desire to press education is found in the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, beginning in 1738, when the boy was not six years old. The language and subjects would be deemed to-day suited only to mature minds. In 1741 the father wrote:—

"This is the last letter I shall write to you as a little boy, for to-morrow you will attain your ninth year; so that for the future, I shall treat you as a youth. You must now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies. No more levity. Childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming to a child would be disgraceful to a youth" etc.

Letter after letter continued in this tone. For years was the process carried on. The result was a striking proof of the futility of such methods. The son died when but little past his youth, a failure in everything the father had most fondly desired and striven for. The crowded brain ever stumbled and hesitated when put to any important test.

It was inevitable that New England parents, with their fairly passionate intensity of zeal for the education of their children, should in many cases overstimulate and force the infant minds in their charge. It seems somewhat anomalous with the almost universal distrust and hindrance of female education that one of the most precocious flowers of Puritanism should have been a girl, the "pious and ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell," who was born in Boston in 1708. Before her second year was finished she could speak distinctly, knew her letters, and "could relate many stories out of the Scriptures to the satisfaction and pleasure of the most judicious." Governor Dudley and other "wise and polite" New England gentlemen were among those entitled "judicious," who placed her on a table to show off her acquirements. When she was three years old she could recite the greater part of the Assembly's Catechism, many of the psalms, many lines of poetry, and read distinctly; at the age of four she "asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries."

As her father was President of Harvard College, it may be inferred she had an extended reading course; but in a catalogue of Harvard College library printed a year or two later there is not a title in it of any of the works of Addison, or any of the poems of Pope, nothing of Dryden, Steele, Young, or Prior. In 1722, when Jane Turell was twenty years old, the works of Shakespeare were first advertised for sale in Boston.

In many families of extreme Puritanical thought, the children developed at an early age a comprehension of religious matters which would seem abnormal to-day, but was natural then. A striking instance of this youthful development (as he was of highly sensitive thought of every description) was Jonathan Edwards. A letter of his written when he was twelve years old is certainly precocious in its depth, though there is a certain hint of humor in it. Some one had stated the belief that the soul was material and remained in the body until after the resurrection. Young Edwards wrote:—

"I am informed y^t you have advanced a notion y^t the soul is material and keeps w^th y^e body till y^e resurrection. As I am a profest lover of novelty you must alow me to be much entertained by this discovery. 1^st. I w^d know whether this material soul keeps w^th in ye Coffin, and if so whether it might not be convenient to build a repository for it in order w^ch I w^d know w^t shape it is of whether round, triangular or foresquare or whether it is a number of long fine strings reaching from y^e head to y^e foot, and whether it does not live a very discontented life. I am afraid when ye Coffin gives way ye Earth will fall in and crush it, but if it should chuse to live above Ground and hover above y^e Grave how big it is, whether it covers all ye body, or is assined to y^e Head or Breast, w^t it does when another Body is laid upon it. Souls are not so big but y^t 10 or a dozen of y^m may be about one body whether yy will not quarrill for y^e highest place."

His paper on spiders, written when he was but twelve, has become famous as a bit of childish composition. It shows great habits of observance, care in note-taking, and logical reasoning; and bears no evidence of youth either in matter or manner.

A typical example of the spirit of the times in regard to juvenile education is found in the letters of Mrs. Pinckney. She writes to a friend:—

"Shall I give you the trouble my dear Madam to buy my son a new toy (a description of which I inclose) to teach him according to Mr. Locke's method (which I have carefully studied) to play himself into learning. Mr. Pinckney (his father) himself has been contriving a sett of toys to teach him his letters by the time he can speak. You perceive we begin betimes for he is not yet four months old."

This toy may have been what is known to-day as a set of alphabet blocks, a commonplace toy. Locke speaks of a game of dice with letters with which children could play a game like "royal-oak," and through which they would learn to spell. He was not the inventor of these "letter-dice," as is generally asserted. It was a stratagem of Sir Hugh Plat, fully explained and illustrated in his Jewel House of Art and Nature, printed in London in 1653, a portion of a page of which is shown here.

The toy seems to have been a success, for the following year Mrs. Pinckney writes to her sister:—

"Your little nephew not yet two and twenty months old prattles very intelligibly: he gives his duty to you and thanks for the toys, and desires me to tell his Aunt Polly that if she don't take a care and a great deal of pains in her learning, he will soon be the best scholar, for he can tell his letters in any book without hesitation, and begins to spell before he is two years old."

This precocious infant, afterward General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of Revolutionary fame, declared in his later life that this early teaching was sad stuff, and that the haste to make him a very clever fellow nearly made him a very stupid one.

Little Martha Laurens, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1759, could, in her third year, "read any book"; and like many another child since her day learned to read holding the book upside down. Joseph T. Buckingham declared that when he was four years old he knew by heart nearly all the reading lessons in the primer and much of the Westminster Catechism.

Boys entered the Boston Latin School when as young as but six years and a half old. They began to study Latin frequently when much younger. Zealous and injudicious parents sometimes taught infants but three years old to read Latin words as soon as they could English ones. It redounds to the credit of the scholarship of one of my kinsmen, rather than to his good sense or good temper (albeit he was a minister of the Gospel) that each morning while he shaved, his little son, five years of age, stood by his dressing-table, on a footstool, and read Latin to his father, who had also a copy of the same book open before him, that he might note and correct the child's errors. And the child when grown to old age told his children and grandchildren that his father, angered at what he deemed slowness of progress, frequent errors of pronunciation, and poor attempts at translation, would throw the book at the child, and once felled him from the footstool to the floor.

It is told of Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, that he learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and could read the Bible before he was four years old, and taught it to his comrades. At the age of six he was sent to the grammar school and importuned his father to let him study Latin. Being denied he studied through the Latin grammar twice without a teacher, borrowing a book of an older boy. He would have been prepared for college when but eight years old, had not the grammar school luckily discontinued and left him without a teacher.

The curriculum at Harvard in olden times bore little resemblance to that of to-day. Sciences were unknown, and the requirements in mathematics were meagre. Still a boy needed even then to be clever to know enough Greek and Latin to enter at eleven. Paul Dudley did so in 1686. His father wrote to the president a quaint letter of introduction:—

"I have humbly to offer you a little, sober, and well-disposed son, who, tho' very young, if he may have the favour of admittance, I hope his learning may be tollerable: and for him I will promise that by your care and my care, his own Industry, and the blessing of God, this mother the University shall not be ashamed to allow him the place of a son—Appoint a time when he may be examined."

There were still younger college students. In 1799 there was graduated from Rhode Island College (now Brown University) a boy named John Pitman, who was barely fourteen.

There is no evidence that the early marriages, that is, marriages of children and very young lads and girls, which were far from rare in England during the first years of our colonial life, ever were permitted in the new world. Nor were they as common at that date in England as during the previous century, for there had been severe legislation against them, especially against the youthful marriages of poor folk.

Many have known of the juvenile weddings of English princes and princesses and marriages by proxy for reasons of state; but few know of these unions being general among English people. An interesting and authoritative book on this subject was published in 1897 by the Early English Text Society. Dr. Furnivall made a careful study of the old court records of the town of Chester, England, and published this account of trials and law cases concerning child-marriages, divorces, ratifications, troth-plights, affiliations, clandestine marriages, and other kindred matters. It is, as the editor says, a "most light-giving" volume. It ranges over all classes, from people of wealth, the manor owners and squires, to ale-house keepers, farmers, cobblers, maids, and men. It tells of the marriages of little children in their nurses' arms, some but two or three years old, so young that their baby tongues could not speak the words of matrimony. Various arrangements, chiefly relating to lands and maintenance, led to these marriages, also a desire to evade the Crown's guardianship of orphans. In one case, a "bigge damsell" of twelve "intysed with two apples" a younger boy to marry her. "The woman tempted me and I did eat." One little bridegroom of three was held up in the arms of an English clergyman, who coaxed him to repeat the words of the service. Before it was finished the child said he would learn no more of his lesson that day. The parson answered, "You must speak a little more and then go play yon." The child-marriage of the Earl and Countess of Essex in 1606, resulting in the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the Countess' marriage to the Earl of Somerset, is a well-known historical example of the unhappy result of such marriages. The Earl of Anglesey's grandson was married in 1673, when he was eight years old. Mary Hewitt of Danton Basset was wedded in 1669, when three years old. In 1672 John Evelyn was present "at the marriage of Lord Arlington's only daughter, a sweet child if there ever was any, aged five, to the Duke of Grafton."

I have given the dates of these later child-marriages to show that they were not unusual in England long after America was settled. As late as 1729 a little English girl of some wealth and but nine years old was taken from her boarding school by her guardian and married to his son. Very differently did the upright New Englander regard the duties of guardianship. A little girl named Rebecca Cooper was left an orphan in early colonial days at Salem, Massachusetts. She was "a verie good match," an "inheritrice," and the sharp eyes of Emanuel Downing and his wife were upon her to "make a motion of marriage" for their son. Both wrote to Governor Winthrop, Madam Downing's brother, to gain his intercession in the matter, though the maid had not been spoken to. Madam wrote:—

"The disposition of the mayde and her education with Mrs. Endicott are hopefull, her person tollerable, the estate very convenient, and that is the state of the business."

Governor Endicott was the guardian and his answering letter to Winthrop has a manly and honorable ring which might well have sounded in the ears of all English guardians.

"I am told you are sollicited in a busniss concerninge the girle which was putt to my warde and trust. I have not been made acquainted with it by you know whome, which, if there had been any such intendment, I think had been but reason. But to let that passe, I pray you advise not to stirre in it, for it will not be affected for reasons I shall show you....

"The Lord knows I have alwais resolved (and so hath my wife ever since the girl came to vs) to yielde her vp to be disposed by yourself to any of yours if ever the Lord should make her fitt and worthie.

"Now for the other for whom you writt. I confesse I cannot freelie yeald thereunto for the present, for these grounds. ffirst: The girle desires not to mary as yet. 2ndlee: Shee confesseth (which is the truth) hereselfe to be altogether yett vnfitt for such a condition, shee beinge a verie girl and but 15 yeares of age. 3rdlie: Where the man was moved to her shee said shee could not like him. 4thlie: You know it would be of ill reporte that a girl because shee hath some estate should bee disposed of soe young, espetialie not having any parents to choose for her. ffifthlie: I have some good hopes of the child's coming on to the best thinges. And on the other side I fear—I will say no more. Other things I shall tell you when we meet. If this will not satisfy some, let the Court take her from mee and place with any other to dispose of her. I shall be content. Which I heare was plotted to accomplish this end; but I will further enquire about it, and you shall know if it be true, ffor I know there are many passages about this busniss which when you heare of you will not like."

It is pleasant to record that all this match-making and machination came to naught. It would not have been strange if Governor Winthrop had deemed this girl old enough to be married. He had been but seventeen years old himself when he was married, but he was, so he writes, "a man in stature and understanding." He evidently was of the opinion that a child of fourteen or fifteen was of mature years. When his son John was but fourteen the governor made a will making the boy the executor of it.

These child-marriages were not abolished in America because maturity or majority was established at a greater age; for up to the Revolution boys reached man's estate at sixteen years of age, became tax-payers, and served in the militia. Early unions were controlled by restrictive laws, such as the one enacted in Massachusetts in 1646, that no female orphan during her minority should be given in marriage by any one except with the approbation of the majority of the selectmen of the town in which she resided. Another privilege of the girl orphan was that at fourteen she could choose her own guardian. Thus were children protected in the new world, and their rights conserved.

CHAPTER X

OLDTIME DISCIPLINE

The manner of oldtime children differed as much from the carriage of children to-day as the severe and arbitrary modes of discipline of colonial days differed from the persuasive explanations, the moral inculcations and exhortations by which modern youth are influenced to obedience. Parents, teachers, and ministers chanted in solemn and unceasing chorus, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child," and they believed the only cure for that foolishness was in stern repression and sharp correction—above all in the rod. They found abundant support for this belief in the Bible, their constant guide.

John Robinson, the Pilgrim preacher, said in his essay on Children and Their Education:—

"Surely there is in all children (though not alike) a stubbernes and stoutnes of minde arising from naturall pride which must in the first place be broken and beaten down that so the foundation of their education being layd in humilitie and tractablenes other virtues may in their time be built thereon. It is commendable in a horse that he be stout and stomackfull being never left to his own government, but always to have his rider on his back and his bit in his mouth, but who would have his child like his horse in his brutishnes?"

The chief field of the "breaking and beating down" process was in school. English schoolmasters were proverbial for their severity, and from earliest days; though monks with their classes are never depicted with the rod.

We find Agnes Paston, in 1457, writing to London for word to be delivered to the schoolmaster of her son Clement, who was then sixteen years old:—

"If he hath nought do well, nor wyll nought amend, pray hym that he wyll trewly belassch hym, tyll he wyll amend; and so did the last master, and the best that ever he had, at Cambridge. And say I wyll give hym X marks for hys labor, for I had lever he were beryed than lost for defaute."

She herself had "borne on hand" on her marriageable daughter; beating her every week, sometime twice a day, "and her head broken in two or three places." This seems to have been the usual custom of the British matron in high life. Lady Jane Grey, when she was fifteen years old, never came into the presence of her father and mother but she was "sharply taunted, cruelly threatened, yea, punished sometimes with pinches, nips, bobs, and other way." Elizabeth, Lady Falkland, as long as her mother lived, always spoke to that rigid lady while kneeling before her, "sometimes for more than an hour together, though she was but an ill kneeler, and worse riser." Poor Elizabeth! she was an only child, "an inheritrice"; but she could truthfully aver she never was spoiled.

An early allusion to school discipline is in the Boy Bishop's Sermon from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, who died in 1535. It runs thus:—

"There is no fault he doth but he is punished. Sometimes he wringeth him by the ear, sometimes he giveth him a strype on the hand with the ferrul, sometimes beateth him sharply with the rod."

Great Cromwell was sent off to school with injunctions to the master, Dr. Beard, to flog the boy soundly "for persisting in the wickedness of the assertion" that he had had a vision and prophecy of his future greatness. Dr. Johnson told of the unmerciful beating he had by one Master Hunter, who was "very wrong-headedly severe." He said the man never distinguished between ignorance and negligence, and beat as hard for not knowing a thing as for neglecting to know it, and as he whipped would shout, "This I do to save you from the gallows." Still the Doctor was grateful for the beatings, as he felt to them he owed his knowledge of Latin; and he approved of the rod, saying of some well-behaved young ladies whose mother had whipped them oft and heavily, in variation of one of Shakespeare's lines, "Rod, I will honor thee for this thy duty." His creed of correction was this:—

"I would rather have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than to tell a child, if you do this, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers and sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on't. Whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other."

The illustrations of old Dutch books that show school furniture, have the odd ferules of monkish days, the flat ladle-shaped pieces of wood which were distinctly for striking the palm of the scholar's hand. The derivation of the word "ferule" is interesting. It is from ferula, fennel. The tough stalks of the giant fennel of Southern Europe were used by the Roman schoolmasters as an instrument of castigation.

Old English lesson books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many, even, of the early years of this century, that have any illustrations of classes, schoolmasters, or school interiors, invariably picture the master with a rod or bunch of birch twigs. An old herbalist says:—

"I have not red of any vertue byrche hath in physick, howbeit it serveth many good uses, and none better than for the betynge of stubborn boyes, that either lye or will not learn."

Birch rods were tauntingly sold on London streets with a cry by pedlers of "Buy my fine Jemmies; Buy my London Tartars." Even that miserable Dyves Pragmaticus enumerated "Fyne Rod for Children of Wyllow and Burche" among his wares. A crowning insult was charging the cost of birch rod on schoolboys' bills; and in some cases making the boy pay for the birch out of his scant spending money.

Birch trees were plentiful in America—and whippings too. Scholars in New England were not permitted to forget the methods of discipline of "the good old days." Massachusetts schools resounded with strokes of the rod. Varied instruments of chastisement were known, from

A lybbet was a billet of wood, and the heavy walnut stick of one Boston master well deserved the name. A cruel inquisitor invented an instrument of torture which he termed a flapper. It was a heavy piece of leather six inches in diameter, with a hole in the middle. This was fastened by an edge to a pliable handle. Every stroke on the bare flesh raised a blister the size of the hole in the leather. Equally brutal was the tattling stick, a cat-o'-nine-tails with heavy leather straps. The whipping with this tattling stick was ordered to be done upon "a peaked block"—whatever that may be. That fierce Boston disciplinarian and patriot, Master Lovell, whipped with strong birch rods, and made one culprit mount the back of another scholar to receive his lashing. He called these whippings trouncings, the good old English word of the Elizabethan dramatists. Another brutal Boston master struck his scholars on the head with a ferule, until this was forbidden by the school directors; he then whipped the soles of the scholars' feet, and roared out in an ecstasy of cruelty, "Oh! the Caitiffs! it is good for them."

There was sometimes an aftermath of sorrow, when our stern old grandfathers whipped their children at home for being whipped at school, so told Rev. Eliphalet Nott.

Many ingenious punishments were invented. A specially insulting one was to send the pupil out to cut a small branch of a tree. A split was made by the teacher at the severed end of the branch, and the culprit's nose was placed in the cleft end. Then he was forced to stand, painfully pinched, an object of ridicule. A familiar punishment of the dame school, which lingered till our own day, was the smart tapping of the child's head with a heavy thimble; this was known as "thimell-pie." Another was to yoke two delinquents together in a yoke made with two bows like an ox yoke. Sometimes times a boy and girl were yoked together—a terrible disgrace. "Whispering sticks" were used to preserve quiet in the schoolroom. Two are shown here, wooden gags to be tied in the mouth with strings, somewhat as a bit is placed in a horse's mouth. Children were punished by being seated on a unipod, a stool with but a single leg, upon which it was most tiring to try to balance; they were made to stand on dunce stools and wear dunce caps and heavy leather spectacles; they were labelled with large placards marked with degrading or ridiculous names, such as "Tell-Tale," "Bite-Finger-Baby," "Lying Ananias," "Idle-Boy," and "Pert-Miss-Prat-a-Pace."

One of Miss Hetty Higginson's punishments in her Salem school at the beginning of this century was to make a child hold a heavy book, such as a dictionary, by a single leaf. Of course any restless motion would tear the leaf. Her rewards of merit should be also told. She would divide a single strawberry in minute portions among six or more scholars; and she had a "bussee," or good child, who was to be kissed.

Many stories have been told of special punishments invented by special teachers. The schoolmaster at Flatbush was annoyed by the children in his school constantly using Dutch words, as he was employed to teach them English. He gave every day to the first scholar who used a Dutch word a little metal token or medal. This scholar could promptly transfer the token to the next child who spoke a Dutch word, and so on; thus it went from hand to hand through the day. But the unlucky scholar who had the token in his possession at the close of school, received a sound whipping.

An amusing method of securing good lessons and good behavior was employed by old Ezekiel Cheever, and was thus told by one of his pupils, Rev. John Barnard:—

"I was a very naughty boy, much given to play, in so much that Master Cheever openly declared, 'You, Barnard, I know you can do well enough if you will, but you are so full of play you hinder your classmates from getting their lessons, therefore if any of them cannot perform their duty, I shall correct you for it.' One day one of my classmates did not look at his book, and could not say his lesson, though I called upon him once and again to mind his book. Whereupon our master beat me.... The boy was pleased with my being corrected and persisted in his neglect for which I was still beaten and that for several days. I thought in justice I ought to correct the boy and compel him to a better temper; therefore after school was done I went to him and told him I had been beaten several times for his neglect and since master would not correct him, I would, and then drubbed him heartily."

The famous Lancasterian system—that of monitorial schools—discountenanced the rod, but the forms of punishment were not wholly above criticism. They were the neck-and-hands pillory, familiar up to that date in England and America as a public punishment of criminals; wooden shackles; hanging in a sack; tying the legs together; and labelling with the name of the offence against rules.

I have found nothing to show that Dutch schoolmasters were as severe as those of the English colonies. Dr. Curtius, the first master of the Latin School in New Amsterdam, complained that "his hands were tied as some of the parents of his scholars forbade him punishing their children," and that as a result these unruly young Dutchmen "beat each other and tore the clothes from each other's backs." The contract between the Flatbush Church and schoolmaster, dated 1682, specifies that he shall "demean himself patient and friendly towards the children."

The discipline of Master Leslie, a New York teacher of the next century, is described by Eliza Morton Quincy in her delightful Memoirs. The date is about 1782:—

"His modes of punishment would astonish children of the present day. One of them was to hold the blocks. They were of two sizes. The large one was a heavy block of wood, with a ring in the centre, by which it was to be held a definite number of minutes, according to the magnitude of the offence. The smaller block was for the younger child. Another punishment was by a number of leathern straps, about an inch wide and a finger long, with which he used to strap the hands of the larger boys."

One German schoolmaster, Samuel Dock, stands out in relief in this desert of ignorance and cruelty. With simplicity and earnestness he wrote in 1750 the story of his successful teaching, as in simplicity and earnestness he had taught in his school at Shippack. His story is as homely as his life:—

"How I Receive the Children in School.

"It is done in the following manner. The child is first welcomed by the other scholars, who extend their hands to it. It is then asked by me whether it will learn industriously and be obedient. If it promises me this, I explain to it how it must behave; and if it can say its A. B. C.'s in order, one after the other, and also by way of proof, can point out with the forefinger all the designated letters, it is put into the A-b, Abs. When it gets thus far, its father must give it a penny and its mother must cook for it two eggs, because of its industry; and a similar reward is due to it when it goes further into words; and so forth."

He made them little presents as prizes; drew pictures for them; taught them singing and also musical notation; and he had a plan to have the children teach each other. He had a careful set of rules for their behavior, to try to change them from brutish peasants to intelligent citizens. They must be clean; and delinquents were not punished with the rod, but by having the whole school write and shout out their names with the word "lazy" attached. Letter-writing was carefully taught, with exercises in writing to various people, and to each other. Profanity was punished by wearing a yoke, and being told the awful purport of the oaths. He taught spelling and reading with much Bible instruction; but he did not teach the Catechism, since he had scholars of many sects and denominations; however, he made them all learn and understand what he called the "honey-flowers of the New Testament."

In order to appreciate his gentleness and intelligence, one should know of the drunken, dirty, careless, and cruel teachers in other Pennsylvania schools. One whipped daily and hourly with a hickory club with leather thongs attached at one end; this he called the "taws." Another had a row of rods of different sizes which, with ugly humor, he termed his "mint sticks." Another, nicknamed Tiptoe Bobby, always carried a raccoon's tail slightly weighted at the butt-end; this he would throw with sudden accuracy at any offender, who meekly returned it to his instructor and received a fierce whipping with a butt-end of rawhide with strips of leather at the smaller end. One Quaker teacher in Philadelphia, John Todd, had such a passion for incessant whipping that, after reading accounts of his ferocious discipline, his manner and his words, the only explanation of his violence and cruelty is that of insanity.

There is no doubt that the practice of whipping servants was common here, not only children who were bound out, and apprentices and young redemptioners, but grown servants as well. Occasionally the cruel master was fined or punished for a brutal over-exercise of his right of punishment. At least one little child died from the hand of his murderous master. In Boston and other towns commissioners were elected who had power to sentence to be whipped, exceeding ten stripes, children and servants who behaved "disobediently and disorderly toward their parents, masters, and governours, to the disturbance of families and discouragement of such parents and governours." In Hartford, Connecticut, a topping young maid felt the force of a similar law:—

"Susan Coles for her rebellious cariedge towards her mistris is to be sent to the house of correction, and be kept to hard labour and coarse dyet, to be brought forth the next Lecture Day to be publicquely corrected and so to be corrected Weekly until Order be given to the Contrary."

Scores of similar records might be given. Judge Sewall, in his diary, never refers to punishing his servants, nor to any need of punishing them. There is some evidence of their faithfulness and of his satisfaction in it, especially in the references to his negro man servant, Boston, who, after a life of faithful service, was buried like a gentleman, with a ceremonious funeral, a notice of his death in the News Letter, a well-warmed parlor, chairs set in orderly rows, cake and wine, and doubtless gloves.

John Wynter was the head agent of a London company at a settlement at Richmond's Island, in Maine. His wife had an idle maid, and some report of her beating this maid was sent back to England. Wynter writes:—

"You write of some yll reports is given of my Wyfe for beatinge the maide: yf a faire way will not doe yt, beatinge must sometimes vppon such idle girrels as she is. Yf you think yt fitte for my Wyfe to do all the work and the maide sitt still, and shee must forbear her hands to strike then the work will lye vndonn.... Her beatinge that she hath had hath never hurt her body nor limes. She is so fatt and soggy shee can hardly doe any work. Yf this maide at her lazy tymes when she hath bin found in her yll accyons doe not disserve 2 or 3 blowes I pray you who hath the most reason to complain my Wyfe or maide. My Wyfe hath an vnthankful office."

It has surprised me that this complaint—and others—should have been sent home to England, where (as we have abundant evidence) the whipping of servants was excessive and constant. Pepys and other old English authors make frequent note of it. Pepys whipped his boy till his arm was lame. The Diary of a Lady of Quality gives some glimpses of this custom. On January 30, 1760, Lady Frances Pennoyer writes at her home at Bullingham Court, Herefordshire, that one of her maids spoke in the housekeeper's room about a matter that was not to the credit of the family. My lady knew there was truth in what the girl said, but it was not her place to speak of it, and she must be taught to know and keep her place.

The diarist writes:—

"She hath a pretty face, and should not be too ready to speak ill of those above her in station. I should be very sorry to turn her adrift upon the world, and she hath but a poor home. Sent for her to my room, and gave her choice, either to be well whipped or to leave the house instantly. She chose wisely I think and with many tears said I might do what I liked. I bade her attend my chamber at twelve.

"Dearlove, my maid, came to my room as I bade her. I bade her fetch the rod from what was my mother-in-law's rod-closet, and kneel and ask pardon, which she did with tears. I made her prepare, and I whipped her well. The girl's flesh is plump and firm, and she is a cleanly person, such a one, not excepting my own daughters who are thin, and one of them, Charlotte, rather sallow, as I have not whipped for a long time. She hath never been whipped before, she says, since she was a child (what can her mother and the late lady have been about I wonder?), and she cried out a great deal."

Poor little Dearlove, fair and plump, and in bitter tears—you make a more pleasing picture seen through the haze of a century than fierce my lady with her rod.

The many hundred pages of Judge Sewall's diary give abundant testimony of his tender affection for his children. In this record of his entire married life he but twice refers to punishing his children; once his son was whipped for telling a lie, a second time he notes the punishment thus:—

"1692, Nov. 6. Joseph threw a knob of Brass, and hit his sister Betty upon the forehead so as to make it bleed; upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks I whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in, call'd by his Grandmother, he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle, which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage."

It was natural that Judge Sewall, ever finding symbols of religious signification in natural events, should see in his son Joseph's demeanor a painful reminder of original sin; and we can imagine with what sad sense of duty he whipped him.

It is the standard resort of ignorant writers upon Puritanism, and especially upon Puritanic severity, to give the name of Cotton Mather as a prime expositor of cruel discipline. I have before me a magazine illustration which represents him, lean, lank, violent, and mean of aspect, with clipped head, raising a heavy bunch of rods over a cowering child. He was in reality exceedingly handsome, very richly bewigged, with the full, distinctly sensual countenance of the Cottons, not the severe ascetic features of the Mathers, and he as strongly opposed punishment by the rod as most of his friends and neighbors favored and practised it. His son wrote of him:—

"The slavish way of education carried on with raving and kicking and scourging, in schools as well as in families, he looked upon as a dreadful judgment of God on the world: he thought the practice abominable and expressed a mortal aversion to it.

"The first chastisement which he would inflict for any ordinary fault, was to let the child see and hear him in an astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child would do so base a thing. He would never come to give the child a blow, except in case of obstinacy, or something very criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family."

There can be found episodes of colonial history where the disprejudiced modern mind can perceive ample need of the sharp whippings so freely bestowed upon dull or idle scholars and slow servants. Cotton Mather was too gentle and too forbearing toward certain children with whom he had close relations. A "warm birch" applied in the early stages of that terrible tragedy, the Salem Witchcraft, to Ann Putnam, the protagonist of that drama, would doubtless so quickly have ended it in its incipiency as to obliterate it entirely from the pages of history.