INTRODUCTION
From that April day when Mr. Lawson
closed his account it was long before another eye-witness undertook a narrative.
Yet great things were doing. At Salem accusation and hearing went on apace, and
the jails grew crowded, awaiting the session of a court. On May 14 arrived from
England President Increase Mather, bringing the new charter, and with him the
new governor, Sir William Phips. What the governor thought of the emergency
and how he dealt with it we shall presently learn from his own pen. But other
pens were earlier busy. Perhaps the most notable was that of Thomas Brattle,
who early in October addressed the following letter to some clerical
correspondent. Who this divine may have been whose questions the letter answers
is unknown: our document is not the original, but a copy without superscription,
and from its contents we can infer no more than that he lived or had lived in the
colony. But Thomas Brattle we know well. “He was,” wrote
President Leverett of Harvard at his death, “a gentleman by his birth and
education of the first order in this country.” Born at Boston, in 1658, of
wealthy parentage, a graduate and a master of arts of Harvard, then a traveller
and a student abroad, he won such distinction as a mathematician, and notably as
an astronomer, as to be made a member of the Royal Society, and was in close
touch with the world of scholars; but his career was that of an opulent and
cultivated Boston merchant, and for twenty years, from 1693 to his death in
1713, he was treasurer of Harvard College. “In the Church,” said
of him the Boston News-Letter, “he was
known and valued for his Catholick Charity to all of the reformed
Religion, but more especially his great Veneration for the Church of England,
although his general and more constant communion was with the
Nonconformists.” In other words, he was of the liberal party in religion
and politics, an eminent opponent of the Puritan theocracy, and he did not escape
the epithets “apostate” and “infidel.”
The letter here printed did not see print in his own day; but that the present
copy exists suggests that it may have been meant to circulate in
manuscript,[43] and
it is not impossible that it was even written for that purpose. Yet if so, we may
be sure it was used with discretion. It was his grand-nephew, the then well-known
Thomas Brattle, Esq., of Cambridge, who late in the eighteenth century
communicated it to the Massachusetts Historical Society.[44] From that manuscript
copy it is here reprinted.
Notes
[[43].]
The suggestion is that of Sibley, in his sketch of Brattle's life
(Harvard Graduates, II. 489-498), the best summary of
what is known of him. That the extant copy is without superscription, and signed
by initials only, may point to such a use. It must not be forgotten that it was
written on the eve of the session of the General Court.
[[44].]
It was first published in that society's Collections, V. 61-79.
