Wenham (1792 - 1799)

C H A P T E R I I I

Wenham

[ 1792-1799 ]

R. Judson was without a charge for more than a year. It was

late in 1792 before he was able to return home from one of his trips with the good news that he .had received an acceptable call.

The church was the one at Wenham, at the base of Cape Ann, five miles north of Salem in Essex County. Its previous pastor, Mr. Swain, had served it more than forty years until his death. Now the congregation had voted unanimously, the last day of November, to extend a call to Mr. Judson. At the same meeting it had also voted to do away with the “halfway covenant,” which had long been a thorn in the flesh of ministers of his persuasion. No longer could a man or woman expect to become a member of the church merely by being of good moral character and a believer in God. From now on the church would go back to the practice of old New England, which required that a candidate must also testify to the satisfaction of the minister and the congregation that he had experienced “Redeeming Grace.” And from now on only those in full membership could have their children baptized, although nonmembers would not be barred from attending church. All in all, it was a great triumph for the new minister.

In Wenham the church chose the pastor but the town employed him and paid his salary. Immediately after the church made its decision, a town meeting was held. The town voted to invite Mr. Judson to be its minister, and to offer him the use of the town’s parsonage plus a “free contribution” and “Sixty pounds Lawfull money” for settling in Wenham. His salary was to be ninety-five pounds a year, but since money values were fluctuating as the new national currency began to be minted, if he were not paid in pounds he could be paid in some current form of money of an equivalent

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WENHAM

value. Mr. Judson wasted no time accepting the call. A little more than two weeks later he presided at his first church meeting. On December 26, 1792, he was formally installed. Dr. Bentley, watching events from nearby Salem, noted in his diary that: “This day is to be ordained Judson, lately from Malden. His council are Cleveland, Oliver, 8: Parish. He will not trust an enlightened clergy after the trouble they gave him in Malden.”

A few days later, January IO, 1793, Mr. Judson bundled his family into a sleigh, gathered up the reins, clucked to the horse, and on WhiSpering runners they Sped over the snowy roads to Wenham.

Wenham was scarcely half the size of Malden. Its five hundred inhabitants occupied fewer than seventy-five houses Strung out along the Old Bay State Road, oldest highway in Massachusetts, which meandered north from Beverly to Ipswich and then up the seacoast to the Merrimack River. But to a small boy of four, Wenham could not have been very different from Malden. The parsonage, similar to the Malden one, Stood on a gentle rise just east of the Old Bay State Road. The church was across the road and a few hundred yards to the north. A Spired structure with a bell in the belfry, it was about the same size as the Malden church. The pews were the same square, high-backed kind Adoniram had seen before. Probably the only important difference, to a boy’s eyes, was that the choir took its place in the gallery instead of forward on the ground floor.

The father would have been aware of other differences. Wenham was slowly declining in population, and the church had been allowed to fall into rather poor repair since its construction in 1748. Against this disadvantage was the immense advantage of a united congregation. For a few years, at least, the Judsons should enjoy peace.

And so they did. And it was here, on May 28, 1794, that another son was born to them, Elnathan, named for his paternal grandfather, Captain Elnathan Judson of Woodbury, Connecticut, of whom Adoniram, Senior, was the seventh child and sixth son.

The boy Adoniram flourished in Wenham. He began to assume individuality. At four he had been imitative, aping his father by collecting the neighboring children and preaching to them. The hymn he gave out to his youthful congregation, his parents remembered, was usually the one beginning “Go preach my Gospel, saith the Lord.” But by six or seven, perhaps when he began going to Master Dodge’s school, he had begun to display interests and abilities unlike those of the other boys in the neighborhood.

For that matter, his personality was different. It had a peculiar vividness. He was unusually high-spirited, enthusiastic in anything he did, active and energetic. He had complete self-confidence. Yet, on the whole, he preferred books to play. During the years of his boyhood he read everything he could lay hands on, from his father’s religious books to Ben Jonson’s plays—which be borrowed in the neighborhood -—to the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the best sellers of their time.

This avid devouring of everything in print would have marked him in any typically ingrowing, gossipy village like Wenham. But to this was added a curious flair for puzzle-solving, for‘inquiry, for testing, that today would convince parents they were rearing a born scientist.

Once, very early, he nearly blinded himself peering at the sun through a small hole he cut in the crown of his hat— to solve the problem of the sun’s motion, he told Abigail. As she could not have been much more than five, she believed him when he avowed he had succeeded.

At Master Dodge’s school he impressed —- and undoubtedly irritated —the other boys by his uncanny ability to solve riddles. He simply could not be stumped. Eventually be accumulated a large collection of brain-twisters with which he loved to confound his schoolmates.

At eight or nine his mental cockiness nearly got him in trouble with his father. A newspaper printed what it called an “enigma,” which it defied its readers to solve. Adoniram looked at it, decided he had succeeded with others just as hard, and promptly set to work. Presently he had the solution, copied it neatly, addressed it to the editor, and —— probably with Abigail tagging along—walked up the shady street beyond the church to the post office in the general store. He gave it to the postmaster, forgetting, in those days before postage stamps, that the neWSpaper would have to pay the postage, which would have been a goodly sum —— fourpence to Boston, about a quarter in today’s values. The postmaster quietly put the letter aside without forwarding it, and later gave it to Adoniram’s father.

"The person Adoniram feared above all others was his father. It was not only that he was a minister. It was nor even that he was Adoniram’s father in a day when fathers ruled their children with an iron hand. It was the sheer awesomeness of the man himself. He was nearly incapable of humor. He was just, but with the retributive justice of God Himself. He was Stern, auStere; and as God did not overlook the sparrow’s fall, so Mr. Judson did not overlook trifles. In fact, deep in Adoniram’s mind God and his father could hardly help taking on identity.1

At any rate, when Adoniram came home for tea later that day and saw the letter on the tea table, his face paled. Mr. Judson indicated the letter. “Is that yours, Adoniram?”

“Yes, sir,” faltered the boy.

“How came you to write it?”

“Please read it, Father.”

“I do not read other pe0ple’s letters. Break the seal and read it yourself.”

With trembling fingers the boy broke the seal, mumbled through the contents, and gave the sheet to his father, who received it in silence and read it to himself. But the expected wrath did not descend. Mr. Judson asked Adoniram for the paper containing the puzzle. Adoniram gave it to him, then hastily retreated to the far side of the room beyond the fireplace. From this distance be watched his father’s face, trying unsuccessfully to read his thoughts. All he saw was his father reading the enigma in the paper, comparing it with Adoniram’s solution, rereading the enigma, and recomparing 1 If so, the fearsomeness of that identity may have been deepened by the fact that about this time, in February of 1796, Adoniram’s mother had borne another child, Mary, who died after less than seven months of life — too young to repent Original Sin and acquire Redeeming Grace by conscious choice. The boy Adoniram, steeped in his father’s creed, must have pondered the infant’s destination with some unease. What was it? Auromatic forgiveness? Or, as the poet Wigglesworth had suggested more than a century before, “the easiest room in hell”? it with the solution with expressionless countenance. At length Mr. judson placed both on the table, and crossing his hands on his knees stared thoughtfully into the fire for a long time.

In a few minutes Mrs. judson tactfully brought up a new topic of conversation. Adoniram—his feelings obscurely tinged with guilt—went to bed without knowing the verdict.

Next morning at breakfast his father said, “Adoniram, I have purchased a book of riddles for you. It is a common book, but when you have solved them all I shall get you a more difficult one.” Adoniram beamed; and beamed more when his father patted him on the head with rare warmth and added, “You are a very acute boy, Adoniram, and I expect you to become a great man.”

But when Adoniram opened the book, his face fell. It was only the arithmetic used by the older boys in Master Dodge’s school. Still, his father had praised him; and if there was anything puzzling in an arithmetic book he felt sure he would like it.

He did. He began frolicking in a sea of figures like a porpoise. His fame as a prodigious worker of problems even spread to Beverly. A man there sent him a puzzle with an offer of the fabulous sum of a dollar—more than his father earned in a day—for the solution. It proved to be far more difficult than the newspaper enigma, and the first day he got nowhere with it. But the next morning, when he was taking care of his little brother Elnathan, now about four years old, it came to him and he tasted triumph once more.

By the time he was ten and in grammar school his reputation for mathematics had extended into language—Greek and Latin——and his schoolmates called him “Virgil,” or sometimes “Old Virgil Dug Up,” in tribute to a shapeless hat he wore. Arithmetic and puzzle-solving had led to something else; for he was also learning navigation in a school kept by Captain Morton.

There was a school of navigation, kept by a retired sea captain, in nearly every seaport town. Nearly every family which had a son with a flair for figures thought at once of his learning navigation and becoming supercargo, mate, master, and perhaps eventually owner of his own vessels. It was a time when men commanded ships in their twenties and retired well-to-do in their thirties. It was an age of navigation. Nathaniel Bowditch, father of modern navigation, was himself a native of Salem; and in 1799, his fame as a navigator already a legend though he was still only twenty-six, he published the first American edition of The Practical Navigator. Adoniram was in his eleventh year then. Whether his ambitious father intended a career at sea for his son, it is impossible to say. Certainly the thought must have crossed his mind. Wenham may have been a slowly declining country village, but nearby Beverly and Salem, with their combined populations now passing twelve thousand, were enjoying the most dazzling prosperity ever seen in New England.

Jaunting the few short miles to Salem, as they must have done often, Adoniram and his father could not have gone far through Beverly’s streets before unmistakable evidences of wealth began to appear everywhere.

Long before they crossed over the toll bridge to Salem, the tall ships’ masts with their Spidery rigging could be seen tickling the sky out of every cove—here and there groups of two or three masts, each marking a ship close at hand near the toll bridge; and on the horizon beyond the Neck a concentration as thick as the pickets in a fence, outlining Salem Harbor itself.

The wealth was visible in the form of the lordly homes of the merchants and sea captains being built on the tree-shaded streets near the swampy Common with its five as yet undrained ponds. Wealth showed in the crepe shawls from Canton, the silks and satins from Smyrna and Turkey worn by the women of the merchant and seafaring families. In the homes of the well-to-do—and the Reverend Mr. Judson and his son were welcome in many of them — it appeared in the carved teak, the jade and coral, the fragile porcelain from China, and even in the parrots, brilliant in harlequin green, red and yellow, jabbering a medley of the world’s tongues.

For the wealth not merely could be seen, it also could be heard. It was voiced not only by the parrots and songbirds brought in cages from the islands of the seven seas to warble their exotic songs in Salem’s windows all year long. It was beaten out everywhere along the waterfront by the thump of the calkers’ mauls. As Adoniram and his father walked along the harbor shore from Derby Wharf at one end to Crowninshield’s wharf, nearest the harbor mouth, at the other, wealth sang out in the chanties of the 2 2

men straining at the windlasses. When they paused to greet acquaintances, wealth told its story in heart-quickening tales of boys who went to sea at twelve or fourteen, soon thought nothing of circumnavigating the globe, Spoke of Hong Kong as if it were a day’s sail from Gloucester, and commanded their own ships before they were old enough to vote.

The wealth could even be smelled. The sea was redolent of it. The harbor air by the wharves reeked of it in the haunting aromas of the spices, the ginger and pepper and sandalwood disgorged from the capacious holds of the tall—niaSted ships that had loaded on the Java Coast, Canton, the Malay Islands and Singapore. To a poor country minister and his wide-eyed young son, Salem Harbor must have seemed like a cornucopia from which poured all the riches of the Orient.

Could it have been the Reverend'Manasseh Cutler who had suggested to Adoniram’s father that the boy learn navigation? His parish of Hamilton was next door to Wenham on the north. He knew Mr. Judson and could hardly have failed to know of the son.

The ministry had not kept CUtler from a career of adventure. Yale graduate of the class of 1765, he had been paStor at Hamilton from 1771 ——when it was called “Ipswich Hamlet”——but his pastorate never interfered with his being a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army, with his forming the Ohio Company and leading settlers into the Far West—where he helped eStablish Marietta, Ohio—or later with his serving in Congress. Tall and portly, addicted to black velvet suits with silk Stockings and silver knee and shoe buckles, he had a daring, unconventional mind that ranged through every field of learning. He practiced medicine, inoculated for smallpox, measured the distance of the stars with sextant and telescope, studied Jupiter’s moons, made botanical investigations, and did a good deal of work with the microscope—then an almost unheard-of instrument of science.

Did he encourage the father’s ambitions? Who knows? But with men like Cutler almOSt next door, and prosperity like Salem’s almost as close, and with a son to whom the complexities of navigations were scarcely more than child’s play, what golden dreams may have shimmered in the father’s head?

If he had such dreams, they were to fade. For once more he was approaching the end of his pastorate. The reasons, so far as we can glimpse them in the minutes of the town meetings and the church records which Mr. Judson kept in his own handwriting, involve a baffling mixture of his failing health, his need for money, overlapping authority between church and town with regard to the support of the pastor, and his own rigid character.

In June of 1799, Mr. Judson asked the church for permission to give up preaching for three or four weeks “to ride for health.” The church refused; whereupon Mr. Judson asked to be dismissed from his pastorate. This request was likewise refused.

At the same time, Mr. Judson had a matter to take up with the town. It was the town which paid his salary, as established by vote, and his salary had not been increased since he first settled in Wenham. The original ninety-five pounds was now paid in United States currency and had been determined as $316.66 a year. But dollars had fallen in value, so that although the needs of his three children were increasing as they grew older, the money he received bought less and less.

Unfortunately for Mr. Judson, the town’s prosperity was declining too, and as a consequence its citizens were becoming more taxconscious. A good many voters were not members of the church; and the abolition of the “halfway covenant” had probably discouraged some from trying to join. When the town met in July to decide what to do about “making up the Depreciation” of his salary, and learned from Deacon Stephen Dodge and Captain Samuel] Blanchard that he wanted a permanent increase or his dismissal, the voters reacted to the ultimatum by agreeing unanimously not to make any addition to his salary at all, either permanently or yearly.

This left Mr. Judson no choice but to ask again for his dismissal, which he did in August, two days before Adoniram’s eleventh birthday. The church refused it a second time, unanimously. But his health was failing so badly that a few days later he told the congregation after Sunday service that he must go to Saratoga Springs to recover, or be given a dismissal at once. Forced thus, the church voted to wait until he returned to decide the whole matter.

He was away six weeks. He had been back in Wenham only a 24 T H E few days when he renewed his request to be dismissed. Once again he was denied, but in the confusion the meeting chose a committee by unanimous vote to agree upon dismissal terms. When the church met again to hear the report, the members rejected it, saying they wanted the minister to remain. They asked for another town meeting to consider the depreciation of money, and in addition voted as a church to give Mr. Judson five pounds a year in place of the undependable contributions, plus twelve loads of wood and an annual vacation of four or five weeks, provided that the town would vote a satisfactory increase in his legal salary. This the town refused to do. Instead, town and church finally agreed on the same day in October to grant the minister the dismissal he had requested so many times. The town did, however, agree to pay the cost of the ecclesiastical council which was to meet at the inn of Patty Lewis and ratify the terms of the separation. The council duly met on October 22, I799, Manasseh Cutler being one of the members, and ratified the agreement so tortuously arrived at. And in the fellowship engendered by the good food and the many bowls of punch and glasses of wine which were customarily consumed at public expense at such meetings, the reverend members inscribed a curious sentence in the record of their findings:

And while they bear testimony of their respect for Mr. Judson cz’r esteem for his character, they cannot refrain from expressing their appreciation of the spirit, which the town has discovered toward him, (a the liberality cz’r candor which appeared to the gentlemen who conducted the business before the Council in the town’s behalf. Were they thanking the taxpayers of Wenham for their generous entertainment? Or were they saying that the Reverend Mr. Judson’s inflexibility made him hard to get along with?

We do not know. We do know that the boy Adoniram was old enough to follow what was going on, and to draw his own conclusions from his father’s example. And of those conclusions, one was: NEVER COMPROMISE.