1
12
143
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09809c34e6ab5cefea03f59e7c116673
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Gibbons Sons Store Advertising Flyer, Week of June 26, 1933
Description
An account of the resource
A large advertising flyer mailed to Granville residents for the week of June 26, 1933. This pre-dates the fire of December 1934 when the store burned to the ground.
Year of the flyer is based on research by Brian Miller into the Jack Dempsey promotion mentioned in the flyer. Further research by Granville History into the Moon Mullins promotion indicates that was also 1933.
The basic flyer is a New England Stores design with the Gibbons store information at the bottom (Granville phone number 8). The slogan for New England Stores was "For Thrifty People" as shown on their logo.
Times have certainly changed. Today you even have to pay for the bags to take home your $300 week's worth of groceries. In 1933 you could get Jack Dempsey's autograph and a Moon Mullins mask for free! Unfortunately 1933 was also during the depths of the Great Depression so the question wasn't one of cost, it was whether you had the money at all.
Use the Search function to view additional photos of the Gibbons store at 11 Granby Road, Granville, MA. including the 1934 fire.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
26 June 1933
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Digital Image: 2024, Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville, MA. and Granville History https://GranvilleHistory.omeka.net
11 Granby Road
Gibbons
Granville
Granville Country Store
Massachusetts
New England Stores
store
-
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8853afbce51f89aebd9f27d8fdd815d0
PDF Text
Text
1790 CENSUS: TOWN OF GRANVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS
Name of Heads of Household
Adams, Pelatiah
Adams, Titus
Atkins, Elihu
Babcock, Perry
Baldwin, Amos
Baldwin, Ebenezer
Baldwin, Ensn. Jacob
Baldwin, Ezra
Baldwin, Lyman
Baldwin, Stephen
Bancroft, David
Bancroft, Enoch
Bancroft, Joel
Bancroft, John
Bancroft, Lieut. Lemuel
Bancroft, Lieut. Samuel
Bancroft, Stephen
Barlon, Ebenezer (Barlow?)
Barlow, Benjamin
Barlow, Edmund
Barlow, Edward
Barlow, Nathan
Barns, Capt. Benjamin
Barns, Ebenezer
White Males
16 Years and
Over
1
1
3
1
2
3
3
2
1
1
2
3
1
1
3
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
1
White Males <
16 Years
White
Females
1
4
1
2
2
3
2
3
2
4
2
3
3
3
2
3
4
4
2
6
2
3
4
2
2
3
2
6
4
1
1
2
3
1
3
3
2
3
2
4
1
1
1
1
All Other Free
Persons
Slaves
�Barns, Ebenezer, Jr.
Barns, Jeremiah
Barns, Phinehas
Bartlet, Isaac
Bates, Capt. David
Bates, Capt. Nathaniel
Bates, Col. Jacob
Bates, John
Bates, Linus
Battles, Abijah
Biddle, George
Bigsbee, Benjamin
Booge, Rev. Aaron J.
Brown, Andrew
Bumpus, Seth
Burbank, Capt. Shem
Burbank, Thomas
Burrass, Israel
Butler, Selah
Caleb, Burt
Church, Abijah
Church, Josiah
Clarke, Amos
Clarke, Jabin
Clarke, Jonathan
Clarke, Lot
Clarke, Ruth
Clarke, Samuel
Cockran, William
1
1
3
1
4
4
5
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
3
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
3
3
2
3
2
3
1
1
2
3
3
3
1
1
1
3
3
3
1
1
4
2
5
5
3
5
6
6
5
4
4
1
1
4
2
2
3
3
3
1
1
3
5
4
1
5
3
3
2
1
2
�Coe, Benjamin
Coe, David
Coe, Dea. Aaron
Coe, Gad
Coe, Hope
Coe, Israel
Coe, James
Coe, Joseph
Coe, Seth
Cooley, Baruch
Cooley, Capt. William
Cooley, Clarke
Cooley, Clarke, Jr.
Cooley, John
Cooley, John
Cooley, Justus
Cooley, Lieut. Daniel
Cooley, Rebekah (Widow)
Cooley, William, Jr.
Cooley, Zadok
Cornwall, Mrs. Eunice
Cornwall, Ozias
Cornwell, John
Cornwell, Mercy
Couch, Timothy
Cowles, Ensn. John
Crossman, Phinehas
Curtis, Aaron
Curtis, Daniel
1
1
2
1
1
1
3
2
1
1
5
3
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
1
2
1
4
1
2
1
1
1
3
3
2
5
4
1
1
2
2
1
2
1
2
3
3
1
2
3
4
5
3
5
5
1
4
2
2
2
2
3
2
1
3
3
4
5
1
5
3
6
�Curtis, Ebenezer
Curtis, Lieut. David
Dalleby, George
Deming, Gideon
Dickinson, Capt. Richard
Dickinson, Oliver
Dowd, Elihu
Dudley, Sylvanus
Dunham, Jabez
Dyer, Joseph
Ellis, Capt. William
Ely, Lewis
Fairchild, Anson
Fitch, Lemeul
Flower, Isaac
Forbes, Ensn. Jonathan
Forbes, James
Forbes, Nathan
Fowler, John
Fowler, Oliver
Fowler, Titus
Fox, David
Fox, David, Jr.
Freeman, William
Frost, David
Frost, Reuben
Gibbons, Bildad
Gibbons, Peter
Gibbons, Timothy
2
4
1
1
3
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
3
1
1
4
1
2
1
2
3
1
2
1
1
3
3
1
2
2
2
1
4
2
5
3
3
4
4
3
4
4
1
3
2
3
1
2
5
5
3
3
1
1
4
1
5
4
2
2
1
2
4
3
2
2
�Gibbs, Samuel
Gillet, Eli
Gillet, Samuel
Gillet, Thomas
Gillet, Thomas, Jr.
Gillet, Zadok
Gleason, Joel
Gleason, John
Goff, David
Goff, Mary (Widow)
Goff, Moses
Granger, Capt. Abraham
Granger, John
Granger, Seth
Graves, Ashur
Graves, Elizur
Graves, Enoch
Graves, Reuben
Graves, Roswell
Graves, Seth
Green, Benjamin
Hale, Ezekiel
Hale, Ezekiel
Hall, Jesse
Hall, Samuel
Hall, Thomas
Hamilton, Capt. John
Hamilton, Henry
Hamilton, James
2
2
1
1
3
1
2
1
1
1
2
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
3
1
2
1
1
3
1
1
3
1
3
4
2
1
1
3
1
1
3
4
1
2
1
3
4
1
8
2
2
2
3
3
4
4
2
4
2
1
1
3
3
1
1
2
3
2
3
4
2
5
3
�Hamilton, Robert
Hamilton, Thomas
Hamilton, Thomas, Jr.
Handy, William
Harding, Ebenezer
Harding, Isaac
Hardy, Jairus
Harvey, Dr. Josiah
Haskell, Simeon
Heileman, Dr. John F.
Hickocks, Levi
Hickocks, Rufus
Hill, Ichabod
Hill, Nathan
Hitchcock, Luke
Holden, Ebenezer
Holden, Ebenezer M.
Holden, Jeduthan
Howe, Ephraim
Hubbard, Ebenezer
Hubbard, Hezekiah
Hull, Gideon
Hull, Robert
Hull, Thomas (Black)
Johnson, Jabez
Keep, Sylvanus
Kelly, Mindwell
Kentfield, Elizabeth
Knott, Selden
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
1
1
2
1
1
3
1
1
1
2
1
2
2
6
4
3
3
2
2
4
2
3
3
2
2
5
4
2
2
1
3
2
1
2
2
8
1
1
1
1
1
4
1
1
1
1
2
�Lanspear, William
Latham, David
Lawhead, Thomas
Leonard, Seth
Levenworth, Zebulon
Linnel, Joseph
Loveland, Robert
Manchester, John
Marsh, Perez, Jr.
Marshal, Perez
Marshall, Joel
Marshall, Simeon
Marshall, Simeon, Jr.
Marvin, Capt. Ezra
Mather, Reuben
Merriman, Ebenezer
Merry, Cornelius
Merry, Luther
Miller, Eliakim
Miller, Eliphas
Miller, Jesse
Miller, Lieut. Isaac
Miller, Recompense
Miller, Timothy
Mills, Cephas
Moody, Oliver
Moore, Dan
Moore, Joseph
Moore, Marvin
1
2
3
2
1
1
3
1
1
4
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
3
1
2
1
1
4
2
1
4
3
1
2
l
1
4
2
2
2
1
2
2
1
1
2
1
3
1
1
1
2
3
6
5
3
3
4
1
3
2
2
2
2
3
5
4
1
2
6
4
2
4
7
5
2
2
2
8
1
1
�Moore, Samuel
Munn, Stephen
Munson, Lieut. Jesse
Owen, James
Parsons, Abner
Parsons, Abner, Jr.
Parsons, Israel
Parsons, Lieut. David
Parsons, Lieut. Seth
Parsons, Moses
Parsons, Mrs. Sarah
Parsons, Philip
Peebles, John H.
Penfield, Isaac
Penfield, Isaac, Jr.
Peters, William
Phelps, Elisha
Pratt, Aaron
Pratt, Alderton
Pratt, Barney
Pratt, Jared
Pratt, Phinehas
Reed, Ahimaaz
Remington, Anthony
Rising, Abner
Roberts, Giles
Robinson, Capt. Dan
Robinson, Charles
Robinson, Dan
2
2
3
1
1
1
1
3
1
2
2
1
3
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
3
1
1
1
1
4
1
1
1
5
2
2
2
3
1
2
2
2
1
2
1
2
1
5
5
3
1
2
2
2
3
6
3
3
2
1
6
2
3
2
1
4
3
3
4
4
4
4
2
5
�Robinson, David
Robinson, Joel
Robinson, John
Robinson, Noah
Robinson, Samuel
Robinson, Susanna
Robinson, Timothy, Esqr.
Rogers, Jabez
Rogers, Solomon
Root, Capt. Amas
Root, John
Rose, Abel
Rose, Abner
Rose, Daniel
Rose, David
Rose, David, Jr.
Rose, Elijah
Rose, Elisha
Rose, Gamaliel
Rose, Jonathan
Rose, Justus
Rose, Lemuel
Rose, Levi
Rose, Phinehas
Rose, Rufus
Rose, Seth
Rose, Sharon
Saunders, Ephraim
Scovill, Bela
3
1
1
2
1
1
4
4
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
5
2
2
2
2
1
3
1
1
4
4
4
1
3
3
4
4
1
2
1
3
2
4
1
2
2
3
2
3
3
4
3
5
4
3
4
2
4
1
3
3
4
4
3
1
1
3
2
3
4
3
3
5
2
1
�Scovill, Capt. Westell
Scovill, Micah
Scovill, Westell
Seward, Caroline (Widow)
Seward, Enos
Seaward, John
Seymour, Asa
Sheldon, Jonathan
Slocomb, David
Smith, Ebenezer
Smith, John
Smith, John
Smith, Samuel
Spelman, Aaron
Spelman, Charles
Spelman, Elijah
Spelman, John
Spelman, Levi
Spelman, Lieut. Eber
Spelman, Oliver
Spelman, Stephen
Spelman, Thomas
Spelman, Timothy
Stedman, Joseph
Stedman, Samuel
Stedman, Samuel, Jr.
Stedman, Tristram
Stewart, Alexander
Stewart, Archibald
1
1
1
1
2
3
1
1
2
2
3
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
3
2
2
1
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
3
1
2
1
3
1
2
3
1
2
3
1
4
4
2
1
8
2
6
1
3
2
3
4
3
5
6
4
3
1
2
2
3
3
2
1
2
1
5
1
4
1
6
2
2
4
5
1
�Stewart, Lieut. John H.
Stewart, Peter
Stiles, Job
Stiles, Job
Stiles, John
Stocker, Peter
Stone, Benjamin
Stow, Elihu
Strickland, Ichabod
Strickland, Jonathan
Strickland, Joseph
Strickland, Joseph,.Jr.
Strong, Eleazar
Strong, Joel
Strong, Joel, Jr.
Sweatman, Joseph
Sweatman, Reuben
Taylor, George
Thrall, Samuel
Tibbets, Moses
Tibbets, Mrs. Olivia
Tichenor, William
Tillotson, Abel
Tillotson, Jonathan
Tillotson, Jonathan, Jr.
Tinker, John
Torrey, Ripley
Tryon, David
Twining, Elizah
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
2
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
4
4
2
2
1
3
3
1
2
1
2
2
1
2
3
1
3
2
2
2
3
3
2
3
3
1
4
1
8
2
3
2
1
3
3
1
1
3
2
2
1
2
2
2
1
2
5
6
2
4
�Twining, Thomas
Wakefield, Nathaniel
Walters, Abner
Walters, Benjamin
Ward, Stephen
Westly, Jonathan
Whitney, Josiah
Wighting, James
Wilcocks, Samuel D.
Williams, Absalom
Williams, Isaac
Williams, Phinehas
Williams, Samuel
Williams, Thomas
Winchel, Martin
Winchell, Dan
Wolf, Edward
Woodruff, Joseph
Woolworth, Phinehas
Wright, David
Totals:
Grand Total:
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
7
2
3
497
1
2
2
1
2
1
6
2
3
2
1
1
4
2
500
4
6
3
2
3
6
4
2
4
6
5
2
1
2
2
2
3
1
4
969
1979
13
0
�
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PDF Text
Text
1790 CENSUS: TOWN OF GRANVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS
Name of Heads of Household
Cowles, Ensn. John
Scovill, Westell
Scovill, Capt. Westell
Crossman, Phinehas
Hill, Nathan
Tryon, David
Twining, Elizah
Harding, Ebenezer
Harding, Isaac
Freeman, William
Twining, Thomas
Linnel, Joseph
Rogers, Solomon
Smith, Samuel
Rogers, Jabez
Wright, David
Whitney, Josiah
Burrass, Israel
Smith, Ebenezer
Gleason, Joel
Bumpus, Seth
Gleason, John
Ward, Stephen
Fowler, Titus
White Males
16 Years and
Over
2
1
1
2
2
1
4
1
1
1
3
1
1
1
4
3
1
3
3
2
1
1
1
3
White Males <
16 Years
White
Females
2
1
3
6
5
5
2
4
2
1
1
2
3
1
2
1
4
4
4
2
1
1
3
3
2
1
1
4
3
3
2
4
4
4
3
4
2
2
2
3
4
All Other Free
Persons
Slaves
�Fowler, John
Hamilton, Capt. John
Hardy, Jairus
Moore, Marvin
Parsons, Philip
Clarke, Jonathan
Fowler, Oliver
Barlon, Ebenezer
Hall, Thomas
Goff, David
Torrey, Ripley
Mills, Cephas
Goff, Mary (Widow)
Goff, Moses
Strickland, Ichabod
Hamilton, James
Hamilton, Thomas
Hamilton, Robert
Hamilton, Henry
Hall, Jesse
Hubbard, Ebenezer
Hubbard, Hezekiah
Hall, Samuel
Dowd, Elihu
Barns, Phinehas
Cooley, Rebekah (Widow)
Cooley, Justus
Cooley, Baruch
Butler, Selah
1
3
1
4
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
1
2
4
1
1
1
1
2
2
3
3
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
1
3
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
8
3
5
5
4
4
3
6
5
3
4
2
3
4
6
5
2
2
1
3
3
5
2
2
1
1
1
1
2
�Remington, Anthony
Bigsbee, Benjamin
Stewart, Lieut. John H.
Hull, Thomas (Black)
Barns, Ebenezer
Barns, Ebenezer, Jr.
Stewart, Alexander
Hale, Ezekiel
Knott, Selden
Robinson, John
Robinson, Charles
Hickocks, Rufus
Robinson, Dan
Robinson, Samuel
Frost, Reuben
Frost, David
Dudley, Sylvanus
Cooley, John
Ely, Lewis
Peebles, John H.
Owen, James
Baldwin, Amos
Robinson, Susanna
Dalleby, George
Wighting, James
Penfield, Isaac
Penfield, Isaac, Jr.
Rose, David
Rose, Abner
1
1
1
2
1
4
4
1
2
8
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
1
4
2
1
3
5
2
3
2
5
1
2
1
1
6
2
4
2
4
2
2
3
2
2
5
4
4
2
2
4
5
3
5
4
3
3
2
2
1
3
1
�Spelman, Oliver
Hull, Gideon
Rose, Daniel
Harvey, Dr. Josiah
Spelman, John
Spelman, Levi
Bates, Col. Jacob
Parsons, Abner
Parsons, Abner, Jr.
Bates, Capt. David
Merry, Luther
Parsons, Moses
Hitchcock, Luke
Merry, Cornelius
Cornwell, Mercy
Bates, John
Haskell, Simeon
Woodruff, Joseph
Adams, Pelatiah
Gibbs, Samuel
Cockran, William
Cornwall, Mrs. Eunice
Stewart, Peter
Rose, David, Jr.
Cornwell, John
Cornwall, Ozias
Granger, Seth
Parsons, Mrs. Sarah
Parsons, Lieut. David
2
2
1
3
1
1
5
1
1
4
1
2
1
1
3
1
7
1
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
3
3
3
1
3
1
3
1
1
2
1
3
1
1
2
4
1
4
1
1
1
1
2
3
4
2
1
6
3
1
5
1
3
4
4
4
5
2
3
3
1
1
1
3
4
3
3
4
6
2
2
�Parsons, Lieut. Seth
Seward, Enos
Peters, William
Coe, James
Rose, Levi
Sweatman, Joseph
Howe, Ephraim
Deming, Gideon
Stiles, John
Miller, Jesse
Forbes, Nathan
Holden, Ebenezer
Holden, Jeduthan
Holden, Ebenezer M.
Graves, Reuben
Miller, Eliphas
Stow, Elihu
Rose, Justus
Rose, Lemuel
Sweatman, Reuben
Miller, Eliakim
Forbes, Ensn. Jonathan
Forbes, James
Burbank, Thomas
Gillet, Samuel
Rose, Elijah
Fairchild, Anson
Lanspear, William
Coe, Hope
1
3
2
3
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
4
3
1
3
2
4
1
2
2
1
4
2
1
2
1
3
3
1
4
1
1
2
3
6
4
3
1
3
4
4
4
4
2
1
2
3
6
2
3
2
3
2
1
1
3
4
4
5
1
2
�Robinson, Capt. Dan
Baldwin, Ebenezer
Coe, Joseph
Tibbets, Mrs. Olivia
Tibbets, Moses
Hickocks, Levi
Handy, William
Seward, Caroline (Widow)
Robinson, Joel
Rose, Jonathan
Stone, Benjamin
Smith, John
Granger, John
Rose, Rufus
Dickinson, Capt. Richard
Woolworth, Phinehas
Fitch, Lemeul
Barlow, Benjamin
Pratt, Barney
Stiles, Job
Cooley, Lieut. Daniel
Pratt, Jared
Pratt, Aaron
Barlow, Edward
Barlow, Edmund
Gillet, Zadok
Clarke, Lot
Parsons, Israel
Bates, Capt. Nathaniel
2
3
2
1
1
2
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
3
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
1
2
1
4
1
1
2
1
2
2
3
2
3
4
1
4
1
4
2
2
5
1
1
3
1
1
2
4
2
5
2
1
3
3
2
2
1
8
3
2
3
4
1
3
2
1
3
2
4
3
3
2
2
3
2
6
�Taylor, George
Dickinson, Oliver
Church, Abijah
Church, Josiah
Williams, Absalom
Cooley, Clarke
Cooley, John
Bancroft, Lieut. Lemuel
Hill, Ichabod
Cooley, Zadok
Cooley, Clarke, Jr.
Graves, Seth
Tichenor, William
Graves, Enoch
Moore, Joseph
Wakefield, Nathaniel
Graves, Ashur
Graves, Elizur
Graves, Roswell
Seward, John
Roberts, Giles
Fox, David
Fox, David, Jr.
Mather, Reuben
Babcock, Perry
Kentfield, Elizabeth
Miller, Recompense
Hale, Ezekiel
Westly, Jonathan
1
2
2
2
1
3
1
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
3
3
3
3
1
2
1
2
1
2
4
2
2
3
1
2
1
3
5
6
5
2
6
2
2
1
1
2
1
2
6
2
1
3
4
4
2
2
3
2
1
4
3
6
1
1
�Latham, David
Phelps, Elisha
Miller, Timothy
Miller, Lieut. Isaac
Sheldon, Jonathan
Granger, Capt. Abraham
Stedman, Samuel
Slocomb, David
Hull, Robert
Manchester, John
Stedman, Joseph
Brown, Andrew
Moore, Samuel
Stedman, Tristram
Hamilton, Thomas, Jr.
Stedman, Samuel, Jr.
Levenworth, Zebulon
Wolf, Edward
Williams, Isaac
Marshal, Perez
Marsh, Perez, Jr.
Marshall, Joel
Stewart, Archibald
Caleb, Burt
Couch, Timothy
Moody, Oliver
Biddle, George
Marshall, Simeon
Coe, David
2
1
3
1
2
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
4
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
3
2
1
3
1
8
1
1
2
2
1
2
1
1
l
1
2
2
7
2
5
4
6
6
2
4
1
2
2
2
3
2
5
2
3
1
2
5
1
5
2
1
2
3
1
�Baldwin, Stephen
Coe, Israel
Coe, Seth
Coe, Gad
Bancroft, Joel
Bancroft, John
Barns, Jeremiah
Barns, Capt. Benjamin
Strickland, Jonathan
Strickland, Joseph
Strickland, Joseph,.Jr.
Bancroft, Lieut. Samuel
Bancroft, David
Bancroft, Enoch
Cooley, Capt. William
Smith, John
Stiles, Job
Thrall, Samuel
Strong, Joel
Strong, Joel, Jr.
Strong, Eleazar
Bancroft, Stephen
Gillet, Eli
Loveland, Robert
Munson, Lieut. Jesse
Gillet, Thomas
Gillet, Thomas, Jr.
Barlow, Nathan
Rising, Abner
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
1
2
2
3
5
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
2
3
3
1
3
1
1
2
2
1
3
3
1
2
1
2
2
3
1
3
3
1
2
2
3
2
3
3
1
2
2
3
3
1
4
2
5
6
3
2
1
2
3
4
5
1
1
2
3
1
3
3
3
3
5
1
8
2
4
�Williams, Samuel
Tillotson, Jonathan
Tillotson, Abel
Burbank, Capt. Shem
Adams, Titus
Tillotson, Jonathan, Jr.
Saunders, Ephraim
Rose, Elisha
Rose, Gamaliel
Rose, Phinehas
Rose, Sharon
Reed, Ahimaaz
Cooley, William, Jr.
Root, Capt. Amas
Stocker, Peter
Tinker, John
Green, Benjamin
Williams, Thomas
Root, John
Marvin, Capt. Ezra
Pratt, Alderton
Moore, Dan
Clarke, Jabin
Clarke, Samuel
Pratt, Phinehas
Kelly, Mindwell
Walters, Abner
Walters, Benjamin
Gibbons, Peter
1
1
2
3
1
1
2
3
1
1
5
1
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
3
4
2
2
1
2
1
1
4
3
1
1
4
3
3
4
3
2
1
2
1
2
3
2
2
2
3
1
4
5
3
3
4
1
5
1
1
2
2
2
2
1
2
3
1
3
2
2
�Battles, Abijah
Dunham, Jabez
Gibbons, Bildad
Merriman, Ebenezer
Flower, Isaac
Seymour, Asa
Spelman, Timothy
Clarke, Amos
Spelman, Charles
Spelman, Aaron
Spelman, Elijah
Spelman, Stephen
Spelman, Thomas
Spelman, Lieut. Eber
Winchel, Martin
Winchell, Dan
Scovill, Micah
Bartlet, Isaac
Williams, Phinehas
Curtis, Ebenezer
Curtis, Lieut. David
Curtis, Daniel
Bates, Linus
Rose, Seth
Leonard, Seth
Clarke, Ruth
Robinson, Timothy, Esqr.
Robinson, David
Keep, Sylvanus
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
2
1
3
1
1
1
1
1
2
4
1
2
1
2
1
4
3
1
3
2
3
2
2
3
2
1
4
4
2
3
1
1
1
2
4
3
3
5
3
3
4
4
3
2
3
5
1
2
2
2
1
3
5
4
4
6
4
3
6
3
5
3
1
�Robinson, Noah
Curtis, Aaron
Rose, Abel
Dyer, Joseph
Lawhead, Thomas
Coe, Dea. Aaron
Coe, Benjamin
Johnson, Jabez
Heileman, Dr. John F.
Scovill, Bela
Baldwin, Ezra
Baldwin, Lyman
Munn, Stephen
Atkins, Elihu
Baldwin, Ensn. Jacob
Booge, Rev. Aaron J.
Wilcocks, Samuel D.
Marshall, Simeon, Jr.
Ellis, Capt. William
Gibbons, Timothy
Totals:
Grand Total:
2
2
1
1
3
2
1
1
1
2
2
1
2
3
3
1
1
1
2
1
497
1
2
3
3
4
2
1
1
2
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
3
500
3
3
4
1
3
3
2
1
3
1
3
3
1
3
3
4
4
2
2
2
969
1979
13
0
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1790 Federal Census for Granville, Massachusetts
Description
An account of the resource
Two PDF files containing transcribed versions of the 1790 Census record for Granville, Massachusetts. <br /><br />1. The first file is in ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY SURNAME. This version is most useful when searching for a particular family. <br /><br />2. The second file is ORIGINAL ORDER of the record. This will more likely (but not necessarily) reflect the order of visitation by the census-taker, and is more useful for determining possible locality and neighbors.<br /><br />Note that the columns for males and females recorded free white persons only. The column titled "All Other Free Persons" were for non-white people, with no distinction between male and female. <br /><br />The Thomas Hull family appears to be the only black family listed in the 1790 census. It is believed that the others listed as "All Other Free Persons" were primarily farm laborers or servants living with white households. The family of Rev. Lemuel Haynes (also black) would have moved to Rutland, VT by 1790 thus would not be listed in this census.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1790">CLICK HERE</a></strong> for more information about the 1790 census.
Subject
The topic of the resource
1790 Federal Census for Granville, Massachusetts. <br /><br /><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>IMPORTANT:</strong></span> In 1790 the town of Granville <span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong><em>included what is now Tolland, Ma</em></strong></span>. Therefore this census includes residents of what is now Tolland.<br /><br />In 1790 Granville was comprised of three parishes:<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration:underline;">West Parish</span>: The West Parish became the <span style="text-decoration:underline;">Town of Tolland</span> in 1810.<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Middle Parish</span>: In 1790 the "Middle Parish" was essentially the area between the great valley on the east, running west to what is now the Tolland border. In 1810 with the "West Parish" becoming the Town of Tolland, the former Middle Parish became the new "West Parish" or what is now "<span style="text-decoration:underline;">West Granville,</span>" having become the westernmost area of Granville.<br /><br /><span style="text-decoration:underline;">East Parish</span>: In 1790 the "East Parish" consisted essentially of everything east of the great valley, to the Southwick border. In 1810 the East Parish became two parishes: Middle Parish, now more commonly known as "<span style="text-decoration:underline;">Granville Center</span>" where the Town Hall is, and East Parish which is known by a number of names: East Parish, the Village and most commonly "<span style="text-decoration:underline;">Granville Corners</span>" or The Corners referring to the general area of the green and Granville Public Library.<br /><br />For a more detailed description see <a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/930">Wilson's "History of Granville."</a>
1790
census
Granville
Massachusetts
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/34234/archive/files/22da93b28fd5db7e47f1a34c3ca9857e.jpg?Expires=1712793600&Signature=c6%7ETn9etF5mqRBJCGoWvdyS-xdGLSZDAGD734yZPNqt9X5tkka0IIxfMx5ShlMwvdLjAc5tnHMTn6lpVVnJftcSECTKmrMuCRzFWobmDf6LxCjTP2i9rvvCbNxp8hbctJeLPPxlI7bzOY4xKcGIm5WfXdQfiis4rLvD2Jj%7EkTpmIb3TnrAu5Hoekaxop%7E1IzMIoiVhedoCCrOF5R6nYX1h7uWiq%7EVt0EHtgS2rse6h3kUy3Iw9S2BwIVjmtmyCP7ckIrSEQS7Tl6w%7ELiomiMlKdfOdFtjlM06vrj1Xawv1fLT4AeqkNMJ4deDCtx06LtasaduBK52YmcVJg0BIlfWA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
28e09aeac706c57ce5e310407f5b1e2a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mary Barlow (1792-1885)
Description
An account of the resource
Title page of a book that belonged to Mary Barlow (1792-1885). The book is in the collection of the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville, MA.<br /><br />Mary Barlow was the daughter of Lt. Edmund Barlow, Jr. and Tabitha Bancroft, married 1786. Lt. Barlow served in the Revolutionary War. <br /><br />Mary married Oliver Rose (1788-1856). Their son, James Oliver Rose married Flora Abigail Case. <br /><br />James and Flora lived on Granby Road at the location of what is now Cooley Buy's shop (66 Granby Road). Mary Barlow Rose also lived there until her death in 1885. The Rose house burned down in 1909. James Rose died in 1907 and Flora in 1915.<br /><br /><a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/928">CLICK HERE</a> to view a photo of the Rose farm. <br /><br /><a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/206">CLICK HERE</a> for a photo of James Rose.<br /><br /><a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/207">CLICK HERE</a> for a photo of Flora Abigail Case Rose.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Digital images copyright Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, 2 Granby Road, Granville, Massachusetts, 01034.
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/34234/archive/files/6bbfa209dbc531af028072409c544cca.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=b7jjn7fj0NZgH3ROBTqqLLi4u6CQ1-4RDoDmYKEmkoSsn2PlDW3Yg2HNuq79D1ciwFCfIgg9dpq-fRWb4TO69KTwqvH0EeaKe-HKyIRPJ7TfrQmEr2nG1AmZggLj8LXsqNoHxbqT2Vqh2WPOZzxFhyLtzcH2ZAzuId4gHeNgqzDnapwi99JxdOd5WewiKdhnNgdIgk55vciOJ-3UPa4Bs9WnlyeYszLggNCiJH-vkJ24XkqHUJ-lPbng%7EmlHACckEzRrUGByMaaq%7EmW5LPMbcER2WeZYuMMfd7kCtdasLuO2ZPHS00bb7QhWuoPSIbCccXGWdRj3on64-gbYX1QsiQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
0692a396f8b0f028c94a7e5e53c955ca
PDF Text
Text
a .. ~
· t, .11 ;,,:,,,_,}
,A,2/,/=., ; .
,1,, _·/, ,.,. ._;,. .
AT THE
Ordination of Mr. Baker.
��Dignity snd Glor}' of CutrsT'i
Churches and Mmillers,
A
DISCOURSE,
DELIVERED AT THY.
ORDINATION
REV. JOE L
BAK E R,
}.J/N/SJ"ER!Jl OFFICP.
!ECON'D CHURC!J o, GRANVILLE.
JUS! ul, •797,
BY JOfJN E!\ifERSON.
..
PASTOll
or
A.Id ,
Tfil CO'llCUCATTO~.\I. CHl.lJ\Ctf nt
CONfYAT.
��AN
0RDINATION SERMON.
R! V t LAT(O NS, 11, r.
"TMtU:' THING{ SA ITH ff. THAT I-I OLl'll!TH
T H! UYEN S rAll.1 IN FIIS lllO<lT HA.,0, W HO WAl.l'I.•
I. TH IN THI M JDS T 01 nn SEVIS OOLOt.S' CANOI.Jt
ITCKI."
T HIS honk ii n,led, r,,, ~nu.'11/in .r ]1/111
Ci,,ijl, wh;,;, G~ xini, .,,,, hi.-, ,, Jb,w ur, bi,
co~:i~tt:;~c~t!,;J·t ~'~:,'! ~;,~:r~ 1f:~'ar ,~!
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f!\~:~1~;dc:e~~:'~~~~ !~~h~o~:~t;~;~t~~ ~~~
-.
11Votld from 1h11 1ime to the liual j11Jgmen1. Thcfe
0d
0
0
Ap~1Ar:it:J~1i :
"-U honored ""ilh this re,eb.t ion Jt tht: t,mc r.t his
banilh,ncnt 10 the illc of P~,m ll ,
( 1 .. ., in!f,><lu-
(j~ci~c:~et d:~~\':,~
T~:·t1i~d
::,~: rc:~~ ;or~=~,dc::tt::!r;"f~ ,i/~n~·:;'n!f
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which was the arpeuan;;:c of• ptrfon 1<"k,rinu1 a u.f
He was ,bthtd with•,.,..,. -_, d,u.., 1,
majdhc.
~tt;,:'
~• f/~0:i11f1sr~w!:.e "j/;'~::::.11:::
w , r, whit, hlt wlfl,
deno1ing venerable am,qu11y.
JI""'' •f fir, were Drigh 1 anJ pter.::!ng,
H it /ut Wirt /,l, j,., l,rajs, finn and ab•<l1ug.
Hu 1J,fr1111 lh1j,1111_d •/ m11111 w11ltrt, ftronJ an.I
cffcaua l . He is horl'1cr <ldc .. bcd as ha11i111 ,,, hi,
rlzhl h•11d /111111 ft•rJ,-fnm hi', ,,,,,,,b Woll II 1h11r,
H is trts 1111 •
,Jw, tdz,djw,rd, 1mJ
hu t,1111J1111Mt1w111111, 1b1J•"
Jh111i111 111 his Jir1•1th,
J 111, ,mgull puf..,ugc
could bcaoncQlllct but tile S,.in,oJ Gull, ·• w11<J I tic
bngu,101,h
�[
6
brieh tnefs of the FJ!h~r·s ~lory , nd the eX?rt rs i~
:u;e of his perf.,n," T hi~ i~mJnifcfJ, not onlr lr<>,n
the e11:1riotclinary reprefen •aull u here g:iven, bu t
:tlfo lrnm the divine chJra,'lcr he :i lfomes in his a I• -s
rlref, 10 John: " I am Alpha and O.nc,:a , the fir/t
:wd the l.1.tl.-I am he that li1·e1h and WJ5 deul,
and behold I am ali1·e lorever rnnre, Amen ; and
hne 1he kevs of hell 2nd uf de:ith."
W JTH the ineffabl e fplco<lor of rhis vi/ion the
Apo/He at firfi was overpowered, •1 When [ faw •
him I tel! at his leet dead,"
Chrilt having r.iifed.
liim, a.nil diffipated his foars, ordered him lO make
a fai1hfu1 record of all •hH had been ex:hiltitcd and
of whatever fhould be farther communicated,
.. \Vrile the things which thou hall fci:n, and the
things "hich :ire, and the things which fhall
llertalrer."
IN this general dire8ion, fomC ruppofo ' is comprehendci.l 1he fe:veral diltinlt parrs of the \\hole
or--r-
~lrt!iit;~
1
t
~s°1~~dcrfl~rl
:,h~~rfni~;Ji~~n ,t:dle~te":
go!clen c:indle/l:icks ; by the thini;::s which art, the
epirttes IO the fove n churches, toe;i.ch of which the
Apollle- was w fend :i p:1~1icular mdfoge ; and by
the things \\ hichfoa// lt h1r1aftu, the feve ral pro•
phecies following.
HAVINO given thcfc order& ChriA: proceeds fo
ell plain 10 John 1he myfl:ety of the feven fl:.rs, which
he faw in hi~ right hand, and the feYCn golden call.
rlle!ticks, informing him that the former denoied
the angels of the churc hes, and that the hllcr wc~c
.a fyml>nlical reprcfer.t:uion of the churche5 thc'l'I• •
Selvu.
Tai Apoll:!c 11tcn applies himfelt to rlle wo,k
2ffi.:n~o. and pnrfua:i t 10 the orders he h'ld rc<.ci1 ed, begms with writing to the fcvcn chur:hes io Aft~.
Mr text iscont~ined in the.firft le!ter, which is i
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inr!;~~:~~~~ ;he '1~! ~;;~:
!'-~ ,ner,
~~h~cet ~i/;~:;.
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J
1
Mdlcr, wh'>m he ch:rnelc,ifc, b, n11c or h;,
~i,.
rious li1les, al{recablc 10 the rep,c:(ent.nion given in
the •ilion above no1iced
anYn°1~/'1~~r:;i:l~~'!,'ki~~sh,-'k:c1:
t~~
~~rn~te~:
fcveo gol1en cindlcfhcks, ani in rhe mid 1 or them
a perfon molt glc.rious anct au..,ull, who, amoni;
other cixu.wrdin..rr circu n!taricct, was u:'1ibited u
holding fcvcn Rut in hi, ri~ht hand,
Conforma.
ble 10 1h11 rep rc(cnlation the melf,ge 10 the church
of Ephtfiil i, rhwi iouuduccd
" Thefc thine;!
faith he th.at holc.leth 1he fevcu Aan in his right
~::d~a~d~:n7ct~~h in the mid,l of the fc,·cn gol•
THU prelate of the epirtle 10 1hat church is fe8:ed for the fobjccl. of •he prcfent d1fcourfe.
It
will lead to a tram of ufetul reAe8ions, adapted to
rhe foh:mn occalion ol our a!T.:mblini: at this time.
Here under the emblernsor golden candlc(licks a.nd
lhuiing {\an it revrefcnu:tl 1hc wor1~ anrl iinport:mce ol Chrifl'1 churchc1, nnd the dignified chuacler a11d rtation ofh1a fni1hful ininillcrs.
In this
p:iffagc we arc 1augl11 the peculiar car& and cognizance which he i1 p1eafcd to take of both, :ind the
fpccial rc:l:11ion h1 which 1hcy !land to him as their
glorious head and king.
How ph:alin!, how ani•
~•~i:r
~
•
:i:
1
1
o:ija~ :~1iki~~c i~it~h~;iJ'~?~~!t
golden candLeltick1 111d holding the Ran jn hi•
right hao:11 l hove ror the c2nd1d ~nd ferious attentioa of thi• chri!liJn audience while ( aucmpt
Come b,idillultration ot the ble{fcd truths contained
io 1his facred paluge.
ticif.",:;~e:::fcn7a~~~
i!t ,t~h:~,:;, c:r"~hfill
under the fymbol of fercn golden candlcAKh.
0
0
~£i::
1 1- ;,;,a~dNpj~:, : : : ~ ~ ~ r:r:~~~~l:·,ch'!"sh~r
~hicb ~uQU{\-;d oJ jull th\l ourubcr i anJ to th~e
the
�~~~,:t:!:~
[
g
J
J:,h~ r:~:
:;tenfi;~11;::.i:~:~~1~'.1JI
ped:1 alfo 1he wh,,lc c:11holic chureh. Tni•, '"1...,e~tr d,fpcrfcri rhroui;h vui,1111 and di(hot tt{;_ioM,
and mccrin,: in d1lf.;rent and thtlrna cnnl(rcg1nnns,
h re.11\y bur one bOOy of which J efo1 Chrifl i1 1h
fo11rc'Tle an•l glorious hnd.
TH1 church, bcing1hus rcprefcnted by (even iold,:n caml:efliclcs, may deno1e it1 bnuty, uccllenet
•
an,1 glory.
IN the 1al,crn;i.cle of old \YU pb,ccd a candle- ;
tl ick cnmpofed of wrought
U.
It crmlii!l'd o(
fncr, hunches, :z:-id co•,t ... intfumany gcU·n l.m;-1.
1·1111 va\m1Mc pi<x-e ol lurn11ure w11 611: I 21 the
fomh fide or the holy place104 fon·ed 10 dluni •• er
the alur of perfume' aoJ the 11hle of fh•..,·-!,:~ .
Th.i canJlf!lick: with iu golJe!l l1m,ts wu 1 1ypic1\ emblem ol the church, enl,g"leut~ and em'k·: etl
b, 1he various in!!•:em::cs ol t•e 4-•lM lp,N
fq
11!11.li·•n to 1h;s a limi!.ar repre!c,'ll.t:.1W1 :. gj,co h
my1 cx 1.
A CAHD LISTICIC. doe1 1101 give I (!Ill o! ii(rlf,
but it 11 an mllrumen1 of CMYtting ,11~ ch!uling
litlll around 11. Ju 1his ref,1eil i• is a " ndll em
ol 1hr church, ""h1~h hlJ no J, •h1 or 1ulk- ta ,/di ; but ii illumi1u1c<I from ,he ~ct
n•£a of
i111cll 1gencc, and holds forth the helu ol- u~b 11d
gr•ce1001'1er1, l 1isinf1haf11!'t-11uiai:: 1.. ,
10d chri!linlS arc llvlcd 1hc h ht el
e •..-·d,
T beirfpiri tual lifo a/ldl,gh i1 ,;med ra Cr l
alone. "Ye wue once: d,1k ,e(1, btu n:-w are••
l1gh1 in the Lord," Whct1 1'<:rfo1aar·1h 11i ... e. •
ly illu mina1 cd 11111 18. in chn,1.•-ler, t:ieit d•
• be·
C<,IIIK' truly illull rious a11d Uenc-h, i.al.
lo
1
~~~!ar::;~~n~:e ~{~"~:ug :~ ::;11,~~1:r:n~: ..~ : .
T111s e 11bleo1 ot a gulden u11Jlcll1u u do.lu
le& dc!lgm.-d IIJ lign1I)' ,Uc i:iu:ee,J1nd r 1:hncf•, \t:l:JU•
ty, 1uJ glury ol 1be churdt al!d ih it.ii lnCSiJ!...:n in
,ti,
�'( ' 1
the riew of Chrill, She it indeed poor, wretched
2nd deformed in herrclf, but co111ely and excellent
by 1lte co.,:,clinerr th:uis put upon her.
In what
h,,eh c:Aim:ation i1fhe held by her royal head and
h utb.rnd I For her redemption he laid down a price:
.~:ni~c::cr::!''::Jci~:~~:~,tbt:J cvTh~:grr:
by
...
poor, milcrablc and wrc1chc.d in hcrfclf; yc:1
her
relation 10 Ch rill, and in cnnfcq11encc of communica1ion1 received from hi, infinite fulncfs, fhc is raifcd to a fi11c dignificJ and j!:]orio1u,
The krip.
cures every where fpnk of the church in ex•hed
terms. She is faid 10 be " ~amilul as Tir~h.
comely as Jcrufalcm," She is dcfrribed as" look11
:~;~:K;/~~1
th
~ ; ~ n ~ a ~;
:,:', !;[~"b111~~i:rs:,!
In 1he Rcvel;uion lhe i, rcprdcntcd u 1hc fpoufc of
ChriA, 1hc: Lamb'• wife, and 1he mother of fai,11s.
Her auire and ornamen1s ;ire vafilv fuperior 10 thofe
of nature llnd art. She i• reprefcnred :as clo1hcd
with the lun, having tile moon under her leet, aod
a crown of twelve fbrs upon hu hcaiJ.
h the -45,h pfalm we h:i.n a defuiption of the
church in 1c,m1 more accommod.itcd to the figura.
1ivcrcprcrcmation of my 1u1. Aller rr;akiog of
111
!~cg~ 1
,~~:~C~I~: ;:~\~ ~~lj 1xf~~~l:ri;;
the chur<.h. 11 The king', d,1ugh1er is all ~lor.ous
Wuhin ; her clothing i~ of wrough1 gold. She Jhall
be bro11i,:ht untn the kmg 111 nunen 1 ol ucallc:.
• work : T he .,i,gins her cumvariiun, th:t.t lollow her
fhatJ be brouf,h1 111110 thee ; "uh glitdncfs ;ind re.
joicing fh,1II they be brough1 : Th,;y lb.ill enu:r in•
10 1he km!(', p~l:1<.e,"
Bu.nvu:.~, the real members of C hrill'schorch
;m: accou1111d his jewels; hia pccuhar uc;1fure.
-=t'hefo an: flylcd " the e11cclle111 of the e,mh ; 1he
!~e~:r::
t',:::~• ~t 1:~~i:'; :;:t ;f!!~ia~; ~~e l~~'td;;
0
1~
\o the next place.
1
SumdlJ,
�r
,o
l
liu.,ndlJ, TH& Mi11ifleu of Chrin, who are here
re1>rdcn1cd u ttar1 which he holds in his right hand.
THE~t (hrs which S.tint John fa,r iu his r1gfit
hmd, he i1 ,o]d, wcrt 1he anitds of 1hc fcven
churche1 ; 1hat i,, che minil\er, l'f thcfc ch•1r..:hc:,,
ro whom 1he ;nelT.al{ts wc:1c fcnt, aud by who~Q
chey were lo be com municated.
TH us the word, whic"i rniniller~ are to NC1Ch 10
men, i• 1he mcO~ge of Chrill. H,s coonfd, ,,,d •
this only, arc they to declare in his name.
ThcJ
:ire 10 come to 1h1: people wi1h a "Thus fai1h th~
Lord;" or with J ohn , lo prdacc their iniln181,:,nc
wi1h faying, •• Thele things faith he that holdcth
the fovc:n fbr~ in his righr hanil, who walke1h in
the mirl(l of the feven gol.!e11 candlelli~ks "
RuT wh,11 I would par,icuhrlv 0011:c i~ th .. ~
J?:~:
.
~:u~~t:,11,.10 '¥h•~i•~i;:1i;•1~n C•~:i:U.rJIJyT~~y
Ccvcnl important ;JeJs ref_,eaing the mi11it·,1al
character aml nfficc .
,.Tur.tilleh.-regii··cntotheMinifl:cuof Chrill:
denotes an cminenl:c uffia1ion in ,h~ church, The
fiar~ have an cxal1d fl:i.tion afug•1cJ 1he"l'I in tl!e
viftb!e heavens. An-I fo i1 hath plcarcJ C·.riff to
appDint to his minifter5 a diftingui!h J pb c in the
firmament of the church,
Huwner ddpired by
many, 1!1c 111initlerial , ili.:c i1 in I~· ;i.1 l,u.nuul-Jc
one. It i, an hi'h anJ holy c.llu,g. Tc,r,poral
ho11or~ and o: nolumcrus arc not in~~{ conncflcd
w11h it;, ,·wt! hence it is no wonJcr it fh'lul.l b? h•ld
in little c!tiimuiun by men of the world. But ,here
arc honors anJ priviicges belonging to the tai1hful •
minili_ars ol Chri!l", which 1nnfccml all car1hl7
d1gni11cs. T!1ey bdongtoaltin~do.n, thlU(li nol
ot this world, which yet, in true di~nity :1n,I g'ory,
as much exceeds the cmpi1cs of it _a, the hlaHo is .., ~
higher than the earth. {n tl:il lon.;.!om the) \I,!_
lum. urcJ wi1h a high fia1ion ; •nd 10 1hem i, com~
G>
mit1i,d a 1rnll ol 1hc: greatdl magnitude and imporlancc:
�[ n ]
•nn-notbin,: lef1 1h.1n the g1orious fl:Ofptl of 11,e
D cited God They ue amb.1fl~do11 uf ,h., king e t
he:ncn, fcnt in Ms name, and by his auchurity co
• r~ocj;41e .1 treat¥ of ruce-t• propofetn,I n:plai n
lerri,1 of reconc,J,a1hn to 1!,c ,ruihy rebel• o! 1bc
liu11,1n race. In their rov M ~hOrr'i n1111c 111d
llcul lhcy ne 10 bcfccch finnen lo be reconciled to
G,o.rl, In fhor·, the minillcr~ of rtli~ion arc the
to, fren11c11 of the Lord ol ho(lt, 1hc fcrn,u of the
molt h,gh G,.J, whore ufficc is to th~,., unto men
thew.,~ nt fal~ation, T hrir pb.ce and Rafr,n is
thcre·ure not cnly 111 i,1,pur11n1, l,u1 dii;:nificd-;
Yet by no ruean1 .1lfo1din;: anr ground l<>r l'r1dc or
itil-u;aht11•n. True the guf~,cl trcafure is im'in7i,;C!y rich i bu1 they lllli:h .. hom 11 "rntmllld,
:ue r oor earthen veffeb, that 1ll 1l::c u..:cl\.11c7 of
the po,.u migh1 be of God ind 001 ol man,
2 TH1r,..cmblcm, br wh1c:h n1initkn ue rcpre~ ~,11icd in 1hc tcu, roin!I ouc th.: "~11IHi1y and or- '
Jer, "'hich bclon;Z 10 their office, aod which ~re
necdfJr_y 10 the i,lue difchuge ol the importani du•
tin o! 11.
T111 true minifleuof Chrill rtfcml,1e thole lu,ninuitl of hcaye,i, whic:h move, in ol,edience to
,:,~ lau prefc.ribed them, in one ltcaJ7 undoiating
courfc round their common centre, 1hc fun. from
.. hich 1':~y dcri,c their light and inlluencc. The~
are ccr11m I.Jin of I HTJ d,!Tcrcnr dcfcrip1,on
which fometimu make 1h!it api,c_n~nce-ficcy
• -CorAtU, 1h31 are ec:ccnmc: and move 10 • I.I dircc.
1i.in1. There fitly rcpr~fcnt thole falfc, 11rcg11lu
tc1chu~. 10 whom lhc fcripu,rc gives 1he name of
a,•11d,ri11t.Jlilrl. Thcfc_blaice lor a Y1·h1lc_ in very
., 11,lllcady :md uutic mohon•, and 1hen d1fappeu,
_J,~~~h:;
~;/::~: ~;:~iJ; ~~,n~~:\~::. S~~h:':;
tullow cbcfe fiery mc•curs, 1hth- iz11u fal11i, w1lf
1
~/~
0
10
!;t;~~~ ~'::110,"':l ;;;'~
rt,c'\~hi"~~ ru::hh
...:fa ;uiJ error.
3·
�Cu l
3. T1111pt:ll1ticn of Aus, bting 1pp1ied_10 gorpel miaiftcn, may denote 1hat u.cctl~nt br1ghm_er1
and purity of doctrine and eonYCrfauon by which
1
th
~N"; ~~£~s"t~:rcr:i~d~ n the briglatncfs of the
firmament and as the !tars which adorn it. ln ~dcr to this, and that they may be ufcful and mai~rain 1hcir dignified (l:ltion, it is rcquifitc 1h31 thc!t
heads be rcplcniO-.cd ..,.jch light and, thcu
hc::irts warmed with the love o! God and the foul,
of men, Would ,hey be inOrumc~t::il of promo!•
i
}~~~~i~!,d~:t~h~~~ci'~~f~ 1::'~h~'r:t .~:.,°mf,~i~~:!
-
0
·,-
they muff take diligent heed 10 1hcmfdvc1 and 10
their doBrinc : Nu1 oaly 10 preach the pure a A
an,dultcrated 1ru1h1 of the gofpcl m a plain and
t':lc:ir manner, with fidelity and 7,cal; but 10 rcC'Ommc,:d the religion 1hcy preach by a pun: aml
•holy life and coevcrfation. Nothing is or morG
importance to the honor anfl fuccers of 1he chrir. '
tian minift,7 th:tn fuch :a rc,nllity in minificu
Nothing will fo cffctl1u1ly ,ccommcnd and en ..
force •he truths they preach, as to be themrelvu ho ..
ly in their hearts, their lives, and convcrfalio:i ; tc,
be exainples 10 1heir 6nck, and 1he world, in .,
word, in convcrfa1ion, in charity, in faith :md purity. This will at!J true luRre and weight 10 the'
mini!lcrial charaB:tt. But wi1bou1 1his gr.ice ib
the heart, and a cortcrpondcn1 depor1ment, the
brightdl p:ms and 1he mof\ thininx abilities will
hne little efficacy in winning fouls to ChnR. •
This was the opinion of a compettnl juJgc.
1
' Though I fpcak with the tongues ol men and of
Angels, and have not charity, J am btcumc 11
foundinij brafs or 1inkli ng cymbal."
...
WE have jun ai!uweJ that gilts :u1,I le::irning .a-..._
miuifler arc ddir2bje and importao1, S1. Paul I
i.
-chc fame. In his difcuurfc. w 1hil fub~cl
¥Jell as in other p_ar\3 @f JC'f1puuc, Ytc arc Jl'
�[
l
•3
0
:!n
;~:f~s':~d :~~ir:!:n~~ni¥i~ ~ri~!r, ~f
m,nillm be1n11: 10 communiciitc knowltdec 10 oth1
~/
'(i;~:,t,,:
;:,>ditta~!r~t/r :~ii;:e,~hcyH~::~d
t.:;~rcre wu to commit 1hc gofpd to fuch u were
,l,/1 f, ,,a.-'1 ,1h,r1. The ignorant 1rnJ unlearned
arc incapaUc of this.
lluT what we here contend for i~, that the minmen of Chr:11 mull nol only be le.a.wed .ind gilled,
t~:h'
;:;,
!er. One
0
f~ ~'
~~J ~n~:1~oowc:cet
::~;~lit~i~i[~
wi1hou1 the other "·ill not be fof6cienr.
He who pot1elrc1 the l:argcft (hare of both is doubt-
.• bc{l qual16ed for the Clinil\crial work and is
motl likely 10 be nfcfol 1bcrtio. h i, uue, _howev-
er,
1h11
the rucce& of mcuu depend• on God, who
in hit divine fnvcrcignty may c1nploy thofc as in-
;:~:~~n~i
•~ ~l;: ~';;r ::~ ~':p~~~:ri~l:: ""t1c\~:
not aud,ori~cd 10 fay tha1 it is im11ofiibfc tor an \g-
norimt and unfanB:ificd minifl:er 10 be in any 111•
1
1h
~"•:~~!vu:~:~•~ o;f ~rott; :,6n~~t
~0 ~1!:fj
h1mlclf be rejetled. Bui H foch char.aB,u ue
unqualified f°'" the w«k oi the minillry and hnc
110 call 10 cn,i:agc 1n i,, we ainnor fuppore thar God
""ill much own and b!cfs their J;zborl. But 10 pro• ~<I'd,
.i:,c:;t
◄· l'aOM the metaphor in the lest we nny re.
marlt on the dilfu,ncc thcrtl i1 even among 1l;c
s:,ood miniflen of Chrifi. As among the heavenly
• luminarioi 1bc1e is an app:ncnt variety \u their lizc,
1
rr~:~~lor~lo~v~· inca::;g d:r:rel ~mr~:~u
-church, fo1nc lhinc wilh a brighter lullrc tbao 01h..
•~t~:!
""·
Somcmlnillcrs hlve ttcei.cJ from 1he F:uh-
"' ol lip:h1t lupcnur drnrccs uf ll, t.t and kotrwledgc.
"i ~cy j><>tkJs ri~r:u i;ifu and ha}C l,tcll tuct>lcd to
B
..ul<•
�,, l
auke higher improvemen ts. There arc fl:an ot 1l1e.
firtl magnim,le, diffu ling around rhcm a glori?LJ•
ud~ncc a11d 11 benigl\ i nfh1cn..-c,
BUI 01hcn, like
1t1e inferior pbncl<, fhinc \\ilh prnpnrlionablv fa in•
1cr heams am! lrfs dfea.
Yci thefc, by fai1hlul""'"'
pcrrL~ering in .::i rcgul:tr, ev1ngclic1I coo~~iU
attain to 111 1lluflrioo1 r:mk ant! to moll important
di,('ui!ics in the region, of tight above.
TH ull we bal'c brit'fly confidcrcd the churches ,r
Chri11 :wd minHlers of the l(Ofpcl under the emble--
;:,~~:lc:~1:~~~:i~~d ~,\~in~1~:~:~ !~~ ~::!•c,~!
dc~1oml to upla.:O the Jiguifo:ant import ot tbi.
C"Omp:irifon.
T111aE Kanothcr 1hing rcm:arln.ble in tbc paf(:lgc before u,, which dcmand1 our p:micular aucotion; which it,
".Thirdly, The ~·onderful perfon here defcribed 31......,.
hokli11,g 1hr lbu i:n his right hand, and walking in
1',e mldf¼ o! chc g.<>lden c;md leHickt. Thiipcrfou
,,·c have ~•rn,!v f:,cn is •he Lord Jefus Chri!t, cho
tternal Son of God,·" ho, in 1hc ronlext, Gyles
h imfc ll ,he Alpha .11nd 1hc Omega, the firn and ,he
bR, who "a~ dc.11d and isalh-c, and liveth forever
fll<ltc. Thi1 \\ n chc pc:rfon , aml 1hi, chc charallu
nl --him whomonr Aroflle f1w in 1hc mi1ut of 1he
fc 1·ct1 .golden cmdlcfiic.kt and holding chc .(t~cn
11
0
tc g~;~iu:r:i:1~
the church, which it will be fui•.abltlor us 11ifiin81y
to con lidrr. Fir!!, His l•o!di111 t/:tjlt,rs in/Jis rigl:t
r'and .- aml Srcondl,;, His walii"l i• th, miljl rf•
tin g,lim u11uf/,jHrl1. The fir fl vlf'w , which 11
'
llcrc ~iven ot Ct.rill, is tlcfignciJ 10 rcmiod u1 oJ
fc vent i1nporian1 mnhs,
1 . IT io.npl ics 1hJt lie pe,fdlly knows his minif.
:en, He \\'ho c,~u.ed 1hc Jlars und pbc1:ai them ill
the fi.rm.amrn1; ht: ""ho know, 1heir ucmbcr ami
t.'&11 t:.ll thcnl ;ill bv thdr lllllf'.CI ; 1ha1 ATmlgl'lly
•
Oo111iJc1Clll
~;r:h~*\!~ ~:r~!;,
ab~:{cic:ir~i •
�J
( ,5
O·nni(dcni Iking i1 do,ibtlcr~. !!Cq11:ai111cd with the
mini/kn br 1hc go(,>el.
H1mfclf ha•h ordained
t~~!1h" t:f~~;'.!·
::~ ~cr~~rd;~~~c
inB{hchi;o11:~
cl'11JIC'i1d:1 where 1hey fias,.1.
H1' kno11's their
par1icularn:111t9':mdchiu3::u, HJ fees in whin
mutna they ~rform their rcfpeAive luntlions ;111d
•:1fwcr 1hc en,\ of 1hcir appointmrnl,
.,_
'1, C H111 r'1 holding 1hc nJr, in his rijj:ht h1nd
ti,~v,q th.11 h:1 minincn arc upheld by his power.
Fr->m hi,n 1hcy ~cri1'e :1_111[1at tigl1t a.d li!c, that
ffri:og:th amlabi!uy, which t!icy po!Teh anJ cxer~
,;::1',
d:~~~e1,w:~~1.c~~1 .:~:, 'r:;:'1~rfiiikr. t~e-!~:r,:1
wuuIJ !?t c:r.tm,s,1,,h~J : th..:f..: :hr, woul,1 t..11.
3. THI ul-'r..:ltioa ia 1hc tc:,;t hrttier Jrnot~s
1hu miniltcrs are under 1hc fpecial dircd1on of
~ 1 1 . As 10 the llars, ir is to be rcmcmGcrcd
o,.u the Supreme LorJ ha1h lixcJ 1hcir !lat ion. He
dif,,ufes them IU tlmr rcfpcdivc orbits and 1\ireth
all 1heir mmions.
The co11mdlion wl1ich 11ue
mindter~ receive, and the power a ncl a111ho rity
with which they are in \'cfie1I, com1.1s !rom ChriU.
He orJ~r• their pamcul;ir pl11:c, prcfcribcs the
fphcrc ,n wh,ch they move, _:uul appninis 1heir \a•
r10111 uper.aiiu:11. Arni the lii;lu wh!ch thcv liilfo/e
b d,riv,; l rr, n tli'll 1hc hmn1.-1n .-r light :rnd 111'i•1e:,ce . Tn<:fc tt.irs fume witn a borruwcd luar,_.,
wh,ch lc..1J~ ,n: 11 ubfcrvc, on~e more.
~linihen
b~1:1g m Chri,l's hrnd 1111p1ii:1 thei r entire Ocpcud.ince on h1,n. Th"y are 11ifl1umcnt1 \\-h1~hhccm-
• t~;~10:~~:~t!~~1o~~~ht:
";:,tt~i~n~~i' :h:' :1~~
m,1mcn1ou1 .1lf11r 01 mi:11', fal\·.1uon ,
Thu~ .ire
1
0
1:-11:1 ho1,urc..!, b111 OI rncmfdv.:1 they can du nu:'; .
• ing-, All 1h.: clli~acy ol 1h~1r cnJc.ivuur., 11 10 be
af,.nbcdtu HIM, wnuf.: lcrvanu 1hey arc:, and by
wnufo aid thev pertorm thcu worlt,
"I ha1c
-- pl..1n1cJ, Apol\01 1.-atered, b<11 GoJ ga¥e the inc1cafo."
Lin·
�/
[
,6
J
LIT us now 111end 10 that other view, our teJtt
~~e
::r.~,":~, !:1k:i~ •f;'4!' !~da'~;
1
0
~~,:• i~f
r~t:,
1'1e feven ,e:oiden candlefticks, This /pea.ks in gen~
ual that fpecia l relation in which the churchet
Jh.ncl, to thei r fupreme head,
It denotes n1ore
pu1icul1rly,
f, Hu abfo\utc :au1hori1y :rnd dominion. C hril\ •
frs king forever upon ihe ho?v hill of Zion, T~i•
kingJo:n he hath founded b1· lus power. Ju w1l•
0
1
3
b~ ;i:·b~~~e
~~
•El or fov1reign grace, he hath conllitutcd them ooc
fj)i ritual boJy, of wb.ich hlmfelf is the gloriou,
had : an•I by vim,e of an unalienable right, prelitk1
O\Cf, .rid foperi~tends their concern,, rules in the
mid!l of , hem, or,bin1 hws and ordinances for I ~
.-nd C:ainu their coiire obedicnc•.
:2. TMt LorttJ,fus, 11'10llr:ingin themidfi nf the
golden candlellicks impom hi1 fpecial care and p:t•
tronage. Tht: Almighty Redeemer hath engaged
to uphoM and delcnd his church.
" A• we h:n·e
heard, f,mh 1he pf!lmitl, fo have we fcen in 1he city
ol rhe L'>rd of hofb, in 1/1, ci1r or ou, God ; God
·will rfl ■ blilh it forever. Lei moum Ziuo re.joice,
let 1be d.:u1gh1cr1 ot Ju1fah be &lad, be.:aufe ol thr
3•1dgmcnts, Walk aDout Zion and go round abu'!a b,r, 1ell 1he 1oweu thereof, muk ye well .Ii.er bul¥.'arkJ, con!ider her palaces,"
T M! church 1s as much di!linguilhed for her
Hrcngth and fccurity, u !or her bc;u.11y and nee\. •
le_nec, God Almighty is engaged in her behalf l
h1mfelf iJ her glury and delence. Hence:- the gate.r
of hell c1011 never prcv,;u\ again!l her,
Atai,,, His ••alking it1 1hc miJll of the g'llJen ..,..
ca,11.llclt1ckJ, mtm1a1cs 1he fpccial prefcnce of C,:rift
wi,h his people. By his wurd, h,, ord1nJntQ 11.nd
fpirit, he rcfolc, among and converfcs with 1hctn,
u Tiu: Lvrd luuh chofen Zion, he ltath. J dircd it
fo,
~i?aa~k~:f.'h:~~~h ~:n::~~:~
i:;;
�( ') J
(<>r hi,habit:uion. This i, mv rc!l fort\~r, hcrt'
will f ,lwdl, filr I have Jdin:d it ; I will abundanl1• b!cf1 h,·r ;iro\·ifion ; I "·ill fa1ialy hu poor w1t!i
brea ! ; J .,..,11 lik.c.-ifc do.1th I ~r prtdh wi1h falv:iuon, an,l her faints lh.1ll 1ho•1• I r j•J)' ; 11,cre will (
make 1he horn ot David to buJ, J ha~c 1mfai ncd a
lamr lur mine inh,.riuncc."
H1:11cc further.
The x1•rcffion un1lcr cunfi•lcr,11ion im 1,1!1\'I the lo\·c
nf C n l 1u 1hc church, and 1hc JJlclfur:. he takn i11
h (. n,~ . Tbe church is his v:ncy:ml, wtmh hi,
own ril(ht han,1 hath plant:,!, fr i• .\ gJrJen, which
r;;~;. !!' :~~~~
1
~; v~fi\~nr~nri;~~1:h,f1i~c;~•~
(l~c~~~:
walking 111 1hcir guJcos aoJ orch.uds to behold .1.,,J
pul.lkc ofdu: fruil wh1d:1 1hcy yield, 11 A garden
1nclul.:J is my filler, my r.,oufc.
Thy planll; are
111 orchard of pomt~ran:ites, with pie ,fant froiu ;
camph1rc, with fpikcnarJ; Citbm111 and cionimon .
with all trees of frankinccnfo t myrrh .i1d aloes,
with all chid fp<..:e, ; a foun1ain ol garden1, a well
ol livin( w11cr1 ;and flrcams fro-n Lebanon." In
fuch a fi1iuradvc nunnc r doth Chrilt fe1 forth the
1rnnclmef1 and fmitfolncfs of the church, :inJ the
fpuim.il fragu.ncy :ind fwec1m:f1 11( 1hofe divine graces, which himfcl1 hath impbn1cd.
br " w,rd, tmd 1, nn<l~ri,.
CHarST's walim1:; in 11,c mh.Jn of 11,c golden candlctlicks, lhc,u th..: int,m.ue .-o,me.-hua
wfiich he ho:di w:1h hischur.. h~,; the --ud kno«!.
11
~:~~a~~c;:~~i,~~::1fa~~:if!~1~ ~~~11~~'1:'c.~
and ddrghtcd he is wi1h 1hulc, whc; apprn~e 1hcmfelvc1 h11 nbed1cn1, faithlul chiLlu;n, anJ 1"rrva.11s,
Thefc arc lavorcd v. 11h ligu.il 1uki:ns <>f the 11i,ine
love, ,h.y arc eniit:hcd and aJomc_d v.i1h plcn1..:ous
commun1c;a11ons o! ,he divine f1,11m and gu,ce ; 1hc:y
fhall be a crown of g!o,y in the hand of the Lo1d,
a11J a royal di;atlcm in the Ii.int! ut their Got!,
1iAVIN$ illus a11cmptcd an 11lutt,;11ion, of the
r1::~
B It
;a,poi1aa,
�d
I"-~
--~
- ~
[•8]
imporunt 1nitl1! contained and rug~encd in our
tex1 ; what now remains is fome improvement of
whaf you ha\'C heard, 1oge1hcr wiih thofr p:uiicular
addref!i-s, which curtom and propriety dem:11:d on
d1cfe folenm occaftons, In 1he firll place, from the
r,rcfoni fubjec! we mav be led to rc9ecl with dc\·cut
grarnnde en che :dlonifhing com.kfccnfions of divine
grat•e.
•
\V1LL the Mofi high in verv deed dwell with
tncn 0-1: earth ii Cehold, 1hc h~on t>f heavens uo~
n91 contain him ; yer 1h:11 fuprerne hfonarch ot the
univerfe, God's co-eqnal Son, has bowed the heavens and come down, :rnd 1.witcd himfclf with du(l:
•r.d norms. The eternal !Ford was made flell1 am!
t.lweh among men. The Sun ot God came 10 eR·
1
1
~l:e~:,~ct~i!~~j1:: f e~: , :~~
:1:~l~r;~~~d
befo,e 1he race ol all people ; :i. light to lighten the
gen1iles, and the glory of lfrcal.
THIS diYinely excellent a11d glo,ious perfon has
not only, at the amazing price ol his owo invalua•
b!c blood, purchafed :.ind re<lecmed a people 10 him.
ftlt i. invcUcd them with many inefiimablc privile.
gu aml b!effings j and entitled them to exceeJing
great and_ preciolls promiles ; but he condcf.:.ends 10
dwell :ma walk with them i 10 teach, gutdit and
uphold them ; to communicate of his fullnefs and
replenifh them 1,ri1h his grace. Hence,
Sumdt, , W £ fee v.hence it is that the church of
God has llood its ground through all age~, in the
rnidll ot ,!angers, oppo!ition and em:mies, 1he moft
potent and formidable. Th.-1 Almi&hty Redeemer,
,~ho firll re!cucd his peovle, hath engaged to protect
& defi:nd them. TIie floods havclirted up their voice,
the floodsha,re liffc<l up their wavesi thelehavc th rel.•
tened lo O\lcrth,ow and [wa llow up the church; bu!
the Lord on high has been mightier than the noifo of
many waters; yea, 1h.-n the might~ wave$ oft he (ea.
T~a lteithcn have raged i the kings and rulers
aod
(~:a~~~~
• 1
I
�'9 -]
aud t:l,igbty of the earth, under 1}.c direfl.ion a r1
influence of 1hc more formiJ.ible powers of darknefs, have combined their forces and exerted 1hi;ir
,-,hole fircngth :m~ policy; have employed .;II their
·- ;irt and !kill ro fubvert aod dcllrov 1hc M-:ffi,h 'c
0
1
"', ~~j"1{! i:.i~h
~=~P:hinfi~a:c'J1, ~:shJ!~~~~• 11:;~~
impuu:nr malice: Hi~ fuperitir witOom and power
have e~cr coun1cu.8:ed their infernal pluts; h1V.-:
repelled and del~•cd their Jaring 2uem:m- \Vfti~c
Zion's King fithts for Zion, !he is perfelUy fr::ure
and may hid defiance l'J earth and h~II.
AND 1he lame divine pow•r, which uphoM, ti·.-:
church, doth likewire protea and tldenJ her tair,·ful miniltcrs: for he whu walks in the midll of t1'r.
. Iden c:rndleilicks, holds the !hrs 111 his righ1 mind.
Hence it ii. 1hat there lights :ire not e11ing1iiU1eii ;
hut are able to maintain their {b1ions; to holJ up
the light of truth; and the prince of darkncfs cannot 1,1rev.1il to envt:!opc the chuu::h , u well as the
world, in total d.1rkncfs. Tlnrerorc
'T'hird/7. TH£ view , which our fubjc& give, ns,
mufl afford abundant c,mfolation 10 the friend; of
Zion, The church, though rich and fplen<lid,
beautiful and glorious by her rdaiion IO 1he Son of
God, i, yet, in hcrfelt, very weak and defencelefs.
Her foes arc many and nrong.
They feck every
way ir. their power, 10 effect her ruin.
The mini!lcrs o! Chrilt, though !hey ha\•e the :ippe!latiou of
,._ :angel~, are but men ; ihnugh refomLlc<l u> fia u and
po!fcffing and eminenr llatio11; yet ii they had no
ti:
!It.
fthee~!~~t;~J~1:.
1i°: ;~;r,f m;:r~l~ ; : 1\ 1:yb~~e~
church would have a feeble ddencv, and woulJ
1
;
~
3
1
1:
1
1:~":
inc\•i1ab!y fall a prey to her enemies. This being
the cafe, how comlor1ablt: is it to renca upon that
fpeci:al relation, which b01h churches and minirtcrs
Hand in ro him, who is the lountain of power,
wifdom and light ; That lhc (oa ol God, the Al•
mighty
�•• J
mi~'itv lArd of hnven and eu1h is their ~rious
lr.ini:; :ind Swiour, has engaged to fupport :ind d lend ,hem ; and has nromifcd hi, all-powerlul and
in~nitely gr1cinu1 prefcncc 10 be with them to I.he
end of time, Thar promifcd pro1caion and pre•
frnce he hath hitherto afforded,
Tuts day, my, brethren, and the folemnify for ,.,
,..hich we are CQUfcned, arc wi1ncrrc~ of 1hi, blctTcJ tru1h. They joy!ullv procl.1im th" continued
cue, faithfolncf~, and lo,ing-kindncf, nl our GoJ
and Hcdcemcr to his people,
Nutwithflandin,,r afl
the oppufition which has been made 10 1h1· Chriflian
caufc, 1he neglca and con1cmp1, with which Chrif.
ti:rn dol1rine1 and infti1ution1 arc, at this day, trea.
t<'d by many; and that infideli1y and ungo,llincf,.
v.hicb i1 fo prcvalcn1 ; yc1 we fee and rhould gn.1ctully notice how 1he churches of Ch rill arc Rill p ~
fton·cd, :rnd divine inllitmions main1aincd. And ;a!.
11,o' the minitlers of the gofl)f;I do no1 longcon1inue
by reafon ol dcJ1h, :ind foine of 1hdc tighn are oiher"' ife removed, or cx!inguifhed ; tCI oihers ue raifcd up 10 fupply ihei, 1•\.:1 e, lln,l !ht: slorioua hc;i.d llf
rhc church i, flill makin~ provifion for the ,~plcn•
ilhing ol hit gol,len c.1ndlc!ti~la. \Vitli fentimcnts
ol d.. vout th;i.nkfulnds and praife, it becomes UJ,
a, th11 time, 10 ad:n•H•ledge the go,odncf, ot divine
proviJen.-e, in rhis rcrpea, 10 1he chnr!;'h and people o! God, tor whofe fake we arc 11Tctnbled on the
prdcn1 occafion.
1
ht1:~1~~,t~~n~c;~~~l1:~i:~~i1t~~r~• 0:- ,~; •
mini:lry, anJ placed over this people in the Lord,
claims onr panicular attention.
bu~~~
D,arSir;
CoKTUH L ATlNC ..,,j,h you 1hc dig-
nified R:,1ion, to which divine providence is railing
0
la
0
:~~i~~~:·1:~~t:if~::: ~:l~ct,h~h:an~:;~
::r::~h~
uirnde of 1ha1 office, ,m which yuu arc entering, I
hcl fcnfa1iow; of plu.ru,und juy iommioglc::~ with.
~
(t11uwcar,
�[ .. J
l
•11~ el deep folicim,I.: and cotictrn 1 which I
t e1!il,,- txprcf~.
An high hon,,r dmh 1he
l
ol Z1,tn confer on you, on me, anJ on all his
.,. .:, ilcn, by gh·in~ us fo con(pi~\IOJ~ a pl.ace in
•11 lrn1gJom ; but you will tc:ncrnl>cr 1h11 the poA:
1
d~!~~l:1~
d~i~~~·cr~hfs
thltof "Light of1he world;" bur a ci1yfc1 upun
an ,11.:,nnol be hi:I, M,111y eve, will be upon
1 ~ You wilt haye .~cEJ :o Jo.)\: rliligcn1lv 1ct
., ·rfell an I w:.llr: cm:um!pc81y before n1hers,
) ur duty i• 10 inilma, tnlif 61.fen, ,Ji~'t '"d gui,..le
t:,11'1£' that ~oncern 1hcir c·.cr!ai\lni; puce. We
l fOU 11c, 1:, • go..l<l mufort-, ,;111hfid fc>r fo
a.-n)Or11n1 a work; btit }O•l will !land 111 eonf!1n1
rnd of f,mher ligi! and d:~a on !rom ab,wc, The
8
~;:;:r:•~-~fch C~rf~
ahi~,
f~';o~ ~:~tot~~:~~~~• :i~r~'.' F~:r~ :~ ;~:i
ani about 10 n:cch·e a comm1ffian and a ch.arge the
mofl folcmn anJ momcmou, ; on the rai1filul d1f~
nd 0
11
~e
~c:\::
d h~:r:~:~t
f:r·~t;:~.:r~~:,~f?r~
dcncc, pl:1cing you
i11
i:
b
one or hi• aofdcn candle.
This it, 1hat you may give light 10 all a,.
0
0
1
y:~ ~~f'finti;·:
\ed from l,ghr, and i:1 6z:od orpofilioo to it. Cl,riA
fends you 10 thc!c benigh1eJ crutures 10 opco t_hrir
t)C•, hl 111rn t~~m fri>m darlrncf1 h> It;h•, aod Imm
the power ot S:11,1;11 10 G...d; t!ut 1 1
r rf't'civc
for,1vcnd~ ol fins and an inheritance
them
that arc lantJLficd.
l T.ltUIT, ,Sir, it will not be your chief concern to
make a brilha111 fig.ire m.. the worl_d, anti to fh111e
in the eyes of men ; b11t 1 hy an ail1vc, d1h,;cu1, p.nd
lutlilul d1fchargc 01 the variou~ 1lutie1 o1 your lacrcd
offi~c, to approve 70Urfelf 10 your d1v111e Lord an.J
M.11lcr ; 1h.1t your be:m b:: waun,J with lo~e to
GuJ a11d the fuulr of incA. o and tha.1 1 07 the puu~
Ricks.
::11~r~i·miJ,l::.
a\.I~ f.t/!~1:.
�( " J
er \ogr ,foS:rine, .. 'Id eumplct r._u n-eo
rJ
u}~-i!o~\h!:m'l~ll1:.:::;;;, :~;~i~i~~u !~'":J:;1,
:! C~~:r.• :"~ t~r~,~~~W~ !r~~~:1~!/'f~~~
1
1
1
~ 1~;:
J:i ihc prul.-cutioa ol y<.l\lr.\Ol)flt yo11 urnl1 npca
mu..-h ,1.tliculty aod oproritNn fl'IJ,n the rrince or
d,rt ..cf•, lro,n 1hcignvr1r,,:e, pri,1.-, anJ ~"crlC1•.rr, of men, horn the 1c1np1a•ioa1 aoJ ..Jluremen r1
cit 1he worhl, anJ frJ:n lh~ rcNtinl:I,, <.."Offuf)(io ,i
dll:a~:;;;o,~e:"r·hr:~l~I ,:"'~ ~~5o~~~hc~i1hhi~b•:
" .. ; but 10 etthe 1fl'I 10 r:o fdrth, this J.1r, n ,t
t,ib,11r.~~ ~i:"K!:~:-li11'm~f,'::'t,~ ;~.~l~IU~,-~~ b;~
Ille puiotti in yuu, •ealtncf1.''
Yoir b.ueh.ir.l a•,.,wof&lle Sr,11 ol G...S.u holi~
inKlhe!bnlrl hia r;('"rh.J. u,.. an ,ru,11n·. ~
Oe tho 1gflt ! 0 uu!1, lk'.ar Sir, put Ill e1111te cnn:id~nct in 1114 )>u""'rr, ,,..;p, 111 , ,Hl I gra.:o 1•1 ch,tt ,\\ .
m,gf11y kdccmtr, an,I )OU nctJ 11"1 do11bt ofbt-ing
fopporiuJ, uphclJ, ~nJ Urrts! I th1t>11~!1 1h11 d11li..:,1!t
wu11rc, fie l~iihf.il LU •h• 1m1\ r,·p,1!'cJ in )" 1u,
1 1
1
:"c~,~~,~~;i~-!~.
1 ~: :~
d-·,u1nh, do ~6: •i.h \OU 11te n:nc prcftn;c .anJ
i"CI: thro b. b, -~
ol • .,,,, ,n111 try,
.May
1 c:oA11pu. It
t,1 1'h, 1111i,h i1, rC:.a1iog ht he1
an•J I~" ~p I ",; '·J'· e q y :r hgn1.
\nJ,
b.a1·m11: u,rnc.J w ,or tu r :it. ul c ~. mar you ,:.
nalJy !
!tied IUlh k t1 0 J(ft_, . I l l ,.:nJ ttiqe
ti
11.:lm1e el ~ l l r ~ t , .anJ .u:
11
-n•" .and c: r.
I TU1tN to J. Lfr,:-h a Jc.,,, wonb lf"I lhe-c:hurc:h and
~h,:'L,ao f11Clt'tf, llfhu wor1h·p 111 1t111 pl.a,'e.
D,.,,.IJ B,l~,rl .- W1 parukc lar)'tl.)' Mith you
in lh, Jul u, 1h11 day , 111J tinc:·er..:lr J<Hn In humble
a.,knowleJ1.-,o:nt1 ul guno,dc 1nJ pu,fc hi G ,J
l•r 1&, m..01re!luior.1 .i: b1 1
A.lid fn.-,r towud~
;,,.~t~
•:;~;~:10':-W~t~1•~~
'°"
�
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Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
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Title
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Sermon Delivered At The Ordination Of Rev. Joel Baker, June 21, 1797
Description
An account of the resource
A discourse delivered by Rev. John Emerson, Pastor of the Congregational Church at Conway, MA. on the occasion of the ordination of Rev. Joel Baker becoming Pastor of the Second Church of Granville (the West Granville church).
This document was donated to the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum by Mrs. Leonard Dickinson of Suffield, CT. on June 1, 1976.
Date
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21 Jun 1797
Rights
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Digital Image Copyright 2023: The West Granville Congregational Church, West Granville, MA., 01034
1797
Granville
Joel Baker
John Emerson
Massachusetts
ordination
West Granville
-
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cf508fc646d14b5b2075d3e9215fb5e8
PDF Text
Text
Theoria to practica and Congregational Independency:
From John Singleton Copley’s portraiture of ‘Liberty,’
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew identified, to
Rev. Lemuel Haynes’s Liberty Further Extended, c. 1776
Corey Phelon Geske
�Theoria to practica and Congregational Independency:
From John Singleton Copley's portraiture of ‘Liberty,’
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew identified, to
Rev. Lemuel Haynes's Liberty Further Extended, c. 1776
Corey Phelon Geske
Commemorating Juneteenth 2023 and the 270th anniversaries of
the July 18, 1753 birth of Rev. Lemuel Haynes and
the incorporation of the district of Granville, Massachusetts, January 25, 1754.
Also recognizing ‘America250,’ the Nation’s Semiquincentennial, July 4, 2026.
Published by the Granville History Digital Collection, sponsored by the
MABEL ROOT HENRY HISTORICAL MUSEUM at the GRANVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY
and the NOBLE & COOLEY CENTER FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION
GRANVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS
May 30, 2023
Granville, Massachusetts
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica
�Cover Illustrations: (Upper Left) West Granville Congregational Church (1778); (Left) Rev.
Jonathan Mayhew by John Singleton Copley engraved by Giovanni Battista Cipriani (Private
Collection); Rev. Lemuel Haynes, portrait illustration (artist unknown), from Rev. Timothy
Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (1837),
Public Domain, CC; (Right) Rev. Lemuel Haynes’s Liberty Further Extended . . . MS Am 19071907.1 (608), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
© Copyright May 30, 2023
All rights reserved
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica
�Abstract
Adding to Jules David Prown’s comprehensive study (1966) and illustrated catalogue raisonné of
America’s leading colonial artist John Singleton Copley, this research identifies and publishes for the first
time as such, the visual image of Copley’s previously considered “destroyed” portrait of
Congregationalist minister Rev. Jonathan Mayhew. Considered a leading forerunner of the American
Revolution, Mayhew planted the seeds of American independence through influential and controversial
sermons spoken at Boston’s West Church and later published. This research establishes, too, that
Elizabeth Clarke Mayhew, continued her late husband’s work with long-overlooked success, and
commissioned Copley to paint two pastel portraits of Mayhew, fully appreciating the very high potential,
realized within months, for one of the portraits, that she sent to London, to be engraved in London and
disseminated in America. Mrs. Mayhew gifted that portrait, previously considered, “unlocated,” to
Thomas Hollis V, who commissioned Giovanni Battista Cipriani to engrave it.
This discovery adds perspective to a new look at Copley’s transatlantic influence in support of ‘Liberty’ in
America and its extension to the abolition of black enslavement, notably through Mayhew’s
Congregationalist preaching, which marked pivotal points in the American quest for independence and
in Copley’s own developing oeuvre of ‘Liberty.’ Mayhew’s defense of civil and religious liberties deeply
influenced John Adams and the American mindset. What Hollis commissioned Cipriani to inscribe
beneath Mayhew’s image, describing the minister as an “assertor” of liberties for “mankind,” carried
weight throughout the colonies for all races, perhaps most notably in western Massachusetts.
To (West) Granville, Massachusetts, the future Rev. Lemuel Haynes was brought as an infant in 1754, by
the Congregationalist Deacon David Rose, following, and perhaps in response to Mayhew’s sermon A
discourse concerning unlimited submission and non-resistance to the higher powers: with some
reflections on the resistance made to King Charles I . . . delivered in a sermon preached in the West
Meeting-House in Boston . . . Published at the request of the hearers. (Boston: D. Fowle, 1750). Mayhew
preached, “Britons will not be slaves . . . Let us all learn to be free . . . Let us not profess ourselves
vassals . . . of any man on earth,” emphasizing ‘Liberty,’ and in Granville, Haynes very possibly wrote his
unpublished essay Liberty Further Extended . . ., c. 1776, applying the precepts of the Declaration of
Independence to the abolition of enslavement. Haynes was the first to do so. Haynes’s lifetime
paralleled that of the young nation, bringing to the forefront the hypocrisy of any who supported
‘Liberty’ without extending it to “mankind” in bondage. Copley’s portraiture bears evidence of his effort
to do so, as early as Mayhew’s influential sermon of August 1765 preceding landmark Stamp Act rioting.
For the first time, Haynes’s writings circa 1776, including his unpublished poem, The Battle of Lexington,
are presented herein as having been composed in Granville, Massachusetts where precepts of ‘Liberty’
seemingly existed as early as 1754 with Haynes’s arrival at five months old, and his subsequent
education, fostering his unprecedented life story from his birth outside of marriage to becoming the first
Black man ordained a minister in the United States – in the Congregational church, bespeaking that
Faith’s independency breaking out of the colonial paradigm, as did a new Nation.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page i of 63
�Acknowledgments
My research methodology builds on the research of Frank Sommer (longtime Director, Winterthur
Library) concerning Thomas Hollis V and “The Metamorphoses of Britannia” as ‘Liberty’ images; and
advances the research of Waldron Phoenix Belknap, examining the reliance upon British prints by
portrait artists of colonial America. Mr. Belknap’s papers are at the Winterthur Library (The Downs
Collection), which was most helpful to my viewing of rare books and mezzotints by Peter Pelham. I was
fortunate to discuss my analyses of print sources that Copley used, with Jules David Prown at the
“Symposium: Prints for a New Nation,” in conjunction with the Winterthur exhibition “To Please Every
Taste,” held at The Long Island Museum at Stony Brook, January 16, 1993 (see E. McSherry Fowble, “To
Please Every Taste: Eighteenth-Century Prints from the Winterthur Museum (Alexandria, Virginia: Art
Services International, 1991).
I am grateful to Mrs. Rose Miller, Town Historian of Granville for pointing out to me that a mideighteenth-century date for the Daniel Rose House (1741) restored by my late brother William Brian
Phelon, was indicated due to structural evidence documented in a report by John O. Curtis (2003),
Antique Home Advisory and Consulting Firm, Brimfield, MA, former curator and director, Old Sturbridge
Village. This led to my documentation that the Daniel Rose House was built in 1741, on the settlement
lot adjacent to, and within sight of the home of Deacon David Rose, where Lemuel Haynes grew up.
indicating that Haynes could have written his earliest treatises or spoken his first public sermon in the
acoustically effective second-floor ballroom of the Daniel Rose House, within sight of the West Granville
Congregational Church where he first preached after it was built in 1778. The West Granville
Congregational Church’s enthusiastic interest in my research about Rev. Lemuel Haynes has been most
appreciated. My brother Bill Phelon’s belief that Rev. Haynes was personally connected to the Daniel
Rose House, by virtue of living nearby in the extended Rose family, has proven correct.
I’m also grateful to the Library Club, Granville Public Library and Noble & Cooley Center for Historic
Preservation at Granville, Massachusetts for their support of the Granville History Digital Collection at
the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum. Many thanks to Richard L. Rowley, Volunteer at the Mabel
Root Henry Historical Museum. Mr. Rowley, a Rose family descendant, provided extensive bibliographic
materials on Lemuel Haynes, and with the West Granville Congregational Church initiated the Rev.
Lemuel Haynes Anniversary Project’s archival website on Haynes at Granville. He also provided
additional archival details, file information and digitization of the important images of the 1738 Dwight
Survey of ‘Bedford Plantation/Granville’ and with the expertise of volunteer archivist Aaron Fraser at the
Museum, provided later historic maps of Granville. I’m also grateful to Julie LaCrosse and Isabell
LaCrosse, Granville Historical Commission, for Interior Design Staging for 2019 Photography of the
Daniel Rose House (1741). William “Bill” Phelon restored the Daniel Rose House, believing it provided a
fortified settlement home with niches for artillery in the western facing cellar wall, and represents one
of the Rose family ‘chimney corners’ that Lemuel studied in and well it may have, for it appears Lemuel
lived within sight of the house and later the West Granville Congregational Church after it was built. His
last request to me was to find out more about Lemuel Haynes and some of that research is herein.
Most of all, I want to thank my husband Steve for his encouragement and expertise during our studies of
Copley, British print-making, and art history, some of our favorite interests over the course of many
wonderful years of marriage.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page ii of 63
�About the author’s methodology
Corey Phelon Geske earned a M.A. in Public Affairs from Stony Brook University and B.A. in History and
Education from Long Island University, C.W. Post. Her unique methodology of thinking ‘outside the box’
has proven productive while examining art history and conducting historical analyses of paintings and
buildings. Her work has included identification of the correct "long lost" title, View in the Valley of
Oberhasle (1842) by America’s leading Hudson River School painter and protégé of Thomas Cole, Asher
Brown Durand (illus., https://www.facebook.com/grartmuseum/photos/a.354268873458/10158352370563459)
Unrecognized by leading Durand scholars David Lawall, Linda S. Ferber, and Barbara Gallati and at the
time Durand's catalog raisonné, Kindred Spirits, was published in 2007, Mrs. Geske matched the twopage sketch above the Oberhasle title in Durand's sketchbook at the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS)
to this painting hanging at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, under another title. Based on her
research in 2008, the painting was correctly identified in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of
American Art in time for the GRAM’s Centennial exhibition and catalog raisonné, 100 Years, 100 Works
of Art; Introduction to the Collection of the Grand Rapids Art Museum (2009) by Richard H. Axsom (p.
24). When exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1842, critics for the Knickerbocker valued it as
“the most attractive . . . from a sketch made on the spot . . .” elevating Durand to the position of being
“now with Cole, the first landscape painter of the country . . . among the best living,” and established
Durand in the forefront of American landscape painting. For this oil on canvas, Durand masterfully
added a 'framing' tree and clouds to his sketch. Mrs. Geske’s research indicates Oberhasle is one of the
most important and influential landscapes of Durand's career expressing his artistic and moral compass.
Mrs. Geske’s identification of Oberhasle was initiated to prove the incorrect (Meiringen) title the GRAM
landscape then hung under, actually applied to a previously unidentified oil sketch signed “A Durand,”
with the topography of Asher Brown Durand’s 1840 sketch of the Vale of Meiringen, Switzerland,
completed on A.B. Durand’s same journey to Oberhasle. According to her research, the oil sketch
appears to have been adapted from the senior Durand’s sketchbook by his great-nephew, Albert G.
Durand the younger (1833-1871), listed (1861) as a painter in New York, for Durand family members
who were watchmakers, imported European watches, and worked with Swiss watchmakers. Concerning
another Durand family landscape, Mrs. Geske’s research (2016) titled, “A Proposal for identification of
The Birthplace of Asher B. Durand by his nephew, Elias Wade Durand (1824-1908) as The Hunter’s Home,
exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1853,” matched the painting to an engraving. Her
Durand family research is on file at the Maplewood Memorial Library, Maplewood, New Jersey.
In 2009, Mrs. Geske located and matched a landscape, On Roundout Creek (Private Collection), by
William Rickarby Miller (1818-1893) to one of Miller’s sketches (1882) at the N-YHS where her Miller
research is on file. That “match” is one of the few instances of a Miller sketch linked to one of his
landscape paintings.
During her studies of American and European artists, Mrs. Geske completed an iconographic study of
the cinquecento master Luca Cambiaso (1527-1585) in 2010. Titled Closing the Circle on Conversion: The
Iconic Signature of Luca Cambiaso Revealed by a Lost Cinquecento Drawing of Saint Anthony Etched in
1736 by Arthur Pond, it was graciously read by Professor Emeritus Edward J. Olszewski of Case Western
Reserve University before his retirement. He described the methodology and conclusions as
“remarkable insight.” Mrs. Geske has also completed extensive related research on Rembrandt Harmenz
van Rijn (unpublished).
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page iii of 63
�In 2013, Mrs. Geske delivered an extensive paper, “A Research Study based on Print Source
Methodology” to the North Carolina Museum of Art advancing Waldron Phoenix Belknap’s research to
attribution, arguing that the Portrait of a Man now still attributed to Nathaniel Dance, is, in fact,
American, and if not by Copley, then certainly of the School of Copley, and representing and resembling
Jonathan Mountfort (previously painted by Copley) on the occasion of Mountfort’s marriage to Mary
Boles, December 20, 1772. Points of her analysis are also on file at the Detroit Institute of Arts, owner of
the earlier Mountfort portrait by Copley.
In 2016, Mrs. Geske traced a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds that was cataloged (2000) at Yale as
untraced to the Toledo Museum of Art, and presented a 'convincing' specific identification of the sitters.
The portrait is now correctly identified as "Mrs. Henrietta Cholmley and Son." Mrs. Geske’s research
based on her print source methodology, further indicated the child was added to Reynold's portrait of
Mrs. Cholmley after he painted her solo c. 1761. Thus, her son Hugh was not "cut" (as previous scholars
had claimed) from the composition for the portrait's engraving (no child in it) by James Watson after
Reynolds, c. 1767. As a result of Mrs. Geske’s conclusions, the portrait was examined in the museum’s
conservation lab by the Consulting Paintings Conservator who found that indeed, the child was added
over the ledge, his mother's dress and blue cloak. According to entries in Reynolds appointment
["Pocket Book"] book, Mrs. Geske believes the child was painted c. early 1764-1765 with his six-year-old
face and the tiny body of a three-year-old, to minimize loss of Mrs. Cholmley's original dress and setting,
as seen in Watson’s engraving. See Henrietta Catherine Cholmley and Son [Mrs. Cholmondeley and
Child] by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1761. Acc. No. 2011.7, Toledo Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. George M.
Jones, Jr. at http://emuseum.toledomuseum.org/objects/57174
In 2021, Mrs. Geske delivered a research paper to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Tracing the Iconology of
John Singleton Copley . . . Son of Liberty and Abolitionist,” documenting print sources for his major
American works with the proposed identification of the subject and earlier date of execution for
Copley’s Head of a [Black] Man, c. 1773; including documentation of a previously unattributed poem by
African American poetess Phillis Wheatley.
Documenting forgotten histories of endangered buildings in New York and Massachusetts, Mrs. Geske, a
volunteer, has written and prepared with the New York State Office of Historic Preservation (SHPO)
successful eligibility reviews and nominations to the National Register for buildings previously
unrecognized locally as designed by architects Henry J. McGill, Talbot F. Hamlin, world famous Henry
Killam Murphy (mentor of McGill & Hamlin), and Gustav Stickley. Suffolk County, New York recently
made an offer of over $6 million to establish a County Park and Museum at one "old house" scheduled
for subdivision that Mrs. Geske documented as by Murphy, one of his earliest designs (1907) in the
world. At Yale University, she located his drawings detailing this ‘Country’ estate of America’s foremost
early patent attorney, Edmund Wetmore, Esq. [Harvard (A.B. 1860), Columbia University (LL.B. 1863)].
Mrs. Geske’s research includes identification of the full name of an unknown Black soldier at the
Hauppauge United Methodist Church, documenting his life story from self-emancipation off Mobile,
Alabama to his military record as Landsman, U.S. Navy serving in one of the most widely publicized naval
battles of the Civil War, to finding his descendants in the community who shared in the resulting
Juneteenth weekend 2023 rededication of his new headstone inscribed by Veterans Affairs. Research
conducted by Mrs. Geske has also included new points of view on George Washington’s April 1790 tour
of Long Island, notably to not only thank the spies he knew of, in the famous Culper Spy Ring that helped
win the American Revolution, but reflect Washington’s sense of place by marking to the day, the
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page iv of 63
�fifteenth Anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, at Lexington and Concord, April 19,
1775. Additionally, she has pointed out for the first time in publication the personally great interest of
American genre artist William Sidney Mount in Washington’s tour, based on his maternal grandfather’s
action as a spy/courier for Washington during the Revolution and Mount’s mother seeing the First
President on that tour. Mrs. Geske’s research has identified and analyzed the print sources used by
William Sidney Mount and Thomas Cole (unpublished). Her research also represents the first publication
of drawings located at her direction at the New-York Historical Society, depicting the earliest image of
the room in which Washington slept on his 1790 tour when stopping at the Roe Tavern; now scheduled
to be moved nearer its original East Setauket location. See News 12 and Geske, “Alfred Griffin, SelfEmancipated Civil War Veteran, to be honored at Hauppauge church,“ (May 21, 2023); “George
Washington’s Patriots’ Day Spy Trail Tour at 230 Years,” (May 1, 2020); “Mount and Milne Preserve Spy
Trail Perspectives,” (May 6, 2021); and “Rediscovering 100-year-old-views of Roe Tavern,” (December
19, 2019), TBR News (all six editions Cold Spring Harbor to Wading River, NY) at
https://tbrnewsmedia.com/tag/corey-geske/
Mrs. Geske also has written articles in The Smithtown News about her discoveries and identifications of
forgotten building owners, preliminary to obtaining National Register eligibility and nomination for
those places. For her rediscovery of Gustav Stickley as architect of the 1912 home of Auto Hall of Famer
Fred Wagner, see Preservation Long Island’s Newsletter (Fall 2017) “Rediscovering Smithtown’s Golden
Age,” and “The Residence of the Starter of Five Vanderbilt Cup Races Rediscovered in Smithtown,” at
https://preservationlongisland.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/PN-Fall-2017-for-website-upload.pdf and
https://www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/blog/article/the_residence_of_the_starter_of_five_vanderbilt_cup_races_r
ediscovered_in_s For her research obtaining eligibility for the National Register for the 5-ton ‘Smithtown
Bull’ civic sculpture designed by sculptor Charles Cary Rumsey, cast in Paris, 1926, see the Burchfield
Penney Art Center, SUNY Buffalo State University, including her article and unique interpretation of the
statue as the secular counterpart of the winged ox, traditionally associated with the European guilds of
St. Luke, patron of artists and architects, to promote an Arts and Crafts Revival on the North Shore of
Long Island, at https://burchfieldpenney.org/about/news/article:03-20-2019-12-00am-smithtown-bull-bycharles-cary-rumsey-eligible-for-historic-register/
At Granville, Massachusetts, her family’s hometown, Mrs. Geske, a prospective member of the
Daughters of the American Revolution, completed extensive research concerning the Daniel Rose House
(1741), West Granville, Massachusetts, restored by her late brother William “Bill” Phelon. Her
documentation has included four online works (2019-2021) featuring the house, in the West Granville
National Register District, as the home of six Revolutionary War soldiers and two Naval officers of the
War of 1812. Additionally, she has presented the Daniel Rose House as possibly fortified on the western
frontier settling lot adjacent to the acreage and home of Daniel’s brother Deacon David Rose, and
therefore an integral part of the extended family where the future Rev. Lemuel Haynes would be
educated and live more than half of his life, returning to visit friends, such as Rev. Joel Baker, up until his
death. Further, the Daniel Rose-Lt. Jacob Baldwin-Rev. Joel Baker. . . Phelon House was the home of the
Nation’s first quilt to be exhibited in a period room at an American museum, as annotated in “[Baker
Quilt]” West Granville Needlework at the F.G. Baker House inspires the historic Deerfield Arts and Crafts
Movement, the Granville History Digital Collection, sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry Historical
Museum, Granville Public Library, and the Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation,
https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233. Mrs. Geske is now a Corresponding Fellow, Mabel
Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville, Massachusetts.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page v of 63
�Theoria to practica and Congregational Independency:
From John Singleton Copley's portraiture of ‘Liberty,’
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew identified, to
Rev. Lemuel Haynes's Liberty Further Extended, c. 1776
_____________________
1 Identifying Copley’s lost portrait highlights Congregationalist Independency
“Inclosed is a proof impression of that [Mayhew] print; it is requested, it may remain for some months
unseen by any one . . . this print would make some noise when heard of . . .”
Thomas Hollis V, Letter to “a confidential
friend in England,” 17681
The name of the recipient of Rev. Jonathan
Mayhew’s etched portrait of 1767 was still
guarded when the above secretive comment
was published in 1780 during the American
Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the ultimate
result of the Whig parson’s legacy of ‘Liberty’
preserved in his correspondence with
Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln’s Inn, London.2
This now well circulated print of Mayhew, is
compellingly identified herein for the first
time in publication, as after his portrait by
Boston artist John Singleton Copley (17381815), whose knowledgeable involvement in
the Mayhew-Hollis interchange offers a new
transatlantic perspective on Copley’s political
Fig. 1. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. Pastor of the West
Church in Boston, in New England: An assertor of the
civil and religious liberties of his country and
mankind by Giovanni Battista Cipriani after John
Singleton Copley’s portrait owned by Thomas Hollis
V. London, 1767. Etching, H. Sheet H. 16 ¾,” W. 11.”
Author’s Collection.
1
The “friend” was likely Archdeacon Francis Blackburne (1705-1787), author of Hollis V’s memoirs in which this
comment appeared. [Francis Blackburne, ed.], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq. (London: 1780), 380-381.
2
“Mr. Hollis’s “connexions with the colonies . . . particularly his correspondence with Dr. Mayhew . . . has been
alledged as evidence of his fomenting that factious spirit in America, which has ended in their declaring themselves
independent of the mother country; an idea which as will appear from undoubted testimony, was the most remote
from Mr. Hollis’s wishes . . .” Ibid., 125. Blackburne’s statement defines the purpose of the Memoirs to defend his
late friend’s motivations and exemplify how one person could contribute to society.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 1 of 63
�beliefs still to be found evidenced in the iconology of his portraiture that when contemporaneously
hung in homes or shops, exhibited in London, or engraved, disseminated the revolutionary message
expressing the political iconology of ‘Liberty.’
Discovering linkages across multiple mediums of material culture, my methodology reveals Copley’s
authorship and factually-based iconological interpretations viewing “art as evidence.”3 This process of
discovery further acknowledges that Mayhew’s message of ‘Liberty’ for “mankind,” inscribed in the
London etching after Copley’s portrait, epitomized and broadcast the independency of Congregationalist
churches in New England. This mindset opened the door for theory “theoria” becoming practice,
“practica,” in Copley’s allegorical portraiture, the preaching of Rev. Mayhew, and the writing and
preaching of the future Congregational pastor, Rev. Lemuel Haynes, the first Black man ordained a
minister in the United States. As a twenty-three-year-old free Black man anticipating the life of a farmer,
Lemuel Haynes’s unpublished tract, Liberty Further Extended, could have been written c. 1776 in (West)
Granville, Massachusetts,4 and was the first to apply the precepts of the Declaration of Independence to
the Black population and extend “Liberty” to the abolition of enslavement, prefiguring his future
ministry.
The term ‘independency’ herein used refers to Rev. Mayhew’s sermons opposing the proposed policy of
Archbishop Thomas Secker (Section 7) to install bishops of the Anglican Church in America and thereby
restrict the freedom of worship enjoyed by other denominations, notably the Congregationalism of his
West Church. The term was applied in the earliest sense to the evolution of Puritanism to
‘Independency’ of thought known as ‘Congregationalism.’5
2 Lost portrait’s twin traced to Cipriani
The bust-length portrait by John Singleton Copley of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), the
preeminent revolutionary-era proponent of religious and civil liberties, was lost to the Boston fire of
1872 and its engraved image buried in 1954 under a misattribution of the portrait’s artist. However, this
portrait was one of two of Mayhew that Copley received payment for in February 1767. Its untraced
3
Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2001), passim.
4
On Haynes writing Liberty Further Extended. . .” in the army, see Paul Finkelman, ed., Encyclopedia of African
American History, 154 cited by Auctioneers, University Archives, https://auction.universityarchives.com/auctionlot/first-edition-biography-of-rev.-lemuel-haynes-si_25D4BCB895
5
According to church histories, the Pastor of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and a founder of the Congregational Church,
“John Robinson (1576-1625), the scholarly and pious leader of this independent movement, must be regarded as
the true founder of Independency or Congregationalism. His views as expressed in his later writings show a
breadth and liberality and toleration which deeply impressed not only the members of his own church but
exercised a wide influence in the religious thought of the time.” Notably, “the church was not only divided on
matters of practice and dogma, but also was not in complete accord on the issues presented by the Revolutionary
War. Mr. [Rev. Chandler] Robbins [pastor of First (and Third congregational society organized 1744, when reunited
in 1784) Church, Plymouth, 1760-1799] was a sturdy patriot and served from time to time with the Revolutionary
forces at Dorchester as chaplain, but some of the leading citizens of the town were not in sympathy with the
demands for independence and separation from the mother country. Deacon Foster was brought before the
church charged inter alia that his political conduct and practice were just matters of offence, that he “discovers a
Willingness to have this Country enslaved,” and “is an Advocate for ye Destructive Doctrines of Positive Obedience
& Non Resistance.” Plymouth Church Records 1620-1859, Part I, Publications of the Colonial Society of
Massachusetts (Boston: Published by the Society, The University Press, 1920), Vol. 22 xviiii; xxxix accessed at
Colonial Society of Massachusetts, https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/252#intro
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 2 of 63
�twin, lost to a provenance of pre-revolutionary controversy, is herein documented for the first time as
having been sent from Boston with Copley’s knowledge, as a gift from Elizabeth Clarke Mayhew (17331777) to her late husband’s long-time overseas friend and correspondent in London, Thomas Hollis V
(1720-1774), champion of British ‘Liberty,’ particularly in Massachusetts.
So pleased was Hollis with the widow’s gift received in May 1767, he immediately commissioned Italian
émigré artist Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-1785) to etch Copley’s portrait of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew;
and in August, sent 300 impressions (fig 1) to her. They were charged with controversial symbolism that
would further Mayhew and Hollis’s cause of ‘Liberty’ after the former’s death. And, Hollis ensured 32
impressions of a second etching by Cipriani, featuring a double portrait of himself (fig. 2), accompanied
his friend’s prints destined for Elizabeth Mayhew as he steadfastly identified himself with Boston’s wellknown minister whom he’d confidentially corresponded with since 1759, discussing religious-political
issues while shepherding gifts of books supporting that cause, to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.6
Hollis advised the late reverend’s widow, that, “Not one impression from either etching has been given
away to or seen by any Person here; nor probably will be of some time, it may be years, or never:
especially from the second, more on either side of the Water [Atlantic].”7 The one Mayhew impression
Hollis did share the following year appears to have been with his ‘confidential friend’ in England,
Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, “Inclosed is a proof impression of that [Mayhew] print; it is requested, it
may remain for some months unseen by any one . . . this print would make some noise when heard
of . . .”8 The gift of the proof was likely with Mrs. Mayhew’s thanks for the latest edition of a book by
Blackburne, with comments added, honoring her husband and sent to her by Hollis with thanks for Rev.
Mayhew’s portrait (by Copley).9 After Hollis’s death, his etching, like Mayhew’s, would appear in
Blackburne’s Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq. in 1780.10
Hollis’s double portrait etched by Cipriani featured him full-face sculpted on the facing side of an obelisk
titled, “Thomas Hollis, Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the Society of Antiquaries 1767, visually
corresponding with the quotation, “You have always found me on the best and justest side,” (emphasis
here)11 spelling out the symbolism of the owl above Hollis’s head. An attribute of Minerva, Roman war
goddess of ‘just causes,’ and patroness of institutions of learning and art, the owl was traditionally
6
“Most of his benefactions to Harvard College went through Dr. Mayhew's hands,” in [Blackburne], Memoirs of
Thomas Hollis, 239, 319.
7
Thomas Hollis [V] to Elizabeth [Mrs.} Mayhew, palmal [Pall Mall] August 18, 1767. Box 1, Folder 105, Mayhew
Family Papers, Bortman Collection of Americana, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University
Libraries. Hereafter, Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries. Published in full for the first time, herein.
8
See note 1.
9
Hollis sent Blackburne’s Confessional (1767); on another occasion, the Archdeacon’s “best respects;” and two
years later, another book by Blackburne with Mrs. Macaulay’s History. Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 18, 1767; May
16, 1768. Box 1, Folder 105, Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries. Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, December
4, 1769 in [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 429-430. Blackburne corresponded more than once, directly
with Mrs. Mayhew. See Blackburne to Mrs. Mayhew, January 1767 in Alden Bradford, Memoir of the Life and
Writings of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D, Pastor of the West Church and Society in Boston From June, 1747, to July,
1766 (Boston: C.C. Little & Co., 1838), 443.
10
Blackburne states, “A few copies [32] of this print [Cipriani’s Hollis V] were sent to New England, along with the
print of Dr. Mayhew; above mentioned; but was never published in England till after Mr. Hollis's death; nor even
then, farther than it was presented to some of Mr. Hollis's particular friends who revered his memory.”
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, (Hollis etching) frontispiece; (Mayhew etching) 371; 373.
11
Translation from David M. Hart, Director (2001-2019), Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, “Thomas Hollis,”
Images of Liberty and Power Webpage, January 4, 2011 accessed March 14, 2023,
http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Art/FeaturedImages/ThomasHollis/index.html
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 3 of 63
�placed on a ”pile of books” and also appears
above Mayhew’s name in his etching.12 The
Latin inscription from Plutarch's Parallel
Lives,13 was appropriate to the ‘parallel’
transatlantic efforts of Mayhew and Hollis to
support ‘Liberty’ while corresponding about
the latter’s gifts to Harvard, where due to
Hollis’s “affection toward the people of North
America, those of Massachusetts and Boston,
in particular,”14 cases [“pile”] of books,
focusing on ‘Liberty,’ arrived.
Fig. 2. (Left) Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Monument to Thomas Hollis, the Younger [V], 1767, sponsored by Thomas
Hollis V, Etching, Sheet, H. 12 5/16,” W. 9 7/16.” Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs. Frederic T. Lewis,
in memory of Dr. Frederic T. Lewis, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, M13864.
Fig. 3. (Right) “Portrait of Thomas Hollis [V]” by John Greenwood, c. 1767. Graphite, with brown wash, H. 2.91,”
W. 2.24.” © The Trustees of The British Museum, 1866,0714.24, Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License,
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
Upon the right-hand base of the obelisk, the seated figure of ‘Britannia Libertas’ holds a Liberty Cap
upon her staff, immediately above Hollis’s profile at the lower right, prognosticating placement of her
symbol of ‘Liberty’ upon his head.
On Cipriani’s etching, Hollis ’s second portrait in right profile favored the style of images of political
theorist Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) engraved in profile on Hollis sponsored prints testifying to
‘Liberty,’ and intentionally edges toward the lower right margin, giving a sense of contemporary motion
conveying his ongoing political efforts, albeit approaching retirement to the country. Hollis’s choice of
artist reflected a keen consciousness of his family’s ongoing philanthropy to Harvard. The profile was
after a sketch (fig. 3) by John Greenwood (1727–1792), whose uncle was the first Hollisian Professor of
“Mathematicks,” Natural and Experimental Philosophy (Physics), the second Hollis professorship at
12
James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979). 209.
Freeman O’Donoghue, Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits in the British Museum (London: Printed by Order
of the Trustees, 1910), Vol. 2, 548.
14
Hollis V to Edmund Quincy, Jr., Pall Mall, October 1, 1766 in [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 339.
13
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 4 of 63
�Harvard.15 Artist, engraver, and art dealer in London, Greenwood was Copley’s Boston-born friend and
London correspondent, meaning two of the three etched ‘portraits’ Hollis sent Mrs. Mayhew were by
New England artists, all the more appropriate, considering that Greenwood is believed to have painted
Mayhew’s portrait c. 1750 (Section 5) before leaving Boston in 1752.
The prints gifted to Mrs. Mayhew, showed Mayhew and Hollis, each with a dedicated ‘Liberty Cap’
symbol against backgrounds of stone, apparently inspired by a condolence letter from Bostonian
Edmund Quincy, Jr. (1726-1782) to Hollis, belatedly notifying him of Mayhew’s death, commiserating,
“we doubt not, HE who is able of stones to raise up defenders of our rights, civil and sacred, will send us
other Mayhews, as we need them.”16 Hollis V’s portrait was long-awaited and had been repeatedly
requested of their benefactor, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Its arrival was in direct
response to Copley’s portrait of Mayhew, a timely gift helping offset the double-shocks Hollis received
when shelves of books and scientific equipment that his family had given over forty years, along with
the portrait of his great-uncle Thomas Hollis III (1659-1730/31) by Joseph Highmore (1692-1780), were
lost in the Harvard Hall library fire of 1764; and when he’d learned of Mayhew’s death, his most
“confidential friend” in America, through the newspapers before any letter from Boston reached him.17
Hollis’s reasons for limiting circulation of the pair of prints, ranged from modesty regarding his own, to
the openly volatile nature of the work he and Mayhew had accomplished furthering ‘Liberty.’ Hollis had
given his word to Mayhew on being his “assured friend,” at the height of the Stamp Act crisis when
rumors abounded Mayhew would be “ordered here [London] on the stamp act.”18
Hollis asked Elizabeth Mayhew to be sole distributor of the Cipriani etchings; she chose to send her list
of recipients back to Hollis, providing a glimpse of a virtual network of Sons of Liberty in America (see
below). She would do the same for recipients of books Hollis sent her in 1768.19 As painter of Mayhew’s
portrait, Copley would have been on Elizabeth Mayhew’s list.
3 Mayhew, Copley and the Stamp Act: August 25, 1765
Graduate of Harvard (1744) and recipient of the degree Doctor of Divinity from the University of
Aberdeen (1749), Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., a dissenting (non-Anglican) minister, was ordained in
1747 to serve at Boston’s Congregationalist West Church,20 where he preached until his death on the
morning of July 9, 1766. He was mourned in the next issue of The Boston-Gazette, as a “Friend to Liberty
. . . and Learning,” with whom, “some of the wisest and best men in Britain early sought a literary
15
Isaac Greenwood (1702-1745) was studying with natural philosopher Rev. John Theophilus Desaguliers (16831744) when he met Hollis III, who established Harvard’s professorship (1726/27), the first in science at an
American college; Greenwood, the first appointed. Peter Pelham engraved a mezzotint of Desaguliers (1725,
passim).
16
Edmund Quincy, Jr. to Hollis V, Boston, July 25, 1766. [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 338.
17
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 337.
18
Ibid., 332, 339.
19
Mrs. Mayhew to Hollis V, November 23, 1767 [specific content not transcribed]; November 17, 1768.
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 380-381; 411. Note, this correspondence and reference to a “list”
was published in 1780, three years after Mrs. Mayhew’s death and during the American Revolutionary War.
20
Dr. J. Patrick Mullins has called Mayhew, “the most politically influential clergyman in eighteenth-century
America and the intellectual progenitor of the American Revolution in New England.” J. Patrick Mullins, Father of
Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017), ix.
Copley’s portrait of Mayhew is not identified, nor cited as engraved by Cipriani in this 2017 biography.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 5 of 63
�correspondence,” which brought to his Cambridge Alma Mater, “the bounties of his particular friends,
among them the name of HOLLIS.”21
Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act [March 22, 1765] imposing a tax stamp on printed paper used for
legal documents and even newspapers and playing cards in the American colonies,22 resulted in Boston
rioting during August 1765, soon followed by riots in Newport, Rhode Island with public unrest
spreading to other colonies. After the first riot in Boston, Rev. Mayhew preached a sermon on August
25, 1765, that despite his denial of any such intent, was summarily believed to have set off
unprecedented violence the next day.23 Rioters attacked the homes of the colony’s Comptroller of
Customs and Deputy Registrar of the Vice Admiralty Court, before destroying the elegant mansion of
Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, leaving only walls,
floorboards, and the remains of a roof.
The Stamp Act riots resulted in destruction of homes that housed Copley portraits, incentivizing him to
get his work out of New World drawing rooms onto the world stage. Within four weeks, he sent his first
exhibition piece to London, a portrait (fig. 4) of his half-brother Henry Pelham, A Boy with a Flying
Squirrel (1765, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with its sophisticated multi-layered revolutionary
messaging that heretofore has never been linked to Mayhew. Focused on a distinctly American species
enchained, yet capable of flying, the portrait bespoke the values of all British subjects in America
capable of the higher thoughts of ‘Liberty’ expressed by Mayhew as early as 1750, when he preached,
“Britons will not be slaves . . . Let us all learn to be free . . . Let us not profess ourselves vassals . . . of
any man on earth,”24 emphasized again in his later sermons.
Although Copley’s conveyance letter sought opinions on his skill as “sufficient inducement to have sent
it so soon,” the root cause of his urgency in advance of a mid-February cutoff date to ship paintings
overseas to London for spring exhibition at the Society of Artists, appears within his closing: “Capt.
Jacobson is just arrived with the stamps which has made so much noise and confusion among us
Americans . . . scence which there is a strong Military watch kept every night.”25 His list of homes looted
(Hallowell, Howard, Hutchinson . . .) read like a list of his commissions as the relatively peaceful
existence of the Boston he knew, was fast disappearing and he sent London a message to that effect, via
oil on canvas.
21
The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, July 14, 1766. Friend of liberty . . . memorial attributed to Edmund
Quincy, Jr., chosen by Boston ministers to notify Hollis of Mayhew’s death, previously recommended to Hollis by
Mayhew, he carried letters from Hollis to Mayhew. Bradford, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, 431, 434-437. [Blackburne],
Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 120, 607-611.
22
Taxation of American colonists without their legislatures’ consent, was ostensibly to cover the cost of the French
and Indian Wars (1754-1763) and garrisoning 10,000 troops in North America thereafter. Colonists believed they’d
already paid war costs.
23
Tanner Ogle, “If we Clash we break: Religion, Republicanism, and Memories of Stuart Tyranny at the inception of
the American Revolution (1760-1766,” M.A. Thesis, University of Akron, May 2020 at
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=akron1554559122305494&disposition=inli
ne Howard L. Lubert, “Jonathan Mayhew: Conservative Revolutionary,” History of Political Thought, Vol. 32, No. 4
(Winter 2011), pp. 589-616 at https://www.jstor.org/stable/26225700
24
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, A discourse concerning unlimited submission and non-resistance to the higher powers:
with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles I . . . delivered in a sermon preached in the West
Meeting-House in Boston . . . Published at the request of the hearers. (Boston: D. Fowle, 1750), 40, 54.
25
Copley to [Capt. R. G. Bruce?], September 10, 1765 in Guernsey Jones, ed., Letters and Papers of John Singleton
Copley and Henry Pelham 1739-1776 (1914; repr., New York: Kennedy Graphics, Inc. Da Capo Press, 1970), 35-36.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 6 of 63
�Delivering Copley’s view of enslavement to Pitt before Reynolds
Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act in March 1766, resulted in Mayhew’s sermon The Snare Broken, a
“thanksgiving discourse . . .,”26 cautioning that self-governance was a natural right. Preached on May 23,
1766, six weeks before his death, Mayhew’s message was directed to English statesman William Pitt the
Elder (1708-1778), soon to become 1st Earl Chatham and Prime Minister, who would receive Mayhew’s
work from Hollis, as
per the reverend’s
request.27 That was
months after Pitt had
studied A Boy with a
Flying Squirrel and
campaigned against
the Stamp Act,
declaring, on January
14, 1766, “Three
million of people so
dead to all feelings of
liberty, as voluntarily
to submit to be slaves,
would have been fit
instruments to make
slaves of the rest.”28
In a letter to Copley,
Lord Cardross [David
Erskine (1742-1829),
future Earl of Buchan],
supporter of “[John]
Wilkes and Liberty,”
friend of Benjamin
Franklin (1706-1790),
and future
correspondent with
George Washington,
took credit for
showing the portrait
to Pitt, long before he
sent it on to [Sir]
Joshua Reynolds
(1723-1792), future
President of the Royal
Fig. 4. John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765, Oil
on canvas, H. 30 3/8,” W. 25 1/8.” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the artist's
great-granddaughter, 1978.297.
26
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, The Snare Broken; a Thanksgiving Discourse [on Ps. Cxxiv. 7, 8] Preached in Boston, N.E.,
May 23, 1766: Occasioned by the Repeal of the Stamp-Act. Boston, N. E. (1766).
27
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, October 4, 1766, [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 345.
28
Edward P. Cheyney, Readings in English History Drawn from the Original Sources (Boston: Ginn & Company,
1908), 623.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 7 of 63
�Academy.29 Judgment of Copley’s unsigned yet unquestionable skill proved secondary to his primary
objective, a political affirmation of American ‘Liberty,’ by a Boston artist somewhat cloaked by the name
given for exhibition, ‘William Copely.’30
Copleyan Allegory© Extending Liberty to Abolitionism
Allegories composed by Copley, heretofore unrecognized by scholars, revolved around the names and
interests of his sitters to create what I herein label Copleyan Allegory©. Interpreted within political and
religious spheres, subliminal messaging is spelled out by Copley’s search for meaningful print sources to
advance painterly ennoblement of subjects through their ‘name,’ representing family and character.
This entailed more than mere borrowing of ‘props.’ Copley used items of material culture as
iconography to develop his moral messaging.
Analyzing print sources provides evidentiary proof of Copley’s subliminal iconology expressed via
Copleyan Allegory representing his preeminent drive to ascertain character through sitters’ names. Print
selection, based on names, was used to visualize name-based phonetic word associations and
etymology in conjunction with Biblical and classical texts or relevant life stories, evidencing sitters’
identities. For Copley, this focus upon name iconology became a definer of identity and character in a
portrait. Art historians to date, have not made this connection.
In A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, Copley portrayed half-brother Henry Pelham seated at a table,
thoughtfully looking toward a distant point while holding a gold chain for a distinctly freedom-loving
American flying squirrel, to signify a colonial perspective on constitutional rights in North America.
Though not exhibited in association with Pelham’s name, the portrait’s politically messaged composition
aspired to the venue of Parliamentary level speech represented by Henry Pelham (1694-1754), former
British Prime Minister (1743-1754) whose name was shared by the young Bostonian Copley called
“Brother.” During the statesman’s leadership, London émigré painter and engraver Peter Pelham (16971751) married Mary Copley (c. 1710-1789), widow of Richard Copley and mother of then nine-year-old
John Singleton Copley; and the Pelhams named their son, born 1749, Henry. In London and Boston,
Peter Pelham’s skill at engraving newsworthy ‘mezzotints’ mixed art and politics in a range of tonal
values (Sections 9, 10). This legacy, together with young Henry’s politically significant name, inspired
Copley, beginning in 1765, with the concept that a portrait could ‘speak’ for the American colonist, even
to Houses of Parliament. Ramifications of conveying politics through portraiture, reverberated for years
to come in any painting Copley chose to allegorize, and knowledge of his father’s effective political
dialogue empowered Copley’s son John Singleton Copley, Jr. (1772-1863) on his path to becoming Lord
High Chancellor of England and 1st Baron Lyndhurst.
When Copley completed A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, he did not own a single enslaved person in his
household.31 His choice of setting for his half-brother with an American pet enchained and collared,
bespoke an extension of the concept of ‘Liberty’ for American colonists to the Black enslaved
29
Capt. Bruce “first sent” the portrait to Cardross. Captain R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, August 4, 1766, CopleyPelham Letters, 42. Mungo Campbell, “Lord Cardross and the 'Boy with a Squirrel'; Sir Joshua Reynolds's First
Encounter with the Earl of Buchan and John Singleton Copley,” The Burlington Magazine, Nov., 1987, Vol. 129, No.
1016, 728-730, https://www.jstor.org/stable/883218r
30
No. 24, Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760-1791 (1907; repr., Bath: Kingsmead
Reprints, 1969), 64.
31
Marriage to Susanna Farnham Clarke in November 1769, “brought the institution under his roof,” as part of her
marriage settlement, according to Copley’s biographer Jane Kaminsky, who has extensively studied post-1769
enslavement in the Copley household within the broader context of Copley’s Boston sitters. Jane Kamensky, A
Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016), 163.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 8 of 63
�population.32 For his portrait, Henry Pelham of Boston is seated behind a highly polished mahogany
table that by virtue of its reflection offers the conceptualization of double meanings. Flagged by woody
nut shells, its surface reflected plantation culture in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Havana, Cuba where
enslaved labor harvested mahogany for the American colonies. Copley’s double-entendre was clear.
Copley’s intention was to stimulate a dialogue, in London, reflecting upon the self-evident situation of
the colonial American, Black and white, perceived as and actually, enslaved, represented by the squirrel
on a chain. “Reflection” was pictorially spelled out across the mirror-like tabletop to reinforce the
thoughtful Henry Pelham’s outlook, eyeing a faraway objective, “across the Pond.” In London, the King
could view Copley’s work, if he should attend the Society’s exhibition.
Copley created a unique American iconology relying upon the squirrel33 as long-time symbol of reflective
meditation and conscience.34 On a chain, the pet represented conscience without visible ability to freely
act, nonetheless capable of judgment and sentiment, while projecting a natural state of freedom. While
Copley considered he was “tamely submiting”35 to a familial “Yoke” keeping him in Boston, his portrait’s
allegory indicated that Americans saw their ‘Liberty’ abrogated by “taxation without representation” in
Parliament that was unacceptable for those following a “Strict Regard to Conscience.”36
Sons of Liberty Appreciate Political Messaging of Fellow ‘Son,’ Copley
A few weeks after Copley dispatched A Boy with a Flying Squirrel and three months before its London
exhibition, Boston’s Sons of Liberty were keen to his choice of a gold chain for the portrait’s iconology.
Per the Boston News-Letter, December 26, 1765: “By Capt. Davidson we also received a STAMPED NewsPaper of the 2d of November. It being the first Stamp which had shewn its ugly form in this province, in
the evening it was exposed to public view at the Coffee-House, and then suspended, not by a golden,
but an iron chain [author’s italics], to which was affixed a pair of hand cuffs,” with the hope it “might be
the last ever seen in America.”37 The Sons’ iron chain associated colonists’ ‘enslavement’ by tyranny with
black enslavement and foreboded increasingly violent resistance. After the first shots of the Revolution
were exchanged between American Minutemen resisting British troops ordered to capture Boston
rebels Samuel Adams and John Hancock at Lexington and munition stores at Concord, April 19, 1775,
32
On Copley’s likely inspiration for allegory to enslavement when designing A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, his source
material is discussed in further unpublished research by Geske.
33
Copley’s iconology explains the American emblematic contribution Fleischer detected while citing other (preRevolutionary) scuirine iconography of ‘patience’ and ‘diligence’ [Emblems for the Improvement and Entertainment
of Youth (London, 1755)], noting the American popularity of squirrel portraits distinct from European: “it is
possible . . . we have here an American contribution to emblematic references in portraiture,” see Roland E.
Fleischer, “Emblems and Colonial American Paintings,” American Art Journal 20, No. 3 (1988), 3, 5, 23-27.
34
The squirrel evolved as eighteenth-century printers’ ornaments symbolizing reflection upon text, looking beyond
the ‘letter’ to the meaning as would a squirrel working at a nutshell to get to the meat. Barry J. Anson, Printers’
Ornaments: Head Pieces, Tail Pieces, Initials of Emblematic Significance (Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University,
1945), 155. On squirrel and “meditations,” Paris, c. 1500, see Margaret B. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries (New
York: E.P. Dutton, Inc, 1983), 89n68.
35
Copley’s words (also “Bondage,” “shackels”) described his Boston responsibilities in the same letter discussing
successful exhibition of “the portrait of my Brother.” Copley to Peter [Captain Peter Traille, not Pelham], Boston,
September 12, 1766, Letters, 47.
36
On “taxation,” see note 41. “Conscience” was inscribed on Paul Revere’s ‘Sons of Liberty Bowl’ (1768) honoring
the “Glorious Ninety-Two” members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who voted not to rescind a
letter to other colonies, protesting the Townshend Acts (1767). No. 49.45, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
37
Joshua Fogarty Beatty, "The Fatal Year:" Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765 (2014), 156n47.
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1539623642,
https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-96gh-3y07
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 9 of 63
�Copley wrote his wife Susanna: “You know years ago, I was right in my opinion that this would be the
result of the attempt to tax the colony. . . How warmly I expostulated with some of the most violent
Sons of Liberty against their proceedings they must remember; and with how little judgment, in their
opinion did I then seem to speak!”38
In Boston, August 14, 1769, third anniversary of the “enforced resignation of the distributor” of ‘the
Stamps,’ 350 Sons of Liberty dined at Liberty Tree in Dorchester including Copley; 39 whose politics
changed little in coming years. On December 20, 1772, brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke wrote Copley,
identifying him with, “you Sons of Liberty.”40
Preceding the Stamp Act Congress (October 1765) in New York,41 Copley’s golden chain opened a back
channel via art communicating American sentiment on individual freedom to change policy in London. In
profile, placing his ear to the viewer, Bostonian Henry Pelham signaled onlookers to ‘hear’ Copley’s
pictorial political message echoing the Society of Artists’ mission expressed on their 1765 exhibition
catalog title-page, acknowledging that after the Seven Years War (1756-1763), peace “ennobled life
through arts discovered [Virgil].”42 Seeking critiques on his work and motivated to help avoid future
protests against taxes to pay off that War’s debt load, Copley entrusted Pelham’s portrait, with his letter
describing Stamp Act rioting, to Captain R.G. Bruce. Having encouraged Copley “to finish the Picture,”
Bruce was pleased to be, “the first to find out its Merit, since it has had such great universal Applause in
this Country.”43 When first receiving it, Bruce acted upon Copley’s political messaging, later writing: “You
are greatly obliged to Lord Cardross, a Friend of mine, to whom I first sent it. He showed it to the most
eminent Conniseurs, then gave it to Mr. Reynolds who sent it with his own Pictures to the Exhibition.”44
Afterward, he advised Copley, it was “universally allowed to be the best Picture of its kind that appeared
on that occasion.”45
Copley’s symbol of a “Strict regard to conscience”
With his work shown to a politician, Pitt, before Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), future President of the
Royal Academy, Copley was not judged as “an Artist imploy’d” only in his “profession;” Copley’s
Painting/Ars Pictoria was surpassed by Statecraft/Ars Politica.46 Secretary of State during Newcastle’s
ministry, Pitt was soon-to-be Prime Minister, having likely seen A Boy with a Flying Squirrel before he
spoke against the Stamp Act, January 14, 1766. The Act was repealed March 18, 1766, a month before
the Society of Artist’s Spring Exhibition opened and Pitt was elevated to the House of Lords, becoming
1st Earl of Chatham (August 1766). Flying on a wind of success, Henry Pelham’s well-received portrait
debuting in 1766, reappeared in a special exhibition (1768) for the King of Denmark. A Boy with a Flying
Squirrel empowered colonists sympathetic to Sons of Liberty and opposed to the Stamp Act, from New
38
Copley to Susanna Farnham Clarke Copley (1745-1836), Parma, July 22, 1775; possible family oral tradition
described the ‘Sons’ as a “public rather than private organization, though it had its officers;” members assembling
under Liberty Tree when signaled by raising “a flag on a staff near it.” Amory (1882), 62, 461-462.
39
See “Copely, John,” in Palfrey, List, 139-142.
40
Jonathan Clarke to Copley, London, December 20, 1772. Letters, 193.
41
Attended by nine colonies, members drew up a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, emphasizing “no taxation
without representation;” they sent petitions to both Houses of Parliament and King George III.
42
Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760-1791 (1907; repr., Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1969),
318.
43
Captain R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 25, 1767, Letters, 60.
44
Captain R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, August 4, 1766, 42.
45
Ibid., Letters, 41.
46
Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Augsberg: Johann Georg Hertel, 1758-1760; repr., Edward A. Maser, ed., Cesare Ripa
Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery (New York: Dover Publications, 1971], Plates 197, 199.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 10 of 63
�Hampshire to South Carolina,47 to adopt the squirrel as an ongoing representation of a “Strict Regard to
Conscience,” and garnered international attention for the little animal as an American symbol, a fact not
heretofore recognized.
Copley’s symbolism extends to abolition: English law did not support enslavement, 1772
In London (1767), Captain Bruce placed Henry Pelham’s portrait in Benjamin West’s home,48 and in
January 1772, West’s friend, fellow Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin acted on Copley’s messaging,
giving a pair of American gray squirrels to the family of his friend Jonathan Shipley (1714-1788), Bishop
of St. Asaph, a member of the House of Lords and supporter of America. The Shipleys gave one squirrel a
new name in the English language, ‘Mungo,’ made famous by the enslaved black servant in The Padlock
opera that premiered (1768) at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. [Franklin eulogized this freedom-loving
squirrel that would run away, identifying it with the colonists’ quest for ‘Liberty.’] By naming the
American squirrel ‘Mungo,” the Shipley’s were urging American colonists to extend ‘Liberty’ to abolition
of black enslavement, as did Franklin, former enslaver, later an abolitionist. The bishop’s timing
recognized the anti-slavery Somerset v. Stewart case had reached the King’s Bench where Lord Chief
Justice William Murray (1705-1793), 1st Earl of Mansfield,49 would rule (June 1772) English law did not
support slavery, paving the way for banning enslavement in the western hemisphere.
4 Anonymity ensures romance
Cipriani ‘s 1767 etching did not name Mayhew’s portrait painter, possibly at Mrs. Mayhew’s request
originating with Copley, or as an unrequested courtesy to the artist, because Hollis expected the print to
be controversial. As a result, Copley remained in relative anonymity and his political position favoring
the moderate activity of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, paralleling his acceptance of this potentially
contentious and useful commission, has not been recognized by recent scholars.
Cipriani’s etching directly links Copley to the Whig politics of Mayhew whose half-sister married into the
Braintree branch of the Adams family.50 John Adams (1735-1826) “often Saw” and had listened to
Mayhew in the pulpit while growing up in his Braintree/Quincy, Massachusetts birthplace where the
47
Copley’s scuirine portraiture included (1) Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (1765, Crystal Bridges Museum of American
Art), née Frances Deering Wentworth of Portsmouth. First cousin to John Nelson II, she was likely aware of
Elizabeth Nelson’s portrait; her hands are similarly posed. Although future Loyalist exiles, her cousin (and second
husband) John Wentworth, agent (future Governor) for New Hampshire, worked with Charles Watson-Wentworth,
Second Marquess of Rockingham, who while Prime Minister won the Stamp Act repeal (1766). (2) John Bee Holmes
(1765, Dietrich American Foundation on loan to Philadelphia Museum of Art) portrays the six-year-old South
Carolinian holding a chained gray squirrel in the Boston-area portrait style of Joseph Badger (c. 1707-1765).
Holmes became aide-de-camp to General John Barnwell, South Carolina militia; was imprisoned by the British; and
became an attorney, judge, mayor and state senator. (3) On Daniel Crommelin Verplanck (1771), see below.
Several artists imitated Copley’s scuirine symbolism.
48
Capt. R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 25, 1767. Copley-Pelham Letters, 59.
49
Copley painted a full-length portrait of Mansfield (1783, NPG 172], including him in The Death of the Earl of
Chatham (1779-1781; Tate, on loan to National Portrait Gallery London; NPG L146).
50
Jonathan Mayhew’s half-sister (by their father) Reliance Mayhew Adams (1697-1730) married Eliashib Adams
(1699-1768/69) great grandson of Henry Adams, founder of the Braintree branch of the Adams family, and the
great-great-grandfather of Second President, John Adams.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 11 of 63
�minister visited his own Mayhew family members. Adams, a friend of the Copleys in London,51
considered Mayhew one of the five men chiefly responsible for, “The Revolution,” that, “was effected
before the War commenced in the Minds and Hearts of the People,” marking, “A Change in their
Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.”52
Cipriani’s etching reveals the dangerous depths of revolutionary iconology generated by Copley’s
portraiture before the first shots of the American Revolution were fired April 19, 1775. By that time,
Copley was in Europe studying the great masters to hone his painterly abilities, and in years to come,
Mayhew would be an overlooked chapter in the Boston artist’s internationally acclaimed career. A
quarter of a century before Lexington and Concord, the late Mayhew set in motion a revolutionary
mindset Copley advanced through his skill set offering allegories to ‘Liberty’ by way of likenesses
destined to be placed within engraved contexts for political purposes, as well as uncirculated portraits,
such as Nathaniel Hurd (c. 1765) and his own Self-Portrait (1769), herein discussed.
I posit that a direct furtherance of Mayhew’s message of ‘Liberty’ was what Copley wanted to and did
achieve through portraiture, but any publicly recognized printed connection to Mayhew was what
Copley, a Son of Liberty, wished to avoid while furthering the cause. His reasons for anonymity, reflected
a financial need to protect his future income-producing commissions from Loyalist and Whig alike and
his potential future prospects in London where his first commission upon arrival was to paint King
George III and Queen Charlotte.53 But, above all, on a personal note, a non-published connection to the
Mayhew portrait, could protect his courtship with his future wife Susanna Farnham Clarke (1745-1836),
known to her family as ‘Sukey.’ As historian Jane Kamensky has noted, Copley could have begun their
courtship as early as 1762 at Copley’s step-brother Charles Pelham’s school of dancing.54
Sukey’s father, merchant Richard Clarke (1711-1795), a steadfast Loyalist, withdrew his family from
Mayhew’s church and refused to receive the minister at his home, following the preacher’s anti-Stamp
Act sermon of August 25, 1765 and its aftermath, although Mayhew wrote to Clarke, maintaining his
sermon on “the importance of Liberty” counseled against violence.55 Four years after the Mayhew
51
Mrs. Adams, “a frequent visitor at George Street [London], would pour her complaints into Mrs. Copley’s
sympathetic ear, as stitching on her husband’s shirts . . . she told of . . .” Martha Babcock Amory, The Domestic
and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley (1882; repr., New York: Kennedy Galleries, Inc. Da Capo Press, 1969), 104.
On Adams family portraits, Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley in England 1774-1815, Vol. 2, 300-301.
Citations before page 244, reference Vol. 1: John Singleton Copley in America 1738-1774 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966), Vol. 1.
52
John Adams to H. [Hezekiah] Niles, February 13, 1818; John Adams to Dr. J. (Jedediah] Morse, Quincy, December
2, 1815, John Adams, The Works of John Adams Volume 10 Letters 1811-1825, Indexes (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1854) accessed at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-vol-10-letters-18111825-indexes#lf1431-10_head_120 ”From John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 18, 1818,” Founders Online,
National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-13-02-0148 [Original source: The Papers
of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Vol. 13, 22 April 1818 to 31 January 1819, ed. J. Jefferson Looney.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 138–139.]
53
The Commission was from Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire; Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay (through May 1774), asked Lord Dartmouth to recommend Copley to the King, Copley to
Susanna Copley, London, August 17, 1774; Rome, October 26, 1774 in Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 30, 37.
Amory states the portraits were completed by Copley after his tour and were at Wentworth House, Portsmouth,
New Hampshire. I am grateful to Keeper Tom Hardiman, Portsmouth Athenaeum for indicating the present
location is unknown; Letter to the author, October 23, 2006.
54
Jane Kamensky, A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley, 150-151.
55
Daniel Dennison Slade, “Jonathan Mayhew to Richard Clarke, Boston, September 3, 1765,” New England
Historical and Genealogical Register, January 1892, 15-20.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 12 of 63
�commission, Copley would marry Sukey.56 The reaction of Copley’s future father-in-law to the events of
the summer of 1765, spell out why Copley would not wish to have his name associated with Mayhew, in
print on any Boston or London engraver’s work in 1766-1767.
5 Crayons prove to be clue to overlooked Copley portrait
A year after the Boston fire of 1872, Augustus Thorndike Perkins published a sketch of Copley’s life and
the first cataloging of his work, thus preserving descriptions of portraits lost to the conflagration,
including Copley’s pastel of Rev. Mayhew and an earlier three-quarter length in oils of his wife Elizabeth
likely painted before, or at the time of, their marriage. These portraits were in the possession of their
grandson Peter Wainwright (1790-1878) when destroyed in 1872.57
However, in 1966, art historian and comprehensive Copley biographer, Jules David Prown recorded that,
“Copley received ten guineas for two pastel portraits of Mayhew on February 25, 1767,” the fee
representing his price increase that year.58 Although Prown made no identification of the payor, a
receipt (fig. 5) would surface April 3, 2003 at Swann Auction Galleries, New York, and read: “1767 Rec d
of Mrs. Elizh: Mayhew the sum of ten guineas in full for two portraits of Doc r: Mayhew with frames and
glasses. Boston Feby: 25 1767. Mr: John S. Copley.”59 As Prown noted, the unspecified medium was
pastel on paper (requiring the protection of “Glasses”). While ‘Portrait 1’ of Copley’s two remained in
America with Mayhew’s family until destroyed in 1872, the recipient of the second, ‘Portrait 2,’ listed by
Prown as “Unlocated,” was not identified as gifted to Hollis.60 Neither was counted in Prown’s ‘Statistical
Data’ (the most extensive on any colonial American portrait painter) on sitters’ politics.61
The three letters (1767-1768) to Elizabeth Mayhew from Hollis V, concerning her gift of Copley’s portrait
and the etchings Hollis sent her, are archived in the Bortman Collection of Americana, at the Howard
Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University Libraries; one hasn’t previously been published.62
Nor have they, or Hollis V’s Memoirs, previously been linked to Copley scholarship. Combined, these
sources provide the necessary documentary evidence that by May 10, 1767, Hollis V had received and
acknowledged (fig 6) Mrs. Mayhew’s gift of a picture of her late husband by Copley. This allowed me to
deduce that her fee set his higher price scale, reflecting Copley’s knowledge of the pastel portrait’s
London destination.
56
Until his death in 1790, Richard Clarke would live under Copley’s London roof.
Perkins described Mayhew’s portrait as “a crayon of half size,” with the minister, “dressed in robes with a white
wig.” Augustus Thorndike Perkins (1827-1891), Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the Works of John Singleton
Copley (Private Printing, 1873), 84.
58
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 223; 98.
59
Swann Galleries, Autographs Apr 03, 2003 - Sale 1965, Lot 137.
60
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 223.
61
Data for 240 American portraits, lists 52 Whigs, representing 45% of Copley’s American sitters versus Tory
64:55%. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 110, 126.
62
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 18, 1767 (acknowledging Mayhew’s portrait) reprinted in Bradford, Rev. Jonathan
Mayhew, 441 (incorrect year 1768); August 18, 1767 (sending 300 etchings of Mayhew’s portrait), partly quoted in
Clarence E. Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings (Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society, 1954),
27 (never published in full until herein); May 16, 1768 (discussing etchings) partly reprinted, in [Blackburne],
Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 380.
57
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 13 of 63
�Fig. 5. Receipt from John Singleton Copley to Mrs. Elizabeth Mayhew, Boston, February 25, 1767.
Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.
Fig. 6. Fig. 8. Detail of Letter from Thomas Hollis V to Mrs. Elizabeth Mayhew, Pall
Mall, London, May 18, 1767. (Box 1, Folder 105, Mayhew Family Papers, Bortman
Collection of Americana, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston
University Libraries. Hereafter, Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries).
Fig. 6. (Detail) Letter from Thomas Hollis V to Mrs. Elizabeth Mayhew, Pall Mall, London, May 18, 1767. (Box
1, Folder 105, Mayhew Family Papers, Bortman Collection of Americana, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research
Center, Boston University Libraries. Hereafter, Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries.
Medium of crayons indicates Cipriani’s source
Hollis V’s’ Memoirs indicate he paid Cipriani to work from a portrait of Mayhew “sketched at Boston;”
and, importantly, a last-minute asterisked footnote was added before going to press [emphasis here]:
Mr. Hollis settled with Cipriani the design of a print of the late Dr. Mayhew. From a hint in a
letter from Mr. H. to the Doctor’s widow, we think it probable that the head was engraved, or
sketched at Boston* and the design related to the decorations and emblems (which are
extremely elegant and characteristic) exhibited in the print as now published; for which Mr.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 14 of 63
�Hollis paid Cipriani thirty guineas. [*We have since been informed that the head was taken
there in crayons.] 63
Blackburne’s “hint” may be in Hollis’s May 16, 1768 letter in which he underlines, “very much like him,”
suggesting the portrait was by a talented unnamed Boston artist, whose work Cipriani did justice to.
Hollis’s underlining speaks to Copley’s ability to take a likeness: a top criterion of Boston sitters. In 1765,
Copley’s skill at taking a realistic likeness was praised in a sitters’ relation of a family letter from Scotland
to him, describing how his fifteen-month-old son tried to “catch hold” of his hand in his portrait by
Copley, as “proof of the Painter’s skill in taking Your likeness.”64
Copley’s anonymity, in association with Mayhew’s portrait, was still maintained even when Blackburne,
the likely recipient in 1768 of one proof impression of the controversial print, wrote the Memoirs
published in 1780. Cipriani, a contributor of plates for the text, was likely the source stating the portrait
was taken in Boston “in crayons,” suggesting he knew Copley was the artist, but did not divulge his
name to maintain the late Hollis’s confidence, while validating the likeness was accurate. A founding
member of the Royal Academy and designer of the Academy’s diploma, Cipriani’s specification of the
medium of “crayons” was tantamount to an attribution of the artist, implying Copley was the painter.
Before the Memoirs appeared, Copley’s “Portrait of a Lady; in crayons” was exhibited in London by the
Society of Artists in 1768,65 indicating the caliber of his portraiture, which was recognized when he was
elected to full membership (1779) in the Royal Academy, soon to become an academician.
Copley completed a large number, more than fifty, particularly fine pastels in the 1760s. His
admiration for Swiss artist Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), extended to specifically asking for
guidance to obtain, “a sett of the best Swis[s] Crayons for drawing of Portraits . . . [for] liveliness of
colour and Justness of tints.”66
Based on medium alone, it appears Copley was responsible for Mayhew‘s portrait engraved by Cipriani,
a conclusion supported by Prown’s description of Copley’s oeuvre: “by 1765, Copley had hit his stride in
the medium: during the next five years he created a series of pastel portraits that are without equal in
American art, and indeed rivaled only by . . . contemporaneous European pastelists . . .”67
Copley’s correspondence outlines the path he took to attain exhibition of his crayon work in London.
Despite the advice of Joshua Reynolds and American born artist Benjamin West, to work in oils not
pastels,68 Copley challenged their opinions. On November 12, 1766, he asked West to be specific,
believing his “best portraits done in that way;” existing letters indicate that in February 1767, Copley
made the unilateral decision to send a pastel portrait for West’s inspection; and would send another in
63
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 371.
In the realist tradition of Greek artist Zeuxis, Thomas Ainslie’s story accompanied his invitation to Quebec to
paint more portraits. At the heights of his popularity in Boston, Copley responded, “I have a large Room full of
Pictures unfinishd, which would ingage me these twelve months, if I did not begin any others . . .” Thomas Ainslie
to Copley, Quebec, November 12, 1764; Copley to [Thomas Ainslie], February 25, 1765. Copley-Pelham Letters, 3031; 33.
65
No. 24, Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 64.
66
“I would fain hope [America] will one Day become the School of fine Arts and Monsieur Liotard[‘s] Drawing with
Justice be set as patterns for our immitation.” Copley to Jean Etienne Liotard, Boston, Sept. 30, 1762. Copley
Pelham Letters, 26.
67
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 57-58.
68
On Reynold’s opinion, see Capt. R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, August 4, 1766, Copley-Pelham Letters, 41-42;
Benjamin West to Copley, London, August 4, 1766, Copley-Pelham Letters, 45.
64
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 15 of 63
�January 1768, one was exhibited in the spring of 1768.”69 It was possibly that of a ‘Mrs. Gray,’ as noted
by Prown based on the combined reference to her crayon portrait and A Boy with a Flying Squirrel in a
letter to Copley from William Carson of Rhode Island.70 In 1772, Carson largely summed up Copley’s
understated political and evident artistic reputation established at Society of Artists’ exhibitions and
codified by his Mayhew portrait in crayons, “Your painting of the Squirrel was a modest production, and
your picture of Mrs. Gray in Crayons could only testify, that in Boston . . . you, a man of some Genius . . .
I doubt much if there is your superiour In Europe.”71
In the same November 1766 letter to West, Copley requested the name of a London engraver for the
portrait he was then painting of a “Decenting Cleargyman,” who now appears not to be Rev. Jonathan
Sewall (1688-1769) as heretofore presumed, but Rev. Mayhew painted in pastels, which correlates with
Copley’s associated question on crayons,72 before the Mayhew commission was shipped to Hollis.73
A year later, knowing he had ‘a feather in his cap’ thanks to his portrait of Mayhew etched by Cipriani,
Copley wrote to West not mentioning the London print, still under wraps of limited circulation, but
stating he’d only seen three heads in crayon, thereby indirectly alluding to how a Grand Tour would
benefit him, given such an accomplishment (should it come to light).74 By early January 1768, word of
the success of Copley’s Mayhew portrait etched in London, may have increased the popularity of
crayons as a less expensive alternative to oils, and encouraged other artists skilled at painting in that
medium to advertise in Boston and Salem newspapers.75
In 1769, Copley rendered his own and his bride Susanna Farnham Clarke’s portraits in pastel (Winterthur
Museum). Continuing to favor the crayon, in 1774, Copley encouraged Henry Pelham to, “practice
continually . . . I would have you keep in your Pocket a book and Porto Crayon – as I now do – and where
ever you see a butifull form Sketch it in your Book. By this you will habituate your Self to fine formes. I
have got through the Dificultys of the Art, I trust, and shall reap a continual Source of pleasure from my
past Industry as long as it pleases God . . .”76
69
Copley to Benjamin West, November 12, 1766; Capt. R. G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 11, 1767; Copley to
Benjamin West, January 17, 1768, Copley-Pelham Letters, 51-52; 53; 66.
70
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 216. “Mrs. Gray” was probably the first sent, because Copley indicates the second
crayon portrait was not to be copied, as a promise to the girl’s parents, suggesting she was unmarried. Copley to
Benjamin West, January 17, 1768. Copley-Pelham Letters, 67-68.
71
William Carson to Copley, Newport, August 16, 1772. Copley-Pelham Letters, 187-188.
72
Copley to Benjamin West, November 12, 1766. Copley-Pelham Letters, 51-52. On Mayhew, not Rev. Joseph
Sewall, as long presumed, as ‘Decenting Cleargyman,” see below.
73
West’s earliest extant reply concerning an engraver was six months later. West to Copley, London, June 20, 1767
about the time he received the first crayon portrait shipped in late February. Copley-Pelham Letters, 58.
74
Copley to Benjamin West, January 17, 1768, Copley-Pelham Letters, 67n2,3-68.
75
George Mason (c. 1740-d. 1773) advertised portraits in crayons in frames and glass at two guineas, Boston NewsLetter. January 7, 1768 in George Francis Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England 1704–1775 (Topsfield,
Massachusetts: The Wayside Press, 1927), 2; also, Boston Chronicle of June 7-11, 1768. Benjamin Blyth (1746-1811)
then active in the Salem area, advertised his painting room for “Limning in Crayons” in The Salem Gazette, May 1017, 1769. Henry Wilder Foote, “Benjamin Blyth, of Salem: Eighteenth-century Artist,” Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, Oct., 1953 - May, 1957, Third Series, Vol. 71. 67,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25080476.
76
Copley to Henry Pelham, Paris, September 2, 1774. Copley-Pelham Letters, 245.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 16 of 63
�In 1779, when committed to working in oils, Copley preserved an image
of his once preferred medium in his portrait of Mrs. Clarke Gayton
(1779, Detroit Institute of Arts) posed with a porte-crayon holder in her
right hand, her sketchbooks on the floor beside her, [fig. 7a-b (Detail)] as
she thoughtfully compasses her chin as if preparing to picture words. 77
Mayhew family 1953 attribution
Beginning, in 1767, with Cipriani’s etching of Jonathan Mayhew, Copley
would provide fellow colonists with a look at well-known ‘faces of
‘Liberty,’ engraved for widespread dissemination. In contrast to his
relative anonymity maintained for
Mayhew’s portrait, Copley’s likenesses of
Samuel Adams (1770-1772) and John
Hancock (1765) engraved in 1774 by Paul
Revere, did not credit Copley’s name as
painter, but are long remembered as after
his work.78 Similarly, when 300 etchings
by Cipriani, first circulated in the autumn
of 1767, they were likely recognized by
Boston cognoscenti as after Copley’s
picture and understood to have been
judged by Thomas Hollis V, Harvard’s
Fig. 7a-b. Mrs. Clark Gayton, 1779 by John Singleton Copley. Oil on
major benefactor, as worthy of being
canvas; H. 50,” W. 40.” Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Mr. D. J.
engraved gratis in London.
Healy, 27.556. Detail of porte-crayon.
As art historian Paul Staiti asserts,
“Though Copley was intimately linked
with the Loyalist Clarkes, his own position on revolutionary matters is hard to identify. Copley himself
was not unsympathetic to dissent;” observing of Copley’s Whig sitters, Samuel Adams was the “most
radical revolutionary in America.”79 Unknown previously, the minister whose sermons fueled the Adams’
family’s political positions, was not only painted by Copley, but replicated for revolutionary purposes
and disseminated, with caution, when it mattered most.
However, Copley’s connection to Mayhew was tenuous, for reasons ranging from the minister’s death
nearly a decade before the Revolutionary War broke out, to the undesirability to overly associate the
77
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the pastel was a “dry paste made by grinding pigments and
compounding them with gum-water, used as a crayon;” held by a porte-crayon, “usually a metal tube split at the
end and held by a sliding ring so as to grasp the crayon.” For artists’ portraits, “the porte-crayon . . . unlike the pen,
was so very specifically associated with artists. Just as Sir Joshua Reynolds in his discourse used the porte-crayon to
highlight the importance of drawing, so Thomas Gainsborough in his portrait of the amateur artist, Lady Ligonier,
and his double portrait of his own daughters, chose to use the porte-crayon as a symbol of their commitment to
drawing.” Jacob Simon, “The artist’s porte-crayon,” National Portrait Gallery, London, Oct. 2012. Sir James A.H.
Murray, ed., A New English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), Vol. 7, 540, 1140.
78
Engraved by Revere after Copley for the Royal American Magazine, Vol. 1, spring of 1774 before Copley’s
departure for London in June. Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 82, 84. Phrase “faces of liberty” is derived from
the title of James Thomas Flexner, The Face of Liberty (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1975), passim (including
Copley’s portraits of Samuel Adams, Hancock, Hurd, Revere, James and Mercy Otis Warren and Joseph Warren.
79
Paul Staiti, “Accounting for Copley,” in Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 1995), Exhibition catalogue, 44.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 17 of 63
�Copley name with the Whig parson, for the sake of his London career as painter of Royal family
portraits. or that of his son, John Singleton Copley, Jr. (1772-1863), who would become 1st Lord
Lyndhurst, three-time Lord High Chancellor of England. Understandably cloaked in anonymity, Copley’s
long-term association to Cipriani’s etching of Mayhew stood the test of time in Mayhew family related
histories from 1911 to 1953, but thereafter was lost to Copley scholarship.
A search for a family record linking Copley to Cipriani’s etching, revealed that in 1953, former Assistant
Secretary of War, Colonel Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright (1864-1945), great-great grandson of Rev.
Mayhew, Doctor of Divinity, cited Perkins’s account about Copley’s portrait lost in 1872, and added,
“The clear-cut classic features of the Doctor in the well-known engraving by the Italian artist, Cipriani,
were taken from the Copley portrait.”80 The colonel was preceded in that opinion by Charles Edward
Banks (1854-1931) in The History of Martha’s Vineyard (c. 1911-1925).81 Colonel Wainwright’s privately
printed collection of genealogy-based biographies retained the connection for Mayhew’s descendants,
albeit Cipriani’s source was not preserved in Copley family memoirs.
Dispelling the Jennys misattribution of 1954
Col. Wainwright’s limited edition family history was overshadowed within months by, and likely
unknown to, antiquarian and print specialist Clarence S. Brigham in his widely circulated research
published in 1954, that maintained Cipriani’s engraving was based on a portrait by Salem,
Massachusetts artist Richard Jennys, Jr. (active 1766-1801), with no mention of Copley,82 noting,
“Judging from the drawing in the Cipriani print (reproduced in the Memoirs, Volume I, page 371), it was
based on the 1766 mezzotint by Richard Jennys,” (fig. 9).83 Subsequent scholarship did not identify
Cipriani’s print as representing Copley’s lost ‘Portrait 2’ of Mayhew (listed by Prown as “Unlocated).84
However, Jennys’ known work is in oil, not pastel.85 Brigham’s reference to the Memoirs recording a
portrait taken in Boston in crayon, flagged me to initiate a search for documentation indicating a Boston
master of the medium of pastel, Copley, was the actual painter of the quality portrait Cipriani engraved.
On July 17, 1766, a few days after Mayhew’s funeral with an impressive procession that included fiftyseven carriages,86 and precisely three days after Mayhew’s obituary was published in the BostonGazette, the News-Letter advertised, “Prints of the late Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., done in Metzotinto
80
Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, Those who came before us: Wainwrights, Mayhews, Stuyvesants and others
[{Milton Point, New York: Publisher not identified), 1953], 91. Wainwright was an army officer, Spanish–American
War and World War 1; United States Assistant Secretary of War (1921-1923); and United States Congressman, 25 th
District, New York (1923-1931).
81
Charles Edward Banks, The History of Martha’s Vineyard, Duke’s County (Boston, G.H. Dean, 1911-25), Vol. 2,
frontispiece; Vol 3, 312-3.
82
Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 25-26. World Cat lists seven editions at 700 libraries,
https://www.worldcat.org/title/28378 and three editions of Wainwright’s history in twenty libraries,
https://www.worldcat.org/title/1157903689?oclcNum=1157903689
83
Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 25-26.
84
Prown notes Cipriani made a drawing of Copley’s The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779-1781) for engraver
Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815), a choice that now takes on added meaning suggesting Copley was pleased with
Cipriani’s etching of his Mayhew portrait. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 290. Copley’s family knew Cipriani by
sight; the engraver introduced his new wife to Susanna Copley in 1810, at the family church, St. George’s, Hanover
Square. [Miss Copley to Mrs. Greene], London, August 27, 1809 in Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 296, 471.
85
Frederic Fairchild Sherman, Richard Jennys: New England Portrait Painter [(Springfield, Massachusetts): PondEkberg, 1941), 73.
86
John Rowe (1715-1787), Edward Lillie Pierce, and Anne Rowe Cunningham, Letters and diary of John Rowe,
Boston merchant, 1759-1762, 1764-1779 (Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1903), 103.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 18 of 63
�by Richard Jennys, jun. are sold by Nathaniel Hurd, Engraver, near the Exchange.” Boston silversmith and
“Engraver” Hurd’s press, offered prominence to Jennys, who engraved the mezzotint after his own
painting, thereby announcing his first published record of activity as an artist.87
Copley had jump started his career in similar fashion in May 1754 when the first publicly advertised print
after a portrait he painted, appeared in a Boston newspaper. His mezzotint of the recently deceased
Rev. William Welsteed (1696-1753), recorded Copley as painter and engraver, testament to his ability to
take quality likenesses worthy of engraving. 88 Copley’s Welsteed portrait was modeled after the portrait
of Rev. William Cooper (1694-1743) by John Smibert (1688-1751), engraved in 1744 by Copley’s stepfather master mezzotinter Peter Pelham (1697-1751), whose copper plate for Cooper was altered for
Welsteed’s mezzotint.89 Copley had learned the timeliness of marking the passing of a minister from
Pelham, who shortly after his arrival in Boston resumed his English mezzotinting livelihood, by engraving
(1728, Metropolitan Museum of Art) the likeness, he first had to paint, of the late Rev. Cotton Mather
(1663-1728). After Mayhew’s death in 1766, public demand for a likeness was expected by Copley and
the lesson he had learned from Pelham appears to have been communicated to Jennys and Paul Revere.
The rapidity and construction of Jennys’s first-time production indicates that although possibly aware of
Mayhew’s portrait by John Greenwood c. 1750 in an earlier style wig, sharing the resemblance but
differing in facial proportions and the turn of the head, he likely worked from a locket miniature by
Copley, c. 1754-July 1766,90 provided by Mrs. Mayhew.91 She, or Copley, also could have provided Jennys
with a mezzotint (fig. 8a) of the late Rev. Benjamin Colman, D.D. (1673-1747) for the design of a
minister’s robe to accompany the face, knowing Colman was a member of the Harvard College
Corporation and a frequent correspondent with Hollis III, as was the late Rev. Mayhew with Hollis V.92
In an adaptation reminiscent of Copley’s early reliance on Pelham’s Rev. Cooper (an assistant to
Colman), Jennys reversed (fig. 8b) Rev. Colman’s robe in his portrait by Smibert engraved by Pelham in
1735 (fig. 10 a, b) to produce Mayhew’s portrait (fig. 9). A corresponding migration of the buttons to the
viewer’s right, completed Mayhew’s garment. Jennys’s mezzotint featured an oval frame, narrower than
that in Pelham’s Colman, above calligraphy in Pelham’s style; Jennys’s subject (without inscription) was
larger than Pelham’s (H. 11 7/8,” W. 9 ¾” versus H. 8 ½” x W. 7 3/8”), indicating Pelham’s plate was not
87
Boston News-Letter, July 17, 1766 in Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 37; Jennys’s inscription reads “Rich.
Jennys Junr. pinxt. & Fecit.” See Ellen Miles, “Richard Jennys,” Richard H. Saunders and Ellen G. Miles, American
Colonial Portraits 1700-1776 (Washington D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1987), Exhibition catalogue, 275-276.
88
Approaching Copley’s sixteenth birthday, July 3, 1754, Welsteed’s mezzotint first appeared in the Boston Evening
Post, May 27, 1754 in Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 36.
89
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 15-16. Also, Karen E. Quinn in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 162.
90
On Greenwood, see “Treasures of the Congregational Library [Boston, MA]: Portrait of Jonathan Mayhew,” April
27, 2009, https://www.congregationallibrary.org/blog/treasures-congregational-library-portrait-jonathan-mayhew
Copley’s dateline includes Mayhew’s May 29th 1754 sermon and marriage, September 2, 1756. Copley’s portrait of
Mrs. Mayhew (Perkins, John Singleton Copley, 84) is further reason a portrait of Rev. Mayhew by Copley, already
existed in July 1766, and Copley, rather than Jennys, would have been called for a portrait during Mayhew’s illness
when the minister contemplated, “man’s form in the likeness of thy son Jesus Christ, that I may behold thy face in
glory . . .” Manuscript unsigned [Rev. Jonathan Mayhew], “A Prayer written in anticipation of his death,” c. 1766.
MS AM977, Colonial North America at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
91
Prown estimated, “the number of Copley paintings now known approximates three-fourths of his actual
production.” Prown, John Singleton Copley, 99.
92
Colman was minister of Boston's Brattle Street Church. On Colman-Hollis III correspondence in Harvard archives,
see Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Folsom, Wells and Thurston,
1840), Vol. 1, 527-546, passim.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 19 of 63
�Fig. 8a-b. (Upper Left; Reversed) The Reverend Benjamin Colman, D.D., 1735 engraved by Peter Pelham after
John Smibert. Mezzotint, Subject H. 8 ½,” W. 7 3/8.” Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan
Collection, 1946.9.727.
Fig. 9. (Right) The Revd. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., 1766 painted and engraved by Richard Jennys, Boston.
Mezzotint, H. 14 9/16,” W. 10 7/8.” Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, (1946.9.833.
reused.93 This suggests some input by Copley, who thereby distanced himself from Mayhew as Jennys
and Hurd published what proved to be an effective long-term cover story for Copley.
The waters of Copley’s potential early authorship were further muddied by Boston silversmith and
engraver Paul Revere (1734/35-1818), a member of Mayhew’s congregation, who produced a smaller
print (5 11/16 x 4 inches) of his pastor and friend with the fullness of face found in Greenwood’s front
view, but following the turn of the head in Jennys’s print imitating the three-quarter view favored by
Copley. Nineteenth-century Boston histories identified Revere’s engraving as early work, likely due to
opinions that it was “perfectly awful,” and a “failure.”94 Brigham located only one (fig. 10), at the New
York Public Library, which also holds Cipriani’s Mayhew, Britannia Victrix, and several Hollis prints of
Milton, plus the [Mayhew] Wainwright Family Papers, suggesting shared Mayhew family provenance.
Signed “P Revere sculp,” it’s inscribed, “The Revd. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. Pastor of the West Church.
93
John Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1883; repr., Mansfield Centre,
Connecticut: Martino Publishing, 2004), [Jennys 1, Mayhew] 729; [Pelham 7, Colman] 967-968; Andrew Oliver,
“Peter Pelham (c. 1697-1751) Sometime Printmaker of Boston,” in Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670-1775
(Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 143.
94
Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 26. Brigham cites Samuel Gardner Drake’s description as “awful” [History of
Boston (1856)]; his son Samuel Adams Drake, described it as a “failure” in his Old Landmarks and Historic
Personages of Boston (1872; revised edition, Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, Company, 1971), 118.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 20 of 63
�Boston. N.E. [New England] OBt July 9th 1766. AEt 46.” Mayhew, born October 8, 1720, died at age 45,
three months short of 46, which could mean Revere’s engraving was printed after October 8th.
Cipriani’s work shows drapery wrapped about
Mayhew’s bust, just below the tabs of his preaching
bands, differing from Jennys’s Colman adaptation and
Revere’s altered gown folds. While Jennys’s, Revere’s,
and Cipriani’s renditions each displayed different robes,
they all portrayed a similarly turned head, supporting
the theory an earlier (locket) face of Mayhew by Copley,
was used by Jennys and by Copley for the two Mayhew
portraits in crayons that he appears to have been
painting in November 1766, and paid for in February
1767. Cipriani used a portrait with the face turned,
Mayhew’s left eye and temple receding in well managed
shadows typical of Copley’s work in 1765-1766.95
Copley’s theoretical portrait of Mayhew would be
comparable to Mrs. Thomas Hancock’s miniature that
Copley completed, c. 1766, to be paired with his earlier
oil on copper miniature, c. 1758, of her husband,96 each
a replica of their c. 1766 pastel portraits by Copley.97
Widows Hancock and Mayhew shared an analogous
claim to Copley’s brush. Rev. Mayhew’s correspondence
with Harvard’s benefactor Hollis V, identified the
minister with Copley’s full-length portrait of Hollis III
intended to be hung in the new Harvard Hall, near the
artist’s similarly impressive full-length (c. 1764-1766)
of merchant Thomas Hancock (1703-1764), also a
benefactor.
Fig. 10. The Revd. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., c. 1766
engraved by Paul Revere, Boston. Engraving;
H. 5 11/16,” W. 4.” New York Public Library, The
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints
and Photographs: Print Collection, Image No.
1686646.
6 Elizabeth Mayhew’s Copley
commission for Hollis V’s gift
Copley’s decision to accept the Mayhew commission, intended as a gift for Thomas Hollis V, proved a
delicate balance, weighing the need for presenting the high standard of his own portraiture and the
tastes of colonial Boston, against the potential risk of associating with Mayhew and Hollis, whose open
support of Whig philosophy, and civil and religious liberty, clearly mixed art and political involvement.
There was the high probability Hollis, known for distributing prints associated with ‘Liberty,’ would use
95
Mayhew’s distinctive rounded wig is seen in Copley’s portraiture as early c. 1761. See Jacob Fowle c. 1761;
Daniel Hubbard, 1764; Samuel Philips Savage, 1764; and Joseph Greene, c. 1764. Closer to Mayhew’s death and
after Cipriani’s etching of Mayhew reached Boston, Copley painted other subjects preferring Mayhew’s wig style:
John Gray, 1766; Harrison Gray, c. 1767; Samuel Quincy, c. 1767; Josiah Quincy c. 1767; Isaac Royall, Isaac Smith
and Jeremiah Lee, 1769, etc.
96
The Hancock commissions included two pastel portraits of Thomas, c. 1758 and 1766 (unlocated) and the fulllength (1764-1766) for Harvard Hall. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 217-218.
97
Barbara Neville Parker and Anne Bolling Wheeler, John Singleton Copley American Portraits (Boston:
Massachusetts Museum of Fine Arts, 1938), 244-245.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 21 of 63
�the portrait to that end. To understand Copley’s decision, it’s important to summarize a chronology of
events leading to why Mayhew’s family and friends selected him for the Mayhew commission.
October 4, 1766: Hollis V responded to Elizabeth Mayhew’s letter of July 27, 1766, about her husband’s
death, with the assurance she would, “take great care of your letters to the Doctor, and whatever
papers you desired might be burnt.” He requested that “ALL my own letters and notes,” be destroyed,
the most recent unread by Rev. Mayhew to be read three times at most in her presence, by a trusted
friend of “public spirit,” and then destroyed, as well as any correspondence of Francis Blackburne
(unnamed in the text). He closed, asking, “A few prints from you, madam, of Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., an
unswerving magnanimous asserter of truth and liberty, even unto the death, would be truly acceptable
to me, and to my friends . . .” Not asking the widow to go to any expense for him, Hollis “enclosed a
bank note for one hundred pounds, made out to Mrs. Elizabeth Mayhew, Boston, without any notice
[mention] of it. The writer of Hollis’s Memoirs observed, “this was the act of a sincere friend, and a truly
benevolent man,” noting Hollis didn’t know Mrs. Mayhew’s father [Dr. John Clarke] was a “man of
property.”98 Nor, did Hollis likely know that in earlier days, Elizabeth Mayhew, née Clarke, was the
subject of a three-quarter length portrait by Copley portraying her wearing a “white satin robe, with a
blue mantle and hat” holding a basket of flowers in her left hand and a rosebud in her right, with a
landscape in the distance.99 Known for being “very beautiful,” family called her, “Aurora Borealis,” the
Roman goddess of the dawn, which proved symbolic of the revolution and a new day, resulting from her
support of her husband’s work, even after his death.100
Mrs. Mayhew’s loss of her husband was described as “very great; for there was never a more happy
connexion on earth,” and her decision to seek Copley’s expertise for the Hollis gift was understandable,
in light of her own portrait by Copley.101 She needed an image better than Jennys’s or Revere’s then
circulating in Boston.102 If Mrs. Mayhew consulted with Copley and her late husband’s friends,
particularly at Harvard, they likely advised that Hollis might arrange a better print to be made from a
fine portrait, if it were given as a gift, in lieu of prints then circulating. It was incumbent upon the
Harvard Corporation to recommend the artist they had chosen to paint the Hollis III portrait, for that of
Hollis V’s friend, thus placing Boston standards for portraiture associated with the college at a high-level
indicative of Harvard’s educational values. In correspondence with Rev. Mayhew, Hollis had long
believed the arts “would effectively strengthen the university.”103
November 12, 1766: Copley wrote two letters to London, one to Capt. R.G. Bruce, asking that his
compliments be given to certain “Gentlemen” [unnamed); and a second to Benjamin West. Despite
98
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, October 4, 1766 in [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 343-46; (no entry of gift in
his annual ledger) 348.
99
Perkins, John Singleton Copley, 84. Also see Frank W. Bayley, The Life and Works of John Singleton Copley
Founded on the Work of Augustus Thorndike Perkins [Boston, Massachusetts: The Taylor Press (for Bayley’s Copley
Gallery), 1915], 175. Prown notes Bayley’s additions to Perkins’ work need to be reviewed with “caution” as owner
of his gallery named after Copley; the Mayhew portraits are not ‘additions’ and are included in Prown’s checklist of
Copley’s American paintings. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 223; II, 467.
100
Inscription (verso) of Cipriani’s etching, gifted by a member of the Wainwright family, “With dearest regards,”
written on recto and signed, suggesting a tradition in which Mrs. Mayhew personalized some etchings she gifted.
101
Harrison Gray to Thomas Hollis, July 28, 1766. Gray (whose proposal of marriage to the widow, a year and a half
later, was refused), described Mrs. Mayhew’s loss to Hollis who briefly replied on a card and later discouraged
future correspondence as he was retiring to Dorsetshire. [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 342-343;
also 381-382, 431. Bradford, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, 438.
102
Before Hollis’s letter of October 4 could have been received in Boston, Elizabeth Mayhew wrote to Hollis
(subject unknown) on October 16, 1767, as noted in his of May 18, 1767.
103
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 125.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 22 of 63
�West’s earlier admonitions to work solely in oil,104 Copley pressed the point, asking, “when you write
next you will be more explicit on the article of Crayons, and why You dis[ap]prove the use of them, for I
think my best portraits done in that way.” He asked about engravers’ fees and West’s recommendation
of an engraver, intoning, “I have been painting the head of a Decenting Cleargyman [Mayhew], and his
friends are desireous to subscribe for it to be scraped in mezzotinto in the common size of 14 inches by
ten, but I cannot give them the terms till I know the price. I shall take it kind if when you see any artist
that You approve You menshon it to him, and Let me know.”105 Copley indicated that as soon he had a
name, he would send the portrait with the money to London to have it engraved.
Scholars have long thought the unspecified “Decenting Cleargyman,” whose portrait Copley was
painting in November 1766, was the same Rev. Joseph Sewall, pastor of Old South Church, for whom
Copley had prepared proposals for mezzotinting his portrait in 1764. 106 Based on the research herein.
this clergyman was Mayhew. Many of the minister’s “friends” were likely members of the Harvard
Corporation seeking to honor Hollis V’s friend and thereby continue Hollis’s interest in the college.
Elizabeth Mayhew appears to have sent, or indicated she would send, a portrait of her husband to Hollis
V, in a letter (text unknown) of January 13, 1767, the date of one of two letters from her that Hollis had
received and referenced in his letter of May 18, 1767 acknowledging receipt of the “Picture” she sent.
Four days later, January 17, 1767, Harvard President Rev. Edward Holyoke (1689-1769) wrote Copley,
insisting he return Cipriani’s bust-length copy of Hollis III’s portrait, loaned since 1764107 for painting the
full-length. The timing, of the two letters, suggests the two Mayhew portraits had left Copley’s studio for
the frame maker, or Mrs. Mayhew’s gift portrait was enroute to London, and that Copley’s Hollis-related
portraiture was completed and the loan extended while Copley worked on the Mayhew commission.
February 16, 18, 1767: Copley sent a portrait [name not specified, possibly ‘Mrs. Gray,’ see above] to
Capt. R.G. Bruce, who replied in June (weeks after the Mayhew portrait was received by Hollis V in May),
that, “I have not yet seen it, the Box not being opened, as Mr. West has desired it may be sent to him,
that he may see your Performance in Crayons.” 108 Copley’s artistic output in crayons and oils reaching
London that spring was reinforced by his full-length Young Lady with a Bird and Dog (1767, Toledo
Museum of Art), arriving “just in time” for the April 22 opening of the Society of Artists’ Spring
Exhibition.109
104
Copley to Capt. R.G. Bruce, November 12, 1766 referenced in R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 25, 1767;
Benjamin West to Copley, London, August 4, 1766, Copley-Pelham Letters, 58-59; 45.
105
Copley to Benjamin West, November 12, 1766. Copley Pelham Letters, 51-52. On identity as Mayhew, not Rev.
Joseph Sewall, see below.
106
Copley’s November 12, 1766 letter coincides with the c. 1766 dating of his portrait of Dr. Joseph Sewall of Old
South Church. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 56-57, 228, Fig. 196. Copley wanted 300 impressions engraved.
Copley to [an English Mezzotinter], January 25, 1764 [year corrected (from 1765) by Museum of Fine Arts Boston),
“Proposals for Printing Dr Sewell’s Portrait.” Copley Pelham Letters, 31-32; On Copley’s portrait of Sewall engraved
(no extant copies) in 1764 by Nathaniel Hurd, see Rebora in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 210n4.
107
Copley believed he was to have received the Cipriani portrait as part payment for his Hollis III portrait after
communicating with Governor Francis Bernard, whom Holyoke maintained had no jurisdiction over the portrait;
Holyoke asked Copley to reconsider any corresponding increased charge. Edward Holyoke to Copley, Cambridge,
January 31, 1767; also [Andrew] Eliot to Copley {1767?] Copley-Pelham Letters, 75 (out of chronological order); 79.
108
Copley’s two letter dates (content of former non-extant re: disposition of A Boy with a Flying Squirrel) are
mentioned in a letter from Capt. R.G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 11, 1767. Copley-Pelham Letters, 52-53.
109
Captain R. G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 11, 1767 in Copley-Pelham Letter, 53.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 23 of 63
�February 25, 1767: Copley signed a receipt for Mrs. Mayhew’s payment (fig. 5) for two pastel portraits
of her husband. She appears to have sent one to London, even before paying Copley, based on Hollis V’s
letter of May 18, 1767, referencing her January 13th letter and thanking her for the portrait.
May 18, 1767: Hollis sent his thanks (fig. 6) to Mrs. Mayhew, by way of the Lydia, Captain Scot,110 for,
“The Picture of the late Dr. Mayhew, my honored friend, your most excellent Husband, is greatly valued
by me on many accounts, & will have its Use too,” adding, “But I am sorry to observe the Expense it has
occasioned to you.”111Hollis saw its “Use” as being etched for a select group of recipients in Boston. If
Hollis had received any Mayhew prints by Jennys or Revere, the etching he commissioned Cipriani to
engrave was intended to accomplish more.112 Hollis V’s concern about the expense for Mrs. Mayhew,
was likely based on the quality of the portrait he received indicating some expense. By way of thanks,
Hollis sent Mrs. Mayhew a copy of Francis Blackburne’s (author/title not mentioned) Confessional, his
major work, that Hollis had (anonymously) initially helped publish (May 1766), asking Blackburne to
write a memorial to Rev. Mayhew in the second edition (June 1767).113
August 18, 1767: About three months after acknowledging Mrs. Mayhew’s gift of her husband’s
portrait, Hollis wrote, “Inclosed in this Box are three hundred impressions from an Etching of the late
excellent Dr. Mayhew, your Husband,” and asked her to be sole “Distributor.” This was the print
identified in Hollis’s Memoirs as from a picture taken in Boston, “in crayons.” The timing of Hollis’s
correspondence indicates the etching wasn’t after Jennys’s work in print for more than a year, but after
Copley’s recently sent portrait in crayons. This is the first time this letter is published in full:
Madam, palmal, aug. 18, 1767
I had the honor to write to you, May 18, by the Lydia, Capt. Scot.
Inclosed in this Box are three hundred impressions from an Etching of the late excellent Dr.
Mayhew, your Husband, and thirty two impressions from an Etching of another Person, his
friend and your friend.
The first Etching was produced through affection to the memory of a good & great public Man.
The second, through the repeated desires of several respectable Gentleman of Boston [^ &
Cambridge] in N.E.; and especially of the late Dr. Mayhew, to whom it was in a degree promised,
when ideas of more entertainment and use could be shown, from [^ it], than the mere Effigies
of a plain, private man.
110
Ship and captain referenced in Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, August 18, 1767. Mayhew Family Papers, Boston
University Libraries.
111
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 18, 1767. Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries. Reprinted under
incorrect year (1768) in Bradford, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, 441.
112
Hollis states the written memorials were “not equal to him [Mayhew]” and “extracts from public prints”
[newspapers] were “curious,” but, there is no specific mention in the Memoirs of Hollis receiving prints by other
engravers. Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, October 4, 1766 in [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 345.
113
Hollis believed it written by, “a Master Writer [Blackburne], an Assertor, like his friend the late Dr. Mayhew, of
Truth and Liberty at all times. You will observe in it a very handsome compliment to the Memory of the Doctor,
drawn in sober [the wisest of all] Commendation.” Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 18, 1767. Mayhew Family Papers,
Boston University Libraries. Neither title or author were named. Hollis gift was [Francis Blackburne[, The
Confessional, Or a Full and Free Inquiry Into the Right, Utility, Edification, and Success of Establishing Systematical
Confessions of Faith and Doctrine in Protestant Churches (2nd ed., London: S. Bladon, 1767), xxxviii, passim. This
memorial was written at Hollis’s request [to an unnamed person, i.e., Blackburne]. Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, October
4, 1766 in [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 345; also (on Confessional facing Cipriani’s print of Mayhew),
371-372.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 24 of 63
�Not one impression from either Etching has been given away to or seen by any Person here; nor
probably will be of some time, it may be years, or never: especially from the second, more on
either side of the Water.
I have wished, Madam, that you rather should be the Distributor of these impressions, than any
other Person, for several reasons; and wherein by so wishing I shall have judged amiss, I hope to
be forgiven.
I am, with unfeigned respect, Madam, Your most obedient, humble servant, T. Hollis 114
November 23, 1767: Mrs. Mayhew acknowledged receipt of the prints and indicated who she gave them
to. On this potential list of Sons of Liberty, the only recipient listed in Hollis’s Memoirs was James
Bowdoin, Esq. [a Son] who wrote verses about both etchings, that were forwarded to Hollis by West
Church member, Harrison Gray, who, therefore was likely one of the recipients.115
May 16, 1768: Hollis V acknowledged Mrs. Mayhew’s letter of November 23, 1767: “It was matter of
highest satisfaction to me to observe, by your very obliging Letter, dated nov. 23, 1767, that the
Impressions from the Etching of the late excellent Dr. Mayhew [fig.1], Your Husband, went safe, proved
acceptable and to be very much like him,” the comment suggesting Copley, known for painting
likenesses, rendered the portrait etched by Cipriani. Hollis once again modestly explained his own
double portrait, “The Impressions from the other Etching [fig. 2] were of far less consequence, and had
never, certainly, been produced, but from the reiterated request of some of the Gentlemen in New
England; nor have any more Impressions from it seen the Light in this Country, nor, probably will see it,
at least of many years.”116
7 Rev. Mayhew’s stand against Archbishop Secker and Cipriani’s etching: “this
print would make some noise when heard of” 117
In his letter thanking Mrs. Mayhew for her late husband’s portrait, Hollis described his friend as, “an
Assertor of Truth and Liberty at all times,” it was a phrase inscribed upon Cipriani’s etching for Mayhew,
“Assertor of the civil and religious liberties of his country and mankind.”118 Hollis also included Mrs.
Mayhew’s description of the cause of her husband’s death being a “nervous” fever: 119
114
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew [addressed to “Mrs. Mayhew, Widow of (^The Rev.) Dr. Jonathan Mayhew”)], August 18,
1767. Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries. Brigham cited this letter, which he located at Boston
University Library. Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 27.
115
Mrs. Mayhew to Hollis V, November 23, 1767 [specific content not transcribed]; Harrison Gray to Thomas Hollis,
December 15, 1767. [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq.; 380-381. James Bowdoin, Esq. (1726-1790) was
listed as a Son of Liberty in 1769 [Hon. John G. Palfrey, “List to the Massachusetts Historical Society,” Proceedings
of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: The Society, August 1869), 140]. Bowdoin became President of the
Massachusetts Provincial Congress executive council (1775-1777); Governor of Massachusetts (1785-1787);
founder and first President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bowdoin College, Maine chartered by
the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1794, was named in his honor.
116
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 16, 1768. Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries; partly reprinted in
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 380.
117
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 380-381 (see full quote, note 1).
118
Hollis to Mrs. Mayhew, May 18, 1767, p. 2. Mayhew Family Papers, Boston University Libraries.
119
Mrs. Mayhew to Hollis V, July 27, 1766. [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 344.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 25 of 63
�Known for liberal views and Stamp Act opposition, Mayhew was shown in Cipriani’s print with what
Hollis’s Memoirs called, “extremely elegant and characteristic” emblems.120 Inscribed “I.B. Cipriani
MDCCLXVII [1767], and measuring, 9 ½ x 7 inches (sheet 16 ½ x 11 inches), Cipriani’s etching of
Mayhew’s bust-length portrait emanating from a wall of cut stone, reads:
Jonathan Mayhew D.D. Pastor of the West Church in Boston, in New England, an assertor of the
civil and religious liberties of his Country and mankind who, overplied by public energies, died of
a nervous fever, July VIIII, MDCCLXVI, Aged XXXXV.
It was described in the nineteenth-century as “in the best style of the time, with Mayhew’s two pens
crossed . . . expanding at the feather end into ripened wheat-stalks, and girt with a laurel wreath
enclosing the legend . . .,”121 reading, “Remarks on an Anon. Tract P. LXXXII. I am indeed a ‘Poor Man.’”
Emphasizing the late minister’s humility in the cause of humanity, this phrase is believed to be
Mayhew’s rhetorical repetition of a disparaging remark directed against him by Archbishop of
Canterbury Thomas Secker (1693-1768), who formally published an answer countering Mayhew whose
published sermon argued that American churches should remain independent of Parliamentary acts to
ensure religious liberty, a concept applying to civil liberty.122
The print’s highly controversial upturned bishop’s miter, revealing a serpent, attacked Secker, whom
Mayhew rebutted in a publication opposing the bishop’s efforts to establish an episcopacy in America, a
move many believed would arouse colonial dissent against the Crown.123 John Adams would describe
Mayhew’s stand:
This transcendant . . . threw all the Weight of his great Fame into the Scale of his Country in
1761, and maintained it there with Zeal and Ardour till his death in 1766. In 1763 Appeared the
Controversy between him . . . and Archbishop Secker on the Charter and Conduct of the Society
for propagating the Gospels in foreign Parts [SPG] . . . If any Gentleman Supposes this
Controversy to be nothing . . ., he is grossly mistaken. It Spread an Universal Alarm against the
Authority of Parliament. It excited a general and just Apprehension that Bishops . . . were to be
imposed upon Us by Parliament. It was known that neither King nor Ministry nor Archbishops
could appoint Bishops in America without an Act of Parliament; and if Parliament could Tax Us
they could establish the Church of England with all its Creeds . . . and prohibit all other Churches
. . .124
Mayhew’s biographer, J. Patrick Mullins, has observed: “By characterizing the activities of the Church of
England as part of a conspiracy against New England’s civil and religious liberty, Mayhew successfully
raised a clamor among New Englanders sufficient to thwart Archbishop Secker’s colonial episcopate
without need for violence or disorder, mobilizing public opinion rather than public force.”125
Upturned, the symbol of the bishop’s office showed the import of Mayhew’s preaching, contrasting with
the upright ‘Liberty Cap’ at the foot of the print. The ancient Roman liberty, or Phrygian, cap was a
120
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 371.
Andrew P. Peabody, “Our Forerunners,” The Unitarian Review (Boston: Office of The Unitarian Review, March,
1889), Vol. 31, No. 3, 202.
122
Bradford, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, title page.
123
Mayhew’s pamphlet Observations on . . . the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1763)
resulted in Secker’s An Answer . . . (1764). Hollis foresaw the upturned miter could be construed as against the
Church of England, but claimed it was intended against the policy of “ONE MAN” [Secker]. [Blackburne], Memoirs
of Thomas Hollis, 381.
124
John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, supra.
125
Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew, 152-153.
121
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 26 of 63
�favorite symbol of Hollis V’s designs imprinted upon books on English liberty written by authors such as
John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and John Milton that Hollis had reprinted and distributed to American
colleges.126 These works have been called “the political text-books” before the Revolution.127
Small as it was, Mayhew’s ‘Liberty Cap’ served as a metaphor for the Biblical parable of the tiny mustard
seed that when scattered would grow,128 reflecting Mrs. Mayhew’s gift of the portrait, “the widow’s
mite,” (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4), and in keeping with one of Hollis’s favorite mottos, Ut Spargam.
Translated as “that we may scatter them,” his motto appeared in his own handwriting upon more than
twenty of the hundreds of books he gave to Harvard, many focused upon ‘Liberty.’129 Hollis appears to
have appreciated that the Latin liber, for ‘book’ could be applied to the root meaning ‘free’ in ‘Liberty,’
and his motto and actions seeded a ‘Liberty Tree’ in Boston. Appreciating this symbolism, Copley
created similar (banyan) allegories (passim) for the ‘Liberty Tree.’
8 Theoria to Practica
In a dedication on the flyleaf of his own Hollis edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government that
he presented to Princeton in 1764, Thomas Hollis V described himself as, “an Englishman, a Lover of
Liberty, [and] the principles of the [1688] Revolution.”130 He developed bookbinding devices designed by
Cipriani, to feature ‘Liberty’ symbols on books he distributed around the world from London to Europe
to Asia131 and North America.
According to Frank H. Sommer, longtime Director of Winterthur Library, Hollis became interested in the
message of ‘Liberty’ delivered by Mayhew, in his 1750 sermon in which Hollis, “found inspiration for one
of the main themes of his visual propaganda . . .,” to create his “first physical icon . . . of British Liberty a
seated goddess triumphant over Charles I” [later Cipriani’s Britannia Victrix (1770, New York Public
Library)]. As Sommer observed, Hollis invented the “’Ideas,’ ‘Images,’ or symbols . . . the theoria,” and
Cipriani and other artists supplied the practica.132 Sommer’s analysis can be applied to Copley’s own
126
On Hollis’s liberty designs see Frank H. Sommer, “The Metamorphoses of Britannia,” Charles F. Montgomery
and Patricia E. Kane, eds., American Art: 1750-1800 Towards Independence (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1976), 40-49.
127
Caroline Robbins believes Sidney’s Discourses influenced Mayhew’s sermon of 1750. Caroline Robbins,
“Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government: Textbook of Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly
(Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, July, 1947), Vol. 4, No. 3, 268, 280n21,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1917334.
128
“He put another parable before them, ’The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took
and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and
becomes a tree.’” Matthew 13:31-32. Verses from Matthew were appropriate for Mayhew due to the
similarity/origin of his surname.
129
On translation, see Rachel Hammersley, “’Ut Spargam’ and Other Hollis Marginalia,” Blog, 7/14/22, Newcastle
University, Newcastle upon Tyne, accessed February 26, 2023 at http://www.rachelhammersley.com/newblog/2022/7/14/ut-spargam-and-other-hollis-marginalia
130
James Holly Hanford, "Ut Spargam": Thomas Hollis Books at Princeton,” The Princeton University Library
Chronicle. Vol. 20, No. 4 (Summer 1959), 165.
131
Caroline Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln's Inn,” The William and Mary Quarterly
(Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, July 1950), Vol. 7, No. 3, 408,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1917230.
132
On Lorenz Natter’s ‘British Liberty Triumphant,’ (Houghton Library, Harvard University) showing a woman
seated with a hasta (staff) and liberty cap above the date January 30 --, see Frank H. Sommer, “The
Metamorphoses of Britannia,” 41-42. On Hollis working with artists, Natter (1756) and first gifts to Mayhew (17571759), see [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 80-81.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 27 of 63
�contributions to theoria and practica, beginning with A Boy with a Flying Squirrel and evidenced by his
awareness that a controversial engraving could result from his acceptance of the Mayhew commission
for Hollis V.
Hollis’s inspiration was drawn from Mayhew’s sermon titled, “A Discourse . . .,” preached on “the Lord’s
Day after the 30th of January, 1749-50,” the anniversary of the execution of Charles I one century earlier.
Mayhew maintained resistance against tyrannical monarchical power was justified, declaring,
“Resistance was absolutely necessary in order to preserve the nation from slavery, misery and ruin.” 133
In 1818, John Adams gifted Thomas Jefferson a copy of that sermon, calling it his ‘Catechism’ and
‘Education’ at the young age of fourteen. Adams explained to Jefferson, “I read it, till the Substance of it,
was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”134 He long remembered
Mayhew’s sermons encouraging American colonists to resist tyranny, beginning with his freedom-loving
diatribe of 1750, that Adams later claimed was, “read by every Body” at the time. 135
Mayhew’s second rousing call for colonial liberties, “A Sermon Preach’d May 29 th 1754 . . . Being the
Anniversary for the Election of His Majesty’s Council for the Province,” (Boston 1754) further asserted
loyalty to a tyrant was enslavement. The previous year, Hollis had returned to England from two Grand
Tours; in 1754, he donated a monetary gift to Princeton (the first of his gifts to an American institution);
and in 1755, became an anonymous donor acting through a third party, to send Mayhew a box of prints
of statesman Algernon Sidney, for the students at Harvard.136 His subsequent gifts of books in 1759
initiated their correspondence lasting until Mayhew’s death.137 Valuing the effectiveness of prints and
portraits that he had commissioned to be made, Hollis had Mayhew’s sermon of 1759138 printed in
London.
Appreciating Hollis’s emphasis upon books, the Boston-Gazette obituary for Mayhew, praised his
published and republished works, “admired both in Europe and America,” that had already “furnished
out a monument to their author, much more durable than marble or brass.”139 As a Harvard graduate,
Mayhew’s ideas of ‘Liberty,’ preached and published, represented fruit borne by Hollis family gifts to
Harvard, in the form of books and professorships supporting freedom of learning.
9 Dedication to education and ‘Liberty’
Copley first learned of the Hollis family’s dedication to education and ‘Liberty,’ at age thirteen when
Peter Pelham engraved his last mezzotint (fig. 11) after Harvard’s portrait of Thomas Hollis III painted in
1722 by Highmore in London. Thirty years after the death of Hollis III, Pelham encouraged future Hollis
family interest in Harvard, when in May 1751, the Harvard Corporation voted, “liberty be given to Mr.
Pelham of Boston Painter to take a Mezzotinto Print from Mr. Hollis’s Picture now standing in the Hall;
Provided All due Care be taken by him that no Injury be done to s’d Picture.”140
133
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, “A Discourse . . . (1750), 54.
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 18, 1818, supra.
135
John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, supra.
136
On Princeton, see Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig . . .,” 430; Hanford, "Ut Spargam," 166.
137
Bernhard Knollenberg, “Thomas Hollis and Jonathan Mayhew: Their Correspondence 1759-1766,” Proceedings
of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 69 (Oct., 1947 - May, 1950), 102, 109-110.
138
Mayhew’s Two discourses on Ps. cxxvi 3. delivered Oct. 25, 1759, being the day appointed by authority to be
observed as a day of public thanksgiving, for the success of his Majesty's Arms, more particularly in the reduction of
Quebec, the capital of Canada (London, l760) in Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig . . .,” 411, 434.
139
The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, July 14, 1766.
140
Saunders cites Anne Allison, “Notes on the Hollis Portraits, 1937, p. 4 in American Colonial Portraits, 142.
134
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 28 of 63
�Fig. 11. Thomas Hollis [III], Boston, 1751 by Peter Pelham. Mezzotint, H. 14,” W. 10 1/8.”
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Boylston A. Beal, Photo © President and
Fellows of Harvard College, M13349.
Pelham advertised Hollis III’s print in the Boston Gazette, September 17, 1751,141 as after the “curious
whole-Length Picture . . . placed in the College Hall at Cambridge,”142 inscribed, “Thomas Hollis, late of
London Mercht a most generous Benefactor/to Harvard College, in N.E. [New England] having founded
two Professorships and ten/Scholarships in the said College, given a fine Apparatus for
141
142
Oliver, Boston Prints and Printmakers, 165.
Boston Gazette, September 17, 1751 in Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 35.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 29 of 63
�Experimental/Philosophy & increased the Library with a large Number of valuable Books &c.”143 Pelham
died three months later.
In the brief space of three years following the marriage of Copley’s widowed mother to Pelham in 1748,
the latter shared his expertise with Copley, particularly when Hollis III’s portrait was interpreted onto a
copperplate. Marjorie Shelley has observed, the “curious connection between mezzotint engravers and
pastelists suggests that Copley was probably introduced to the crayon technique in his stepfather’s
workshop;” using “black and white chalks or pastels for transferring, or ’calking,’ an image to the rocked
copperplate, or by drawing directly on it. The broad handling of both chalk and pastel provided a model
with tonal qualities for engraving the plate that would be translated to subtle gradations of light and
dark in the . . . mezzotint . . . to evoke the effects of painting.”144 For Copley, in 1766, the Harvard
Corporation’s commission for a replacement of the Hollis III portrait was personal and interconnected
with his ability for portraiture in oils and pastels.
Hollis III
From 1754, Hollis V followed in the footsteps of his great-uncle Thomas Hollis III, Harvard’s long-time
“Eminent Benefactor,” as Mayhew described him in his first letter to Hollis V, pointing out that as a
graduate [1744} he owed gratitude to Hollis III and to Hollis V for his recent gifts.145 On July 9, 1766, the
day Mayhew died, Harvard President Rev. Edward Holyoke penned a letter to Hollis V. Reiterating earlier
requests that he send a portrait of himself,146 and focusing on Hollis III’s replacement portrait, Holyoke
wrote: “The Carver who hath made a frame for yr excellent Uncle’s Picture (which we have got drawn at
Large By a Painter who takes a fine Likeness) hath constructed it so, as to have an Eschucheon for his
Arms on the Top of it wherefore if you will please to send us the Blazonry They shall be added.”147 The
unnamed ‘Painter’ was Copley, who received 16 guineas on July 14 for the full-length portrait. 148
To paint the face of the replacement, Copley relied upon the loan of a half-length portrait of Hollis III. It
was a copy painted by Cipriani (fig. 12) after a 1723 portrait owned by Hollis V and sent by him in August
1764 in response to the college’s request for a likeness to replace that lost.149 Cipriani’s portrait was still
in Copley’s studio that July day Mayhew died and would remain for, at least, another six months through
January 1767 when Holyoke insisted Copley return it, a few days after Copley’s portrait of Mayhew in
143
Print records “Jos. Highmore pinx, 1722;”Hollis’s death “Ob: 1731. AEt 71.,” and “P. Pelham. ab origin: fecit et
excudt 1751.” Hollis III was responsible for the first published catalog (1723) of Harvard’s Library intended to be
circulated among potential donors in England who could supply missing tomes. Today, the Harvard Library catalog,
its major online search interface, is called “HOLLIS.”
144
Marjorie Shelley, “Painting in Crayon: The Pastels of John Singleton Copley,” in Rebora et al., John Singleton
Copley in America, 128.
145
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew to Hollis V, August 16, 1759 in Knollenberg, “Thomas Hollis and Jonathan Mayhew,”
109-110.
146
Andrew Eliot to Hollis V, Boston, October 26, 1764 in Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 733. Holyoke repeated the
request January 5, 1765, May 11, 1765, June 10, 1765, Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 602-603; 735.
147
Letterbook of President Edward Holyoke, 1766-1767, Harvard University Archives cited in Morrison H. Heckscher
and Leslie Greene Bowman, American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1992), Exhibition catalogue, 138n32.
148
Treasurer’s Journal (1755-1773), 121 cited in Parker and Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, 105; Prown, John
Singleton Copley, 98.
149
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., 243. On Hollis’s response April 5, 1764, describing the copy made,
“after a portrait taken from the life in my possession,” see Peter J. Gomes, “Thomas Hollis of London and His Gifts:
Two Hundred Seventy-Five Years of Piety and Philanthropy at Harvard . . .” (Kirksville, MO: Truman University
Press, 2000; repr., Hollis’s Hospital, Yorkshire, UK (after 2002), n.p., https://www.hollishospital.org/thomas-hollisof-london-and-his-gifts-two-hundred-and-seventy-five-years-of-piety-and-philanthropy-at-harvard/
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 30 of 63
�pastels, appears to have left his studio for the
frame maker or London. Hollis III’s full-length
replacement portrait remained in Copley’s studio
until 1769.150
For Hollis III’s portrait (fig. 13), Copley reversed
Pelham’s mezzotint, roughly following its form
and mass by moving the print’s swagged drapery
to the right in the new portrait and translating
Highmore’s covered table’s draped vertical edge
as wall corner and highlighted wainscot.
Effectively acknowledging the Enlightenment as
the architecture set off and paralleled the bold
outline of the round topped writing table’s post
with its urn-shaped turning giving rise to the red
urn above it, he thereby extended the symbolic
potential of giving and receiving support to the
writing surface standing upon its tripod-feet set by
its owner’s right foot. By association, the letter
written upon the table is posted forward into
enlightened collegiate thought. The urn’s shell
base inverts the mezzotint’s shell design above
Hollis’s head, to convey marine imagery conducive
to the passage of correspondence across the
Atlantic.
Copley added a pen in Hollis III’s hand and inkwell
to activate the visualization of his welcome
correspondence with Harvard, and completed the
portrait with a letter detailed, “To the Rev. J.
Leveret President of Harvard Colledge in New
England.”151 Copley’s pen effectively extended
Hollis III’s correspondence to Hollis V’s,
particularly with Mayhew.
Fig. 12. Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Thomas Hollis
(1659-1731), copy after an original dated 1723, Oil on
canvas; H. 29 7/8,” W. 25.” Harvard University Portrait
Collection, Gift of Thomas Hollis V to Harvard College,
1765, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard
College, H83.
In Copley’s portrait, Hollis’s face is at the precise angle set in the mezzotint and the Cipriani copy.
Copley’s work is, as Rev. Gomes has stated, a “creative composite” of the mezzotint and Cipriani
portrait, as noted by Anne Allison, “Obviously Copley didn’t copy the mezzotint but I think I can detect
influences of it both in details of Hollis’s face and incidentals.”152
150
Holyoke to Copley, January 31, 1769 in Bayley, John Singleton Copley, 144.
Parker and Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, 105. Copley portrays a letter addressed to Harvard, whereas in
Pelham’s print, a letter with a broken seal has been described as to the “personage” (Hollis) in Chaloner Smith,
British Mezzotinto Portrait, [Pelham 23] 973; the latter agreeing with Gomes’s description as a letter of thanks.
Gomes, “Thomas Hollis of London,” n.p.
152
Anne Allison letter to Frederick B. Robinson in Gomes, “Thomas Hollis of London,” n.p. Rev. Gomes refutes
Laura M. Huntsinger’s statement [in Alan Burroughs, ed., Harvard Portraits: A Catalogue of Portrait Paintings at
Harvard University, 1936] that Copley didn’t rely on the mezzotint; and Barbara Parker (1938) noted Copley didn’t
use the print for the face.
151
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 31 of 63
�Fig. 13. John Singleton Copley; Frame by Unidentified American Framemaker, Thomas Hollis III
(1659-1731), Oil on canvas; H. 93 ¾,” W. 58.” Harvard University Portrait Collection, Commissioned
by the Harvard Corporation, 1765, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, H25.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 32 of 63
�10 Copley’s dialogue of ‘Liberty’ with Hollis and Cipriani
After Copley relied on Cipriani’s copy of Hollis III; Cipriani engraved Copley’s Mayhew portrait, bringing
the skill of the artist responsible for Harvard’s Hollis III replacement portrait, directly to Hollis V of
Lincoln’s Inn. Copley’s acumen, evident in the Mayhew portrait, would have assured Hollis of the high
level of values for the arts, and, by association, education at Harvard and in New England, expressive of
gratitude for Hollis family gifts, thereby encouraging more in future, which immediately occurred with
Hollis sending Cipriani’s etchings in August 1767 for Mrs. Mayhew to distribute. About 300 recipients of
her choosing had no need to subscribe for Mayhew’s print (as Copley had inquired of West in November
1766).
This auspicious Hollis-related evolving accomplishment secured Copley’s unmatched artistic reputation
in America, justifying a prestigious sterling increase in his fee scale in 1767; precipitating the first
exhibition of his portraiture in pastels in London at the Society of Artists in 1768; and establishing his
politics in Boston as a moderate Whig and Son of Liberty in 1769.153 Through the Mayhew portrait’s
transatlantic story, Copley had accomplished what George Livius of Portsmouth, New Hampshire
expected for his personal commission of September 14, 1767, anticipating, “as perfect pictures as you
can make them for your own honor and the credit of New England,” challenging the artist because
Copley’s fee “considerably” exceeded that of two years previously when Livius was last in Boston.154
‘Liberty’ taught in Boston
Copley learned the language of political double entente and nature of allegory in portraiture from his
two earliest teachers, mezzotinter and schoolmaster Peter Pelham and artist John Smibert. Pelham was
a master of that craft of subtle communications in his London engraving work, likely leading to his
emigration to Boston, c. 1727, followed in 1728 by Smibert, whose Notebook contained an undated
verse: “Let lawles power in ye East remain/And never Cros the wide Atlantick main/Here flourish
learning trade & wealth increase/The hapy fruits of liberty and peace.”155 Smibert left for the New World
with intentions to be an art professor at Bishop George Berkeley’s planned college for colonists in
Bermuda, but without the anticipated funding, settled in Boston in 1729.
Less than a decade later, Smibert left Old South Church under the conservative Rev. Joseph Sewall, and
helped organize, and as architect may have designed, West Church; his pew was next to Mayhew’s
family.156 Smibert biographer Henry Wilder Foote has observed, Smibert’s transfer to West Church,
considered “the most liberal” in Boston, “may indicate the trend of his own thinking in religion and
politics;” and before his death (1751), Smibert could have heard Mayhew deliver his early “sermons
against arbitrary rule.”157 In 1749, one of Mayhew’s sermons called for “liberty and freedom of
thought,” admonishing “Let us all stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free; and not
153
On August 14, 1769, the third anniversary of the “enforced resignation of the distributor” of ‘the Stamps,’ 350
Sons of Liberty dined at ‘Liberty Tree’ in Dorchester including Copley. In 1772, brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke
wrote Copley, identifying him with, “you Sons of Liberty.” “Copely, John,” in Palfrey, “List,” 139-142; Jonathan
Clarke to Copley, London, December 20, 1772. Copley-Pelham Letters, 193. Prown acknowledges these facts while
listing Copley as a Moderate Tory. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 125.
154
George Livius to Copley, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, September 14, 1767, Copley-Pelham Letters, 61.
155
The Notebook of John Smibert (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969), 102.
156
Richard H. Saunders, Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1995), 109. As architect, see Henry Wilder Foote, John Smibert, Painter (New York: Kennedy Galleries, Inc. Da Capo
Press, 1969; reprint Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950, 80.
157
Foote, John Smibert, 80.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 33 of 63
�suffer ourselves to be intangled with any yoke of bondage.”158 Born in Scotland, Smibert favored a
pamphlet printed by Andrew Millar (1705-1768) formerly of Edinburgh and later one of Hollis’s London
publishers.159
In London, Pelham’s family motto ‘Vincit Amor Patriae', meaning ‘Love of country prevails,” appeared on
his mezzotint (1721) of Robert Lord Molesworth (1656-1725),160 an Anglo-Irish political theorist, writer,
and social reformist for the working classes. Pelham signed his name beside his own shared family
motto on Molesworth’s coat of arms flanked by verse from Lucan (39 AD-65AD) testifying to the
patriotic principles of the Roman statesman, Cato the Younger (95 BC-46 BC). In Pelham’s London, Cato’s
name had become synonymous with ‘Liberty’ after English playwright Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy
was first performed in 1713. Whenever an actor mentioned the word ‘liberty,’ the Whigs in the
audience cheered and Tories, resenting the political inuendo, cheered louder.161 Pelham’s inscription
and design expressed a language of reform that continued with his Hollis III engraving. Copley would
employ that language in his painting.
Like Pelham, Hollis V favored Molesworth’s writings, attempting to distribute his work as far as Russia. In
1764, he sent Harvard a copy of a book Molesworth translated that defined the values of a Whig.162
Pelham’s inscription for his Hollis III mezzotint expressed an understanding that books and prints
comprised an education that was the basis for ‘Liberty,’ the philosophy of Hollis family gifts of books on
government given to Harvard.
11 Copley’s Boylston portraits in banyans allegorize ‘Liberty Tree’ and oppose
enslavement
For Copley, Highmore’s portrait of Hollis III seated at a table holding an opened letter as a successful
hardware merchant was signified by his robe patterned with ‘flourishing’ flowers. The floral motif
allegorized a Biblical ‘Tree of Knowledge’ that denoted the education, professorships and books given by
Hollis III. The Latin liber meaning ‘book,’ was also the root meaning ‘free’ and ‘independent,’ in the word
(and image of) ‘Liberty,’ thus extending to the later books given by Holllis V, focusing on ‘Liberty.’ This
etymological confluence allowed Copley to equate the robe, called a ‘banyan,‘ to a ‘Liberty Tree.’ For
Hollis III’s replacement portrait, however, he exchanged the banyan in Pelham’s mezzotint for
contemporary clothing that Hollis V preferred for his great-uncle’s portrait as copied by Cipriani.
By the mid-eighteenth-century, the word banian or banyan, chiefly signified the banyan-tree growing in
Persian Gulf cities and giving its name to actual merchants, or traders of Asia. This ‘fig tree of India’ was
often covered by streamers of taffeta, linking it to rich, luxuriant fabrics. To date, ‘fabric’ has been the
sole aspect of banyan use discussed in scholarship to emphasize personal interest in self-fashioning,
aristocratic and materialistic motives as the rationale behind the banyans Copley painted. I posiit that
the banyan conveyed a more signficant meaning based on Copley’s strong appreciation for the power of
158
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, Seven Sermons (Boston, N.E., Rogers and Fowle, 1749), 53, 85.
John Smibert to Arthur Pond, Boston, July 1, 1743 in Saunders, John Smibert, 257.
160
Engraved cum privilegio Regis after Thomas Gibson (c. 1680-1751), a founder of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Academy
in London. Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits, [Pelham 27] 975.
161
“Cato,” The Encyclopedia Americana (New York: Americana Corporation, 1963), Vol. 6, 107. George Washington
had the play performed at Valley Forge more than twenty times during the winter of 1777-1778.
162
According to Caroline Robbins, Molesworth’s An Account of Denmark (4th ed., London, I738), “later became an
important Whig ‘classic.’ Hollis sent twenty copies of it to his friends. It may have been among the books rejected
by the Russians . . .,” and in 1764, presented Harvard with “Molesworth's translation of Francis Hotman's FrancoGallia (London, 172I), with its famous definition of a Whig.” Robbins, “Algernon Sidney’s Discourses,” 286n52.
159
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 34 of 63
�allegory communicating reform. In the Persian Gulf, perpetually growing banyan branches dropping
shoots to the ground lending support and becoming intertwining aerial roots, formed arcades beneath
which thriving markets were held and ‘banian’ traders met. Banians (the traders) abstained from meat,
hence aboard ship, ‘banian days’ meant no meat for a ships’ company,163 which allowed Copley, who
grew up on Boston’s Long Wharf, to apply the garment’s nomenclature to Boston merchants whether
prospering or experiencing meager profits, some meeting, as he did, with Sons of Liberty under the elm
branches of Boston’s ‘Liberty Tree.’164
To this arboreal point, the “Boylstones Garden” seen by John Adams in 1773, was “a large, beautiful and
agreeable one,” including various fruits, “a figg Tree, &c.,”165 possibly furthering Copley’s development
of political messaging for portraits analogizing the dressing robes of Boston merchants (and others) to
banyan (fig) trees and their turbans to ‘Liberty Caps.’ His symbolism evolved by color, green for thriving
and brown/gold for withering, relevant to the sitter’s politics. Relying on the banyan motif in Pelham’s
mezzotint of beneficent hardware merchant Hollis III to make a political point supporting ‘Liberty,’
Copley’s portrait c. 1767 of Boston hardware merchant Joseph Sherburne (Metropolitan Museum of
Art), a High Tory, portrayed the sitter in a brown banyan with a blue turban and table cover connoting a
frigid lack of verdancy.
Copley’s combined use of banyans with a turbaned ‘Liberty Cap’ motif is notable in his three portraits of
merchant Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771) to convey the benefit of uniting against Parliamentary duties
on imports. In the earliest portrait (1767), Boylston, a Moderate Whig,166 wears a blue-green banyan
(fig. 14) with a ship in the background (Harvard University). In its virtual replica (fig. 15) attitude, he
wears a deep brownish gold banyan, sans ship c. 1769 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), corresponding
with the impounding of his brig in October. Seizure of its cargo was due to his repudiation of the Boston
merchants’ Non-Importation Agreement of August 1768,167 responding to taxes under the Townshend
Acts (1767), repealed (except for tea) in April 1770, after effective colonial boycotts (1768).
In 1773, Copley also would use the banyan in his commission from Harvard for the full-length portrait
Nicholas Boylston (fig. 16). Intended to mark Boylston’s bequest for a Professorship of Rhetoric and
Oratory, the portrait was to be placed in the philosophy room with Copley’s full-length portraits of
benefactors Thomas Hancock and Hollis III. For Copley, this presented a conflict of values over the full
extent of human ‘Liberty.’ Hollis’s neighboring portrait commemorated his professorship of Divinity
established as “free from bigotry,”168 widely associated with Hollis V’s gifts of ‘Liberty’-related books to
Harvard, but Boylston didn’t back the Sons of Liberty and non-importation in 1769, and was engaged in
the Atlantic slave trade.
163
James A. H. Murray, ed., Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), Vol. 1, 652; s.v. “banian.”
Palfrey, “List,” 140; Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 461-462.
165
John Adams [23 August 1773], Diary 19, 16 December 1772 - 18 December 1773 [electronic edition]. Adams
Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society,
https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=D19 transcript, L.H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and
Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961), Vol. 2.
166
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 125.
167
On Boylston’s brigantine, see Carol Troyen in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 228.
168
Parker and Wheeler, John Singleton Copley, 44-45; 105.
164
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 35 of 63
�Fig. 14. (Left) John Singleton Copley, Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771), Oil on canvas; H. 50 1/8,” W. 39 13/16.” Harvard
University Portrait Collection, Bequest of Ward Nicholas Boylston to Harvard College, 1828, Photo © President and
Fellows of Harvard College, H90.
Fig. 15. (Right) John Singleton Copley, Nicholas Boylston, ca. 1769. Oil on canvas H. 50 1/8,” W. 40.” Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, Bequest of David P. Kimball, 23.504.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 36 of 63
�Fig. 16. John Singleton Copley; Frame by John Welch, Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771), Oil on
canvas; H. 94,” W. 57,” Harvard University Portrait Collection, Painted at the request of the
Harvard Corporation, 1773, Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, H20.
Copley was aware that the inscription on Mayhew’s etching, sponsored by Hollis V, included the word
“Mankind,” which could be seen as extending religious and civil ‘Liberty’ to Black enslavement. Boston
lawyer, John Adams presented Massachusetts as a bulwark of liberty against tyranny in “A Dissertation
on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” published by Hollis as True Sentiments of America, London, 1768.169
Adams, who never owned an enslaved Black person, recognized Mayhew, the friend of Boston
169
First attributed to Jeremiah Gridley, then corrected to Adams. See Founders Online at
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-01-02-0052-0001 On Adams’s debt to Mayhew’s ‘Dudleian
Lecture,’ May 8. 1765, influencing the Dissertation and Adams’s statement: “Knowledge monopolized, or in the
Possession of a few, is a Curse to Mankind. We should dispense it among all Ranks. We should educate our
children. Equality should be preserved in knowledge,” see “Fragmentary Notes for ‘A Dissertation on the Canon
and the Feudal Law,” May–August 1765, “Papers of John Adams,” Volume 1, Editorial Notes, Massachusetts
Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/PJA01d064
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 37 of 63
�revolutionaries Samuel Adams and James Otis, for his determined resistance to tyranny, seeking ". . . at
the same time to destroy . . . bigotry, fanaticism, and inconsistency."170 One “inconsistency” applied to
those professing American liberty without extending it to Black enslavement. The need to extend
‘Liberty’ to the abolition of enslavement would be expressed in Granville, Massachusetts c. 1776 by the
first Black man who would be ordained a minister in the United States, Rev. Lemuel Haynes, writing the
first tract to apply the precepts of the Declaration of Independence to abolition (see Section 12).
Copley chose to paint Boylston’s banyan in deep blue, the color representing the combination of cyan
(bluish-green) and magenta (purplish-red), suggesting a memorial portrait symbolic of more than the
late Nicholas Boylston; broadly extending to those Black people whom his ‘trade’ enslaved. Blue was the
antithesis of a living ‘Liberty Tree’ expressed by the green and withering brown banyans in the Boylston
portraits of 1767 and c. 1769. The crimson turbans in Nicholas Boylston’s three portraits appear to have
been an optimistic representation of the red wool Phrygian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, also known
as the pileus, an attribute of the goddess of Liberty, as developed by Thomas Hollis V and included upon
the obelisk immediately above his profile (fig. 2). Setting a high bar for Boylston, the cap appears to have
been placed by Copley upon the head of a Loyalist and an enslaver, to bespeak the need to strive for
‘Liberty’ that once assured, could bring peace to all men.
12 Theoria to Practica: Rev. Lemuel
Haynes extends ‘Liberty’ to abolition of
enslavement
Copley’s extension of the ‘Liberty’ concept to a
rebuttal of enslavement in the 1773 Boylston portrait
commissioned by Harvard, exhibited a full
appreciation of the necessity of education in the
achievement of ‘Liberty’ for all. In western
Massachusetts, that concept appears to be evidenced
twenty years earlier in 1754.
On January 1, 1754, the five months old unwanted
child born July 18, 1753 in West Hartford, Connecticut,
to unmarried African American and white parents, was
brought by Congregational Deacon David Rose (17091793) to his home in a Massachusetts settlement first
called Bedford ‘Plantation’. With the understanding
that he would be educated by Deacon Rose, the
infant, Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833) was indentured
until he reached his legal majority at the age of
twenty-one, when he became free of his
Fig. 17. Unknown artist, Rev. Lemuel Haynes, Timothy
Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the
Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (Harper & Brothers, New York,
1837). Public Domain, CC.
170
Adams cited by Frank Dean Gifford, “The Influence of the Clergy on American Politics from 1763 to 1776.”
Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 10, no. 2 (1941): 111n32,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/42968831.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 38 of 63
�indenture.171 Rev. Lemuel Haynes received his early education at Granville, Massachusetts, leading to his
ordination as the first black man ordained a minister (Congregational) in the United States.
The infant Haynes’s arrival New Year’s Day heralded legislation, passed on January 8, 1754 by the House
of Representatives of the province of Massachusetts Bay, to incorporate the settlement of Bedford
Plantation as the district of Granville, Massachusetts. Enacted January 25, 1754, incorporation, officially
marked by consent of King George II two years later, would allow the settlers, who had long petitioned
for that recognition, to receive the rights of townsmen to levy taxes and move beyond “the uncertainty
of the ‘Plantation’ stage.”172 The timing of Deacon Rose’s gesture has not previously been considered as
a declaration that all men in Granville were given the opportunity to be free.173 David Rose, his brother
Daniel Rose (1716-1790) and his wife Achsah ‘Achsey’ Rose (1725-1818), and Lemuel Haynes numbered
among the founders of the Second Church of Christ [Congregational] in [West] Granville. There, the
meetinghouse, built in 1778, was where Lemuel would be the first preacher in the pulpit from 1781 to
1785; before it was built, he may even have preached before that in the high-ceilinged acoustically
advantageous second-floor ballroom where the walls were lined with benches in Daniel Rose’s home
within sight of the church and Lemuel’s nearby home at Deacon David Rose’s house.174
In contrast, at the congregational church at Hadley, Massachusetts, where Rev. Samuel Hopkins was
pastor from 1754-1811, African-American slaves were admitted to membership between 1765-1776 and
“evidence suggests” black congregants were “fully included” in the spiritual worship, yet “physically
marginalized” in the back seats or corners of the meetinghouse from the mid-eighteenth century.175
Unlike other towns in New England, not one enslaved person was listed in Granville, Massachusetts’
1790 census, which included Black people who were free.176
In conjunction with the establishment of Granville as a district, Lemuel Haynes’s arrival in January 1754,
also suggests Deacon Rose was making a statement against the fact that Bedford’s Boston proprietors
included the wealthy Boylston family (figs. 14-16), known for having “amassed a fortune sending
enslaved Africans and foreign goods to the Americas.”177 Deacon Rose and his brother Daniel Rose
171
Rev. Lemuel Haynes indentured his own son to David Rose, [Jr.]. Citing Rutland City records, 1799, see Gregor
Hileman, “The Remarkable Life of . . .” [Lemuel Haynes, Master of Arts, 1804], Middlebury College Newsletter, No.
4 (Spring, 1973), 5-6. I am indebted to Richard L. Rowley at the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum for pointing
out this resource to me.
172
Albion B. Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts (Hartford: Connecticut Printers Inc, 1954), 48-50.
173
First mooted in Corey Phelon Geske, “The Daniel Rose House (1741): Home of Six Revolutionary War Soldiers
and the Nation’s First Quilt Exhibited at an American Museum,” Granville’s Country Caller, March 2021, 2-3 at
Granville History Digital Collection, sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville Public Library
and the Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation, https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1493.
174
Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts, 191-193.
175
Karen Parsons, “’We owe something more than prayers’: Elizabeth Porter Phelps’s Gift of Church Silver . . .,” in
Jean Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward, New England Silver & Silversmithing 1620-1815 (Boston: The Colonial Society of
Massachusetts, 2001), 99.
176
According to the census description, thirteen “other free persons,” included eight members of the family of
Thomas Hull [Hall?] Black, his surname suggesting his race; and five individuals listed in four other households.
Granville, Massachusetts, 1790 United States Federal Census, National Archives and Record Administration.
Thomas Black’s family may have included ‘Albert Black’ who marched in April 1775, with Lemuel Haynes and the
Granville company commanded by Capt. Lebbeus Ball. Militia roll, Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts 64.
177
Gallery Text, Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771), H90. Harvard University Portrait Collection, Bequest of Ward
Nicholas Boylston to Harvard College, 1828 https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/299949?position=1
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 39 of 63
�signed their bonds for settlement with different proprietors on the same day, May 22, 1741, to ensure
adjacent holdings from different landowners, yet the Boylston name appears, even for bonds with other
proprietors.178 Bringing the young Haynes to Granville, infers a declaration on the part of the Rose family
that although enslavers signed bonds with settlers, enslavers could not dictate Granville’s recognition of
equality among all men regardless of race. Such a statement of ‘Liberty’ put into practice, would have
been in keeping with Rev. Mayhew’s sermon, preaching “Britons will not be slaves . . . Let us all learn to
be free . . . Let us not profess ourselves vassals . . . of any man on earth,” in A discourse concerning
unlimited submission and non-resistance to the higher powers . . . delivered in a sermon preached in the
West Meeting-House in Boston . . . Published at the request of the hearers. (Boston: D. Fowle, 1750).
The name of Granville chosen by the Bedford plantation’s settlers for their district recognized John
Carteret, Earl of Granville (1690-1763), Secretary of State (1742-1744), “who was said to be the most
brilliant scholar in England.”179 Thus, the choice of town name could have reinforced the educational
requirement in Lemuel Haynes’s indentureship when he arrived in Bedford within days of the settlement
being incorporated and named as Granville. On the frontier, the Deacon’s educational resources focused
on the Bible as noted in Haynes biography;180 and additionally, the Deacon brought to Bedford/Granville
his “1 Right of Books in a Library”181 that was the Book Company of Durham, established in 1733, “the
second oldest proprietary library founded in America, the first in New England,” believed to be the first
178
Daniel Rose’s bond of May 22, 1741 was with the Bedford plantation proprietors, John Dolbeare (1669-1740),
pewterer and merchant and Thomas Boylston (d. 1739). Daniel signed with Dolbeare’s widow, Sarah Dolbeare,
settling Dolbeare’s mapped lot. Deacon David Rose’s bond was signed the same day with Boston merchant and
shopkeeper John Wendell and Josias Byles. Daniel’s brother John Rose, signed his bond on February 23, 1743/44;
for 100 acres from Thomas Boylston’s widow, Sarah Morecock Boylston (1696-1774) and her son Nicholas Boylston
(figs. 14-16), whose portraits were painted by Copley. Like Daniel and David, John Rose agreed to build a house
within one year. It appears that inclusion of the Boylston name on the Dolbeare bond was intended to represent
the full weight of the Boylstons, one of the most powerful merchant families in the province, as one of the Bedford
proprietors. The Boylston name offered security of title to settlers in the effort to meet the General Court’s
conditions of 1738, for settlement of seventy families within three years at Bedford. Corey Phelon Geske, “The
Daniel Rose Family was There . . . Lived Here: Main Road 1442, c. 1741: Daniel Rose, Lt. Jacob Baldwin, Rev. Joel
Baker . . . Phelon Place, 8-9. 10, Figs. 2, 3. Granville History Digital Collection sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry
Historical Museum, Granville Public Library, and Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation, Granville,
Massachusetts, https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233. David Rose probably lived in Daniel Rose’s
adjacent home while the brothers built David’s home; his deed was recorded in 1743 after Daniel’s. Phelon Geske,
“The Daniel Rose Family was There . . . Lived Here, 12, 47.
179
From Varney’s revision of Nason’s Gazetteer of Massachusetts cited in Wilson, History of Granville, MA, 51.
180
Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (Harper & Brothers,
New York, 1837), 38, 137-138. Note, when Rev. Cooley notes, “thence he remarks,” referring to Haynes, his
wording strongly suggests that his Sketches was written from a biography or notes, written by Haynes.
181
See Inventory of the Personal Estate of David Rose, August 25, 1793; 125-2:14; p. 2 of 4 at
https://www.americanancestors.org/databases/hampshire-county-ma-probate-file-papers-16601889/image?volumeId=39986&pageName=125-2:14&rId=60662356# Hampshire County, MA: Probate File Papers,
1660-1889. Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2016, 2017.
(From records supplied by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives and the Hampshire County Court.
Digitized images provided by FamilySearch.org. For identification as the Durham library, see mention of Daniel
Rose’s neighbor, Ezra Baldwin (1706-1782), a Deacon in Durham and one of the original subscribers in ‘Baldwin
Family Folder, Part 1’, page image 6, with notes possibly by Helena Duris. Granville History Digital Collection
sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum and Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation,
Granville, Massachusetts, https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/577
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 40 of 63
�town library in the colony of Connecticut.182 Deacon Rose had brought twenty-six families from Durham
to settle Bedford.183
Although Haynes’s biography by Rev. Timothy Mather Cooley of Granville, Massachusetts, notes a
scarcity of books, Durham’s social library was open to those in Granville who owned a share in the
‘Durham Book Company’, housed, at various times, in the homes of Durham ministers. 184 Rev. Elizur
Goodrich (1734-1797), ordained in the Congregational church was pastor at Durham (1756-1797), a
fellow of Yale College (1770-1797), once a “candidate for governor of Connecticut, and in 1777 his name
was proposed for the presidency of Yale;” he viewed resistance to tyranny as a religious duty and was
sent by Connecticut’s general association to attend conventions from 1766-1777. Goodrich was known
for accumulating “a library which was regarded as the largest and most complete ever brought into the
colonies on private account.185 Rev. Goodrich’s affiliation with Yale corresponded with the college’s
intense period of patriotism during the tenure of Rev. Naphtali Daggett when President pro tempore
(see Section 14).
In Granville, Massachusetts, Deacon Rose’s ‘Right’ in the Durham social library was maintained until the
end of his life, suggesting that he may have had access, facilitated by Granville families visiting friends
and family remaining in Durham, to a few books and pamphlets from that town, that could be read by
members of his household, including Lemuel Haynes.186 By 1821, Granville’s “Third Social Library” was in
existence;187 and with the particulars of its first two social libraries unknown, perhaps a share in the
182
The Library grew from its initial eight subscribers, paying 21 shillings apiece, extending to shareholders outside
Durham, including the President of Yale College in 1793, the year of David Rose’s death and estate inventory
recording his share. In 1788, the subscribers voted to purchase more books to “especially promote the true
principles of Christian piety, virtue and good manners among all;” and a recent history of the Company further
notes: In Fowler's History of Durham, the author states that "it was this Library that helped to make the voice of
Durham potent in the legislature for sixty years. It was this Library that helped to refine the manners of the people,
and which gave their high character to the emigrants from Durham." Edward N. Hinman, “The Book Company:
Durham’s First Library,” The Middletown Press, August 12, 1983, 7, at the Durham Public Library,
https://durhamlibrary.org/durhams-first-library/?fbclid=IwAR02S0Mk8-s3N7JgDx7FpVOOriqxn17DC8xNeQbpjdT_KxSwrQ_sJMEXBg
183
Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts, 27
184
The Rose and Baldwin families of Granville, owned shares, and were among the original subscribers, in the
Durham library. Emigrating from Durham, their shares were held through the 1790s, presumably from their time of
settlement c. 1741. Rev. Elizur Goodrich became ‘clerk’ of the Durham social library in 1782 and although no
records exist from the Revolution, the library was traditionally in the minister’s study. See Corey Phelon Geske,
“Rose family brings to Bedford/ Granville their ‘Right to Books’ in the first town library in the colony of Connecticut
at Durham,” in The Daniel Rose-Baldwin-Baker-Phelon House, 1741: The Abner Rose Tavern, 1784: Becomes the
Lieutenant Jacob Baldwin Tavern 1794-1799 (September 21, 2020), 52-53,
https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233. Also see, Hinman, “. . . Durham’s First Library,” 7.
185
“Elizur Goodrich studied the right of resistance with President Clap [Rev. Thomas Clap (1703-1767) of Yale], had
later studied Cumberland's Law of Nature, Grotius, Puffendorf, etc., and grew passionate, in the pulpit only, on the
religious duty of resistance to Great Britain.” Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the Revolution, 102, 125n11,
171n1, 189. On library, see “Elizur Goodrich, Appleton’s Cylclopedia, 1900 at
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Appletons%27_Cyclop%C3%A6dia_of_American_Biography/Goodrich,_Elizur
186
Phelon Geske, The Daniel Rose Family was There . . . Lived Here, 38n128, accessed at
https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233.
187
Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts, 269.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 41 of 63
�Durham library such as that owned by David Rose at the time of his estate inventory in 1793, constitutes
a clue to the identity of the first of those libraries.
When a library was being founded at Rev. Haynes’s former church, under the pastorship of a friend of
Haynes, Rev. Joel Baker (1768-1833), who also established an academy, in 1823, a letter was sent from
Granville to John Adams (1735-1826), requesting a copy from Adams’ library of his magnum opus
Defense of the American Constitutions (1787), for one of the town’s two libraries, affiliated with the
ministers of the First and Second Congregational Churches.188 In their letter, the town’s library
committee referred to Adams as “one of the greatest and most venerable characters of the Age" and
within a week, from Adams’ home in Quincy, MA, two volumes arrived from John Adams’ personal
library with his “sincere wishes” for the growth of the Dickinson Library Company of Granville. 189
In his sermon Liberty Further Extended, Lemuel Haynes mentioned a pamphlet from Philadelphia that he
had read that inspired some of his thoughts. “Some Historical Account of Guinea,” published in 1771,
was by Quaker, Anthony Benezet (1713-1784), an abolitionist in Philadelphia, who founded one of the
world’s first anti-enslavement societies. Although the source of Haynes obtaining the pamphlet is
unknown, it could have been borrowed through David Rose’s ‘Right’ in the Durham Library.
Of like mind to Rev. Goodrich, the twenty-six settling families of Granville who came from Durham with
Deacon Rose, followed the minister’s patriotic inclinations, notably occurring when a Liberty Pole was
erected, c. 1776, on the subsequently named Liberty Hill, which appears to have been on his property. In
1774, the district of Granville, Massachusetts, close to the Connecticut line, voted to unite and
communicate with other committees of correspondence in the province as well as stipulating other
colonies.190 This inter-colony effort throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as recommended
by Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, was extended by Granville to other colonies, and in that spirit of ‘extended’
applications, Haynes wrote, Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping,
188
For full title, see Volume 1 of John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of
America: Editorial Note,” Founders Online, National Archives,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-18-02-0290 [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of
John Adams, vol. 18, December 1785–January 1787, ed. Gregg L. Lint, Sara Martin, C. James Taylor, Sara Georgini,
Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Amanda M. Norton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, 544–550.]
189
On “Granville correspondence with Adams, see Phelon Geske, [Baker Quilt], West Granville Needlework at the
F.G. Baker House inspires the historic Deerfield Arts and Crafts Movement, 26-28 at the Granville History Digital
Collection sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, the Granville Public Library, and the Noble &
Cooley Center for Historic Preservation, accessed at https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233. The
Granville letter of January 9, 1823 noted, “In making this request, permit us to express to you our desire more
particularly to become the beneficiaries of the Pride of our Commonwealth, and to receive somewhat of a literary
nature; and to hold the same as a relick of one of the greatest and most venerable characters of the Age.” See “To
John Adams from Timothy M. Cooley, 9 January 1823,” Founders Online, National Archives at
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7745 from The Adams Papers. Adams responded
January 14, 1823: “Gentlemen. I am honoured . . . I send you the second and third Volume of my Defence, of the
first volume I have but one Copy . . . With my sincere wishes for the increase of your liberary, and the prosperity of
your Society. . .” From John Adams to Timothy M. Cooley, 14 January
1823,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7748
190
Carolyn D. Hertz, "The committees of correspondence, inspection and safety in old Hampshire County,
Massachusetts, during the American Revolution/" (1993), 55-56. Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014. 1605.
Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/1605
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 42 of 63
�c. 1776, (fig. 19) an unpublished manuscript housed in the Wendell Family Papers, Houghton Library,
Harvard University.191
Also, archived with the Haynes’s manuscript is Haynes’s poem, The Battle of Lexington (fig. 18), the two
works c. 1776, representing Haynes’s earliest manuscripts.192 Archived with these manuscripts is a letter
(1745) from Daniel Rose to John Wendell of Boston,193 concerning Rose’s property deed, stating that he
had lived a long time “in Bedford” fulfilling the bond he made in 1741.194 The presence of these
documents together, virtually from two individuals living within sight of each other in Granville, without
any further explanation as to relativity, raises the likelihood of a grouping of papers from the Rose
households, connected to the Bedford proprietors (of which Wendell was one) and preserved by the
Wendell family in Boston, perhaps to show the results of the colony’s broadminded views of ‘Liberty’ as
early as 1754 with the virtual ‘adoption’ of Haynes at Bedford.
To understand the high likelihood that Haynes’s wrote both The Battle of Lexington and Liberty Further
Extended in Granville, Massachusetts, new research has revealed the physical proxmity of Haynes’s
extended famliy in western {then Middle Parish] Granville. Deacon David Rose and his brother Daniel
Rose built their homes within sight of each other, meaning Lemuel Haynes could have visited Daniel
Rose’s home, read and studied in that chimney corner, as well as Deacon Rose’s, which was recounted
by Rev. Cooley in his biography of Haynes.
Haynes served as a Minuteman in 1774 and from the neighboring home of Deacon David Rose marched
out to Lexington and Concord in April 1775 with Daniel Rose and his sons. Haynes served in the Roxbury,
Massachusetts camp during the siege of Boston for three weeks.195 If returning to Granville in May 1775,
Lemuel likely was responsible for spring planting and harvests on the adjacent farms of both David and
Daniel Rose while Daniel and his sons were in Roxbury, enlisted for the long Siege of Boston through the
winter to March 1776, or perhaps he had embarked on Ethan Allen’s campaign to Fort Ticonderoga.196
191
Rev. Lemuel Haynes, Liberty Further Extended . . . autograph manuscript (signed); [no place, undated]. Wendell
family papers, MS Am 1907-1907.1, MS Am 1907, (608), Box: 12. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou01421c00624/catalog.
192
Ruth Bogin, “’The Battle of Lexington;’ A Patriotic ballad by Lemuel Haynes,” The William and Mary Quarterly
[Third Series, Vol. 42, No. 4 (October, 1985)], 499-506. See The battle of Lexington: autograph manuscript
(unsigned); [Roxbury [herein ? and placed at Granville, MA], Massachusetts, 1775 April]. Wendell Family Papers,
MS Am 1907-1907.1, MS Am 1907, (601a), Box: 11. Houghton Library, Harvard University at
https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou01421c00616/catalog.
193
In the Wendell Family Papers, presumably, John Wendell (1703-1762) a Boston merchant), father of John
Wendell (1731-1808); the senior Wendell was a member of the committee of four, along with Dr. Belcher Noyes
(brother-in-law to artist John Smibert) who reviewed the 1738 survey of Bedford plantation and prepared a
petition to settle the lines and rights of title for the proprietors of lands that would become Granville, MA, setting
forth criteria for building homes and a meeting house with a settled minister. On this settlement plan approved by
the Massachusetts House of Representatives, see Wilson, History of Granville, Massachusetts, 20-23.
194
Daniel Rose to John Wendell, Bedford, Mass., March 25, 1745. B MS Am1907, no. 608, Wendell Family Papers,
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts at
https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/c/hou01421c00013/catalog. A second letter in the papers is from Oliver Phelps,
Lemuel’s commanding officer in 1776.
195
Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company,
1900), 7:39, 227.
196
For Haynes serving on Ethan Allen’s campaign to Fort Ticonderoga, see Mia Bay, “See Your Declaration
Americans!!! Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black Politics,” North Carolina
Scholarship Online (April 2006), https://academic.oup.com/north-carolina-scholarship-
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 43 of 63
�Haynes’s unpublished poem The Battle of Lexington, resounded with the colonial effort to achieve
liberty from the mother country, extending the concept from the white to black population, claiming,
“For Liberty, each Freeman Strives/As it’s a Gift of God/And for it willing yield their Lives/And Seal it with
their Blood,” inferring each man fought for ‘Liberty.’ Haynes wording, “The Nineteenth Day of April
last/We ever shall retain/As monumental of the past . . .” implies, the poem was written sometime after
he left Roxbury in May 1775 and close to and before April 1776, meaning The Battle of Lexington could
have been penned in Granville, not necessarily (as now indexed) at Roxbury, where Haynes was
stationed for only three weeks after the battle, returning to Granville, and later fighting in other
campaigns when Black men were finally accepted in the Continental Army.
Apparently at about, or after the death of his foster mother Elizabeth Rose in September 1775; which
deeply saddened Haynes, according to his biographer Rev. Cooley, Lemuel wrote an anti-slavery sermon
c. 1776, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping,” that was among
the first tracts to apply the intent of the Declaration of Independence to the abolition of slavery.197
Haynes believed: “Liberty is equally as precious to a black man, as it is to a white one, and bondage is
equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.”198 Haynes penned, but did not publish, the tract
on the extension of the concept of liberty to the condition of the enslaved black man, claiming:
Liberty is a jewel which was handed Down to man from the cabinet of heaven,
and is Coaeval with his Existence. And as it proceed from the Supreme Legislature
of the univers, so it is he which hath a sole right to take away: therefore, he that
would take away a mans liberty assumes a prerogative that belongs to another, and
acts out of his own domain.199
online/book/13198/chapter-abstract/166492675?redirectedFrom=fulltext cited in catalog for “First Edition
Biography of Rev. Lemuel Haynes by Rev. Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev.
Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (1837), signed by John Brown,” at Auctioneers, University Archives,
https://auction.universityarchives.com/auction-lot/first-edition-biography-of-rev.-lemuel-haynes-si_25D4BCB895
197
Christopher Cameron, “The Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism in Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of
Massachusetts (Institute for Massachusetts Studies, Westfield State University) Summer 2011, Vol. 39 (1 & 2), 90.
198
Ibid., 90n18, 93 at http://www.westfield.ma.edu/historical-journal/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/PuritanOrigins-of-Black-Abolitionism.pdf. Cameron cites Richard Newman, ed., Black Preacher in White America: The
Collected Writings of Lemuel Haynes, 1774-1833 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990), xix-xxv, 12, 15.
199
This passage evidences Haynes’s comparison of two texts, possibly available in Granville, MA via Deacon Rose’s
“Right” in Durham’s Library. Haynes tapped words (underlined here) from Mayhew’s Discourses (1750) and William
Blackstone’s subsequent Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) when each defined the Higher Law
supporting equality. Mayhew stated: “all commands running counter to . . . the supreme legislator of heaven and
earth, are null and void . . .” preceding Blackstone: “the law of nature, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by
God . . .” On Mayhew/Blackstone, see William M. Wiecek, "Latimer: The Problem of Unjust Laws,” in Lewis Perry
and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 120. On Haynes’s text, see Ruth Bogin, “’Liberty Further Extended:’ A 1776
Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan.
1983): 85-105. On Haynes referring to a Philadelphia pamphlet (Benezet), 95-96; Bogin notes (90) the top of the
front sheet of Haynes’s manuscript was cut, leaving, “a partly legible letter . . . probably a G,” possibly a notation as
to where “Liberty . . .” was “composed.” This offers a suggestion of Granville, MA. Excerpt from Megan VanGorder,
“’Liberty Further Extended’: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping, Lemuel Haynes, 1776,” Amazing
Grace How Writers Helped End Slavery, 2014 at http://slavenarrativeanthology.weebly.com/free-thoughts-on-theillegality-of-slave-keeping.html Also see David Guidone, “’Liberty Further Extended’: The Federalist Identity of
Lemuel Haynes, America’s First Biracial Minister,” Channels 2019, Vol. 4, No. 1: 31 at
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/channels/vol4/iss1/2/?utm_source=digitalcommons.cedarville.edu%2F
channels%2Fvol4%2Fiss1%2F2&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 44 of 63
�Fig. 18a. Rev. Lemuel Haynes, The Battle of Lexington: autograph manuscript (unsigned); [Roxbury,
Massachusetts, 1775 April]. Wendell family papers, MS Am 1907-1907.1, MS Am 1907, (601a), Box: 11.
Houghton Library, Harvard University. Herein proposed as written in Granville, Massachusetts, c. 1776.
Lexington. Wendell Family Papers, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 45 of 63
�Fig. 18b. Rev. Lemuel Haynes, The Battle of Lexington: autograph manuscript (unsigned); [Roxbury, Massachusetts,
1775 April]. Wendell family papers, MS Am 1907-1907.1, MS Am 1907, (601a),
Box: 11. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Herein proposed as written in Granville, Massachusetts, c. 1776.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 46 of 63
�Fig. 19. Rev. Lemuel Haynes, Liberty Further Extended . . . autograph manuscript (signed); [no place,
undated]. Wendell family papers, MS Am 1907-1907.1, MS Am 1907, (608), Box: 12. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Herein proposed as written in Granville, MA, c. 1776.
In Liberty Further Extended, Haynes insisted that the black man has an “undeniable right to his Liberty”
and noted that in the American Revolution, “Men seem to manifest the most sanguine resolution not to
Let their natural rights go without their Lives go with them.” Again, this may have been a response to
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 47 of 63
�the injury of Daniel Rose’s third eldest son, Abner Rose (1751-1829). Haynes witnessed Rose in recovery
at Granville.200 A letter arriving in late summer 1776, from Abner Rose, then in a patriot hospital,
indicates Haynes was personally aware of the life-threatening injury suffered by Abner, an artilleryman
defending the Hudson River with Continental forces under the command of Brig. General Henry Knox, in
July 1776, when a discharging gun carriage rolled over his foot and split the leg to the calf, leaving him
lame for life, but alive. This Rose family experience may have helped shape Haynes’s thoughts on the
sanguine cost of ‘Liberty.’ In 1782. Despite his injury, Abner Rose would continue to serve as an
artilleryman, meeting with John Hancock, in Boston to discuss his own discharge papers.201
It appears highly likely Lemuel Haynes wrote poetry and his anti-slavery tract at Granville at times of
trouble and conflict during the first two years of the American Revolution, in 1775 and 1776. Although
Lemuel was a free man following twenty-one years as an indentured servant, his periods of writing at
Granville can be compared to the observations of abolitionist and statesman, Frederick Douglass (c.
1817/18-1895), who escaped enslavement and wrote in his biography that, “slaves sing most when they
are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them,
only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience.”202 Douglass believed, “I
have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds
with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject
could do . . . Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from
chains.”203
Based on the wording of “April last,” and Douglass’s observation, Lemuel Haynes’s The Battle of
Lexington, appears to have been written not at Roxbury as presently cataloged at Harvard University,
but in Granville, Massachusetts, notably when he may have responded with poetry to his great personal
grief at the loss of his ‘adoptive mother’ Elizabeth Rose. Haynes’s anti-slavery tract Liberty Further
Extended. . . appears then to have been written at Granville when Haynes returned to recuperate from
typhus contracted during the Fort Ticonderoga campaign,204 and he may have done so at the Daniel
Rose House, as the Deacon became blind, requiring care himself. By 1779, Haynes had regained his
health and traveled twenty-five miles southwest to study theology for one year in Canaan, Connecticut
from the Rev. Daniel Farrand (1719-1803), pastor (1752-1803) of the First Ecclesiastical Society.
Haynes wrote his poem The Battle of Lexington in 1775 after his own attainment of freedom at age
twenty-one paralleled the colonial fight for liberty and as the child that was a colony matured to
200
John Saillant, “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801” (Center for the
Study of Religion and American Culture: Cambridge University Press (1992) Online, 18 June 2018, Vol. 2, Issue 1,
winter 1992), 16n35.
201
It is possible Lemuel asked Abner Rose to deliver his work to an advocate of Liberty in Boston, with hopes of
publication.
202
Kaitlin Greenidge, “Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance,” The New York Times Style Magazine,” March 5,
2021 at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/t-magazine/black-spirituals-poetry-resistance.html
203
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave Written by Himself (Boston:
Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 13-14.
204
Saillant, “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801, 79-102. For Haynes on
Ethan Allen’s campaign to Fort Ticonderoga, see Mia Bay,
“See Your Declaration Americans!!! Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black
Politics,” North Carolina Scholarship Online (April 2006), https://academic.oup.com/north-carolina-scholarshiponline/book/13198/chapter-abstract/166492675?redirectedFrom=fulltext cited in catalog for “First Edition
Biography of Rev. Lemuel Haynes by Rev. Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev.
Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (1837), signed by John Brown,” at Auctioneers, University Archives,
https://auction.universityarchives.com/auction-lot/first-edition-biography-of-rev.-lemuel-haynes-si_25D4BCB895
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 48 of 63
�become a nation, Haynes charged himself with the role of observer, commentator, soldier and preacher
as he watched a nation’s lifespan parallel his own. He applied the concepts of the Declaration of
Independence to the condition of slavery in his Liberty Further Extended, written while Haynes’s
extended family that he grew up with, lived in Granville near their Liberty Hill where a Liberty Pole was
raised in 1776 near the adjacent homes of Daniel and David Rose. Today, the Daniel Rose House offers
one of the strongest associations possible to the nationally significant days of the American Revolution
that established the groundwork for the anti-slavery movement and, ultimately, the Civil War.205
Being indentured, Lemuel was taught how to earn a livelihood by farming and given guidance for his
education, the Deacon having a share in the Book Company of Durham, Connecticut, the first
proprietary library in New England; in 1793, its members including the President of Yale College.206
Haynes was a free man upon reaching his ‘majority’ at twenty-one. Having learned farming and received
an education, he chose to remain in Granville for the first half of his life; and became the first Black man
ordained a minister in the United States. He would return to preach up until his death in 1833 and later
wrote that the Deacon’s family treated him like their own son.207
13 Education and ‘Liberty’
Copley’s portrait of Boston goldsmith, silversmith and engraver Nathaniel Hurd (1730-1777), c. 1765,
marked his first to employ Hollis III’s banyan adapted to a Sons of Liberty allegory built on Hurd’s
commission (1765) from Harvard to engrave bookplates in black (loanable) and red (“too precious for
loan”) for Hollis V’s gifts, a sample sent to Hollis by College President Holyoke (Librarian at Harvard
1709-1712) in his July 9, 1766 letter, the day Mayhew died.208 For Copley, books signifying the Latin liber,
etymological and allegorical root of ‘Liberty,’ as in the ‘Tree,’ introduced that allegory to the first banyan
he painted, worn by Hurd, the engraver of bookplates, posed with books before him.
For Hurd’s portrait (fig. 21), Copley turned to a mezzotint of a teacher, a rabbi, wearing a robe and a
turban, A Jew Rabbi (fig. 20) by William Pether (1731-1821) after Rembrandt Harmenz van Rijn (16061669). The theme of the print applied to the Hebrew meaning of Hurd’s first name, Nathaniel, meaning
“gift of God,” (John 1: 45), interpreted as ‘instruction.’ Copley praised this print in his November 12,
1766 letter to West, in which he asked about the use of crayons, and the name of an engraver for the
portrait of a “Decenting Cleargyman” (Mayhew in crayons) that he was painting: “I have seen a well
exicuted print by Mr. Pether of a Jew Rabbi. if You think him a good hand, be kind enough to desire him
to let me know by a few lines (as soon as convenient) his terms, as the portrait weits only for that in my
hands and I shall send it immediately with the money to defray the expence.”209 A Jew Rabbi was the
only specific print Copley admired in a surviving letter to West. The mezzotint was first published in
London, March 1, 1764, “From one of the most Capital Pictures ever Painted by Rembrandt,”210 Taken
205
Phelon Geske, The Daniel Rose Family was There. . . Lived Here, 51 accessed at
https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1233.
206
Ibid., 52-53.
207
Cooley, Sketches of the Life . . ., 40.
208
Walter M. Whitehill and Sinclair H. Hitchings in Boston Prints and Printmakers, ix-x.
209
Copley to Benjamin West, November 12, 1766. Copley-Pelham Letters, 52.
210
Published with arms and motto of the Garter at center and inscribed as “In the Collection of his Grace the Duke
of Devonshire; To Whom this Plate is most humbly Dedicated” by publisher John Boydell. Chaloner Smith, British
Mezzotinto Portraits, [Pether 39] 991.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 49 of 63
�after what has come to be considered as Rembrandt’s best ‘head,’ Pether’s A Jew Rabbi has been
described as the finest British print ever published.211
Fig. 20. A Jew Rabbi, 1764 engraved by William Pether, London after Rembrandt Harmenz van Rijn. Mezzotint
proof; H. 20 1/8,” W. 14.” Author’s Collection.
Fig. 21. Nathaniel Hurd, c. 1765 by John Singleton Copley, signifying colonial unity portending a future nation.
Oil on canvas; H. 30,” W. 25 ½.” Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic
Trust, 1915.534. Creative Commons, CC.
Copley relied upon etchings and mezzotinto prints so-called from the Italian mezzo, ‘middle’ allowing
rich gradations in ink tonalities favorable to reproducing effects of chiaroscuro (‘light-dark’), highlighting
and shadowing. Art historians studying use of mezzotints as print sources, appreciate the “Prototype
Discovery” identifying the compositional influence of British prints upon American painters, put forward
in expansive detail by Waldron Phoenix Belknap (1899-1949) and published in 1959. His notes are in The
Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library.212
211
David Alexander, “Rembrandt and the Reproductive Print in Eighteenth Century England,” in Christopher White,
David Alexander; Ellen D’Oench, Rembrandt in Eighteenth Century England (Great Britain: Yale Center for British
Art, 1983), Exhibition catalogue, 51-52.
212
An investment banker and architect, Belknap graduated (1933) Harvard School of Architecture and served in
U.S. Eighth Air Force Intelligence (1944) in England during World War II. Waldron Phoenix Belknap, American
Colonial Painting Materials for a History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1959), xv. See Belknap Research Notes and Family Papers, Col. 130, Mic. 2453, The Winterthur Library.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 50 of 63
�Fig. 22. Benjamin Franklin, “Join or Die,” May 9, 1754, The Pennsylvania Gazette. Woodcut. Library of
Congress, Washington D.C.
Fig. 23. Detail of serpentine design on banyan sleeve and lining. Nathaniel Hurd, c. 1765 by John Singleton
Copley, signifying colonial unity portending a future nation. Oil on canvas; H. 30,” W. 25 ½.” Cleveland Museum
of Art, Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, 1915.534.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 51 of 63
�Advancing Belknap’s research to allegorical interpretation, reveals that Copley’s use of mezzotints as
source material can be applied to decoding political allegories in his paintings, herein studied at the time
of the Stamp Act crisis in which Mayhew was a leading figure. In the fall of 1765, Copley directly
referenced A Jew Rabbi as prototype for his portrait of Nathaniel Hurd, to communicate colonial unity
against the Stamp Act. Small wonder that when he wrote West while painting Rev. Mayhew’s two
portraits in November 1766 after the Act’s repeal, Pether’s rabbi came to mind. Opposed to the Act,
Mayhew is credited with encouraging colonial unity in defense of natural law and ‘Liberty,’ and giving
the idea for the establishment of committees of correspondence to James Otis (1725-1783).213
Paraphrasing Rembrandt’s emblems of learning, the open book and lamp, defining ‘rabbi’ meaning ‘my
teacher’ in Hebrew, Copley placed two books at Hurd’s right arm: Samuel Sympson’s A New Book of
Cyphers (1726)214 atop John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldry (1724), constructing a didactic stairway to
greater knowledge as in lessons conveyed by an engraver, be he Hurd or Peter Pelham, who was listed
in Cyphers as one of many London engravers joining together to support publication, a fact not
heretofore recognized. While Cyphers illustrated interwoven family initials, Heraldry delineated surname
identification of Great Britain’s noble families united in loyalty via coats of arms preserved by the
College of Arms.
Inspired by the rabbi’s mantle clasp and brazen serpent entwined about the pillar in his study, connoting
that sight of the serpent would heal/redeem Moses’ people (Numbers 21, 4-9, AV),215 Copley rendered a
semi-continuous serpentine design to the viewer’s left, on the rose-colored lining of Hurd’s banyan (fig.
23) versus a shadowy replica on Hurd’s left ‘sinister’ (Latin sinestra) lapel. His design approximated
Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 cartoon (fig. 22) of a segmented snake signifying the potential strength of
colonies united. Franklin’s emblem resurfaced with the motto “Join or Die,” in late September 1765, in
the Constitutional Courant, Boston.216 Demonstrated by a continuous serpentine fold in the banyan
sleeve along Hurd’s right arm, Copley’s allegory prognosticated that the colonial situation would
improve with unity of the colonies. Because merchants and citizens in New York, Philadelphia. and
Boston united to ban British imports during 1765, by mid-January, London merchants, some bankrupt
from loss of income, petitioned for the Act’s repeal.
For Hurd’s so-called ‘unfinished’ portrait (fig. 24), Copley reversed A Jew Rabbi with Hurd’s bared chest
aligning with the reversed rabbi’s highlighted sleeve hems/cloak edge and the engraver’s right hand,
approximating the rabbi’s, but with Hurd’s forefinger ‘pointing’ as an ‘instructor.’ 217 This alteration of
Copley’s Prototype indicates he regarded the engraver as educator, and, by implication, engravings as
educational tools intrinsic to portraiture and public expression of politics. Hurd’s unfinished hand
reveals when Copley reevaluated his allegory, to emphasize political ‘unity.’ In the finished portrait, he
closely following the rabbi’s pose, moving Hurd’s right arm to the viewer’s right and uniting his hands.
213
Frank Dean Gifford, “The Influence of the Clergy on American Politics from 1763 to 1776.” Historical Magazine
of the Protestant Episcopal Church 10, no. 2 (1941): 111n31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42968831.
214
Cyphers binding identified by Rebora in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 210.
215
The serpent’s curative effect is pertinent to the portrait’s alternate identification as King Uzziah struck by
leprosy (2 Chronicles 26:16-21 AV); now titled A Man in Oriental Costume, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England.
216
“The Snake Devices, 1754-1776 . . .,” (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, December 1907), 420-421,
437-438. For later version, “Unite or Die,” see The Pennsylvania Journal . . ., Philadelphia, December 28, 1774
(American Philosophical Society). Also see fig. 22 herein, retrieved from the Library of Congress,
https://www.loc.gov/item/2002695523/
217
Copley’s model for an instructional pose is typified by Pelham’s John Theophilus Desaguliers (1725), a source for
Paul Revere (1768, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 52 of 63
�Fig. 24. (Left) Unfinished Portrait of Nathaniel Hurd, c. 1765 by John Singleton Copley signifying
incomplete unity of colonies. Oil on canvas; H. 29 3/8,” W. 24 5/8.”
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York: Marion Stratton Gould Fund,
1944.2.
Fig. 25. (Right) Nathaniel Hurd. Frontispiece, The New-England Magazine, July 1832; Pendleton
Lithography, Boston, after ‘Jennings’ [Richard Jennys, Jr.], c. 1777. Stauffer 1482; Bulletin of The
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 1928, Vol. 32, 42; EM4723, The
New York Public Library, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs:
Print Collection.
Provenance indicates the unmarried Hurd owned both portraits, suggesting they were viewed as a
bachelor’s allegorical pendants in his home or workplace, the ‘unfinished’ considered as ‘finished’
because it signified the incomplete unity of the colonies contrasting with the finished portrait indicating
the potential of a thriving nation of united colonies, prompting an enigmatic smile from Hurd. Richard
Jennys’s mezzotint (fig. 24) likely executed c. 1777 as a memorial to Hurd who died that year during the
war, was taken after Copley’s ‘unfinished’ portrait of an unsmiling Hurd. Small roughly three inches
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 53 of 63
�square, it displayed Jennys’s improved skill set while copying a Copley portrait face, as he likely did for
Mayhew a decade earlier.218
Copley paired books and united hands to support foreseeable ‘unity’ across the chest of Hurd, a
Moderate Whig.219 The rabbi’s turban translated as Hurd’s turbaned ‘Liberty Cap.’ Hurd’s portrait
represented an iconological advancement upon an anonymous caricatura sold by Hurd, protesting the
Stamp Act (1765), The Deplorable State of America (fig. 25), Library Company of Philadelphia), generally
attributed to Copley.220 The print’s inscription, “November 1, 1765,” marked the day the Stamp Act
became effective and American business became virtually suspended, but (by ignoring the stamps)
would pick up by year’s end, indicating the economic and calendrical season for Hurd’s brown banyan
and his portrait’s timing.
Fig. 25. The Deplorable State of America inscribed “The Original Print done in Boston by J o S. Copley,” by Eugene
Du Simitiere; attributed to John Singleton Copley, Pennsylvania Gazette, November 21, 1765, Boston. Etching.
Courtesy, The Library Company of Philadelphia at www.librarycompany.org, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere
Collection. Purchase 1785.
218
Described as an “exact copy” when published by Pendleton Lithography, Boston in The New-England Magazine,
July 1832, frontispiece, 7; wherein the artist copied is listed as ‘Jennings’ identified as Jennys by Daniel McNeely
Stauffer, American Engravers upon Copper and Steel (New York, 1907, Vol. 2, 248; Stauffer attributes only two
prints to Jennys: (Hurd) Stauffer 1482; (Mayhew), Stauffer 1483. Jennys’s Hurd mezzotint [H. 3.14”, W. 3.1”] was
exhibited and described in the Bulletin of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 1928,
Vol. 32, 42.
219
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 109, 126.
220
American Revolution memorabilia collector, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere (1737-1784), annotated the cartoon as
Copley’s; Paul Staiti believed it was not. Staiti in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 46n69.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 54 of 63
�The cartoon’s striped ‘Viper’ stinging Liberty personified as a shirtless Native American with a ‘Liberty
Cap,’ compares to Hurd’s serpentine allegory (finished portrait) and bared arm/chest (‘unfinished’
portrait) and ‘Liberty Cap.’ After Hurd advertised the cartoon with a description of its complex
iconology, he may have displayed Copley’s allegorical pair of portraits in his shop during sales to simplify
the message and focus on colonial ‘unity.’221 This debut of Copley’s banyan allegory tested the depths of
public opinion presaging Copley’s future ‘banyan’ portraiture.
Self-Portrait of a Son of Liberty
Copley chose to wear a green banyan with bluish green lapels, in his Self-Portrait, a pendant to that of
his bride, Susanna ‘Sukey’ Farnham Clarke close to the time of their marriage, Thanksgiving Day, 1769.
Copley’s green banyan allegory alluding to a ‘tree,’ cast him as progenitor for their future family, and can
be seen as extending to the ‘Liberty Tree’ where he and other ‘Sons’ gathered August 14, 1769, about
the time he completed the wedding portraits.222 In Copley’s seventeen banyan portraits, he was alone
among men listed as Tories in Prown’s political categorization ,223 to wear a green banyan (otherwise
only worn in portraits of Whig sitters), evidencing that in this Self-Portrait the artist saw himself as a
Moderate Whig and Son of Liberty.
Listening with her family to Mayhew in his West Church pulpit while growing up, Sukey would have
understood her future husband’s commitment to ‘Liberty.’ It is suggested by the turn of his head,
paraphrasing engravings in oval frames, after a crayon drawing by William Faithorne (1616-1691) of
John Milton (1608-1674), poet, political pamphleteer, and author of Paradise Lost (1667); Copley owned
the epic poem’s 1778 edition.224 Their daughter, who lived in her old age at Hampton Court, maintained
it was her father’s “favourite book.’225 For the gift of a gold locket portrait to Sukey, its oval shape
reminiscent of the oval frames in Milton’s engravings, Copley repeats his Miltonesque pose and wears a
blue banyan distancing himself from the political allegory of the green banyan in his crayon portrait in
the public space of their home.226
Copley paraphrased Milton’s white collar by wearing an open collar, approximating that mode of dress
in Hurd’s portraits, to indicate his work ethic that earned his leisure, the latter previously emphasized by
scholarship.227 For his portrait in crayons, Copley appears to have been inspired by an engraving (1725)
of Milton (fig. 26) by Smibert’s London acquaintance, George Vertue (1684-1756) after Faithorne’s
portrait in crayons. Inscribed poetic lines by John Dryden honoring the poet, compare to Copley’s
horizontal hieroglyphic scoring of filigreed gold on his waistcoat. He thereby analogized his artistic ability
translating words as painted allegory to the stanzas of Milton, known for his belief in freedom of the
press and values of ‘Liberty,’ presaging the Declaration of Independence.228 In Copley’s Self-Portrait after
221
Boston Gazette, November 11, 1765 in Dow, The Arts & Crafts in New England, 8. On portrait as payment for
engraving Copley’s Rev. Jonathan Sewall in 1764, see Rebora in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America,
210n4.
222
“Copely, John,” in Palfrey, “List,” 140.
223
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 125-126.
224
Paradise Lost with notes by Bishop Newton, two volumes (1778), sold in the Lyndhurst Sale (1864), was listed in
Prown, John Singleton Copley, 398.
225
Allan Cunningham (1784-1842). The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters And Sculptors. (London: G. Bell
and sons, 1879-1880), Vol. 2, 242 at
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t4qj80b1x&view=1up&seq=264&q1=Copley
226
Cat. No. 49 (illus.), Gloria Manney Collection, Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America.
227
Staiti in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 37.
228
John Milton, Areopagitica; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644);
Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 415, 449.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 55 of 63
�Milton, poetry and painting merged to express Copley’s granddaughter’s description of his work as a
“speaking canvas,”229 echoing the maxim of Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, “Painting is mute Poetry, and
Poetry speaking Painting.”230
Milton also was admired by Hollis V for whom Cipriani engraved the poet’s image (fig. 27) in an oval
after “a portrait in crayons,” [by Faithorne], for John Toland's Life of Milton (1761), sponsored by Hollis
V, with an inscription from Paradise Lost, Book VII, verses 24-28.231 The drapery wrapped about Milton is
reminiscent of that in Mayhew’s portrait engraved by Cipriani (fig. 1), and appearing either at Hollis’s
direction, or as originally rendered by Copley, who could have known of Hollis’s print.
Cipriani’s etching calls for a reassessment of Copley’s Boston correspondence with Benjamin West. The
highly controversial engraved outcome of Mayhew’s portrait then seen in Boston, is one reason Copley
declared to West in 1770, that he was “not sure” he should be considered only as “an Artist imploy’d in
the way of my profession” when it came to mixing politics and art.232 That statement made within
months of completing his Self-Portrait in pastels, speaks to its political, as well as personal meaning, for
Copley, who therein set forth his beliefs as head of his own family, not adapting the Loyalist politics of
his father-in-law. If not responsible for the anti-Stamp Act caricatura (1765, fig. 25), Copley was
nonetheless aware of its verse, “Arms and the Man I sing,” (Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, Line 1) that may well
have completed the missing words from Paradise Lost (Book VII, verse 24), omitted on Hollis’s engraving
of Milton, “----- I sing with mortal voice.” Copley’s Self-Portrait is the picture of a painter whose “mortal
voice,” via porte-crayon and brush, was capable of allegory, even to the choice of drapery upon an arm,
that led a future nation to take up arms for ‘Liberty.’
‘Liberty’ allegories, beginning with A Boy with a Flying Squirrel sent for London exhibition in September
1765, paralleling that in Hurd’s personal portraits c. October 1765, illustrate Copley’s efforts on both
sides of the Atlantic, to establish an artistic language of diplomatic communication. It was based on his
belief that the strength of Americans uniting to defend their civil and religious liberties, could lead to
war and independence. In 1775, he wrote to Sukey:
the war has begun, and if I am not mistaken, the country, which was once the happiest on the
globe, will be deluged with blood for many years to come. It seems as if no plan of reconciliation
could now be formed, as the sword is drawn, all must be finally settled by the sword. I cannot
think that the power of Great Britain will subdue the country, if the people are united [emphasis
here], as they appear to be at present . . . it is very evident to me that America will have the
power of resistance until grown strong to conquer, and that victory and independence will go
hand in hand.233
Chiefly identified with portraits of ‘Founding Fathers’ John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams,
signers of the Declaration of Independence, Copley’s authorship of the portrait of Rev. Jonathan
Mayhew, the man who backed their cause of ‘Liberty’ with well-educated religious fervor, merits this
reappraisal of Copley’s own politics expressed by his Self-Portrait.
229
Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 100.
Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy, De arte graphica. The Art of Painting . . . containing A Parallel betwixt Painting
and Poetry by Mr. Dryden (London: W. Rogers, 1695) cited in Jakub Lipski, Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in
Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2018), 5. See ‘Fresnoy” consulted, in Henry Pelham to
Copley, Boston, October 22, 1771. Copley-Pelham Letters, 170.
231
[Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 363-371 (including the plate of Mayhew’s print, facing 371); 620; 729.
232
Copley to [Benjamin West], November 24, 1770. Copley-Pelham Letters, 98.
233
Copley to Susanna Copley, Parma, July 2, 1775. Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 57-58.
230
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 56 of 63
�14 Advancement of print source analysis to attribution
American independency, supporting civil and religious “Liberty,’ espoused by Rev. Jonathan Mayhew
was echoed in the portraiture of other religious denominations at other colleges, notably at Yale.
Mayhew’s head emulated in New Haven
Identification of Copley as the painter responsible for the Mayhew portrait, brings to light, the portrait
of Rev. Naphtali Daggett (1727-1780), herein dated c. 1766-1767, (fig. 28), taken about the time of the
thirty-nine-year-old Daggett’s appointment as President of Yale College in December 1766. Daggett, a
Yale graduate of 1748, was ordained Pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Smithtown, New York in 1751,
and inducted as Livingstonian Professor of Divinity at Yale in March 1756. He served as president (pro
tempore at his request) from 1766 to 1777 for the revolutionary decade leading up to and during the
Revolution. Presently considered as by an “Unknown Artist,” this portrait is herein recommended for
consideration as by Copley based on compositional and stylistic similarities to his herein proven portrait
of Mayhew engraved by Cipriani.
Daggett’s portrait closely follows the composition of Mayhew’s likeness by Copley. The shading of the
left side of the subject’s face and wig style are like that of the Mayhew portrait. Similar modeling of the
face, is so close as to suggest a resemblance that actually may be due to the fact Mayhew and Daggett
were related. Naphtali was the great grandson of Thomas Daggett (1630-1692) and Hannah (Mayhew)
Daggett (1635-1723), the daughter of Thomas Mayhew, Sr. (1593-1682), first Governor of Martha’s
Vineyard.234 Jonathan Mayhew also descended from Governor Mayhew.235
The spill of powder upon Rev. Daggett’s right shoulder was a realistic detail found in Copley’s Epes
Sargent (1759-1761), and also in his work c. 1766-1767.236 The slight smile upon the lips of Daggett is
similar to Hollis III’s in the Cipriani bust copy (fig. 14), suggesting Copley could have relied upon it while
it was retained in his studio from 1764 (until 1767) for executing the face of Hollis III’s full-length (fig. 15)
portrait for Harvard. Similarities to both the composition of the Mayhew etching and the Cipriani bust,
further support Copley’s responsibility for Daggett’s portrait.
As a relation of Mayhew, Daggett had cause to be in Boston on that July day that Mayhew’s funeral was
held and attended by an extensive funeral procession, which meant Daggett had opportunity to sit for
the portrait in Copley’s studio. Or, after he was appointed to Yale’s Presidency in December, he may
have returned to Boston, given that his family lived at his birthplace of Atteborough, Massachusetts, en
route from Yale at New Haven, Connecticut.
234
Naphtali Daggett was the son of Ebenezer Daggett (1690-1740) and Mary (Blackinton) (1698-1772); son of
Deacon John Daggett (1662-1724) and Sarah (Pease) Capron (1661-1735); son of Thomas Daggett (abt. 1630-abt.
1692) and Hannah Mayhew Daggett (1635-1723), daughter of the Governor.
235
Jonathan Mayhew was the son of Experience Mayhew (1673-1758) and Remembrance (Bourne) (1684-1722),
son of Rev. John Mayhew (1651-1688) and Elizabeth (Hilliard) (1653-1746), son of Thomas Mayhew, Jr. (bef. 1620abt. 1657) and unknown; son of the Governor.
236
Wig powder is also seen on the shoulders of Copley’s portraits of Hugh Hall (1758), John Erving, Jr. (1757-1759),
John Murray (c. 1763), Peter Chardon (c. 1766), Samuel Quincy (c. 1767), and Robert Hooper (1767).
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 57 of 63
�Fig. 28. (Left) Comparison of Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. Pastor of the West Church in Boston, in New England: An assertor of
the civil and religious liberties of his country and mankind by Giovanni Battista Cipriani after John Singleton Copley’s portrait
owned by Thomas Hollis V. London, 1767. Etching, H. Sheet H. 16 ¾,” W. 11.” Author’s Collection and (Right) Rev. Naphtali
Daggett, Artist Unknown, c. 1750-1760; herein attributed to John Singleton Copley, c. 1766-1767. Oil on canvas, H. 29 ½,”
W. 24 ½.” Yale University Art Gallery, 1938.7. University Purchase.)
“I cried because he looked like my grandfather,” 2022
In Smithtown, New York, where he was ordained Pastor in 1751 and married, a descendant of Rev.
Daggett shared with me, her amazement when she first saw his portrait: “I cried because he looked like
my grandfather” (who was a sixth-generation descendant).237 Copley’s ability to capture a likeness, often
expressed by his sitters (see Thomas Ainslie’s letter, 1764), is repeated by this descendant’s description
(2022) of a likeness spanning two-hundred years and, pending formal attribution of the Daggett portrait,
may be the first such documented compliment to Copley’s Zeuxis-like skill seen through the centuries.
“Defenders of our rights . . . other Mayhews”
Daggett also shared Mayhew’s political outlook, fighting for the American cause. Edmund Quincy, Jr.’s
letter of 1766 to Hollis V stating “HE who is able of stones to raise up defenders of our rights, civil and
sacred, will send us other Mayhews, as we need them,”238 applied to the portrait of Rev. Daggett,
president at Yale from 1766 to 1777. A Yale University timeline summarizes the political atmosphere at
237
238
Conversations of author with WLM, October 7, 2022, April 17, 2023.
Edmund Quincy, Jr. (1726-1782) to Hollis V, Boston, July 25, 1766. [Blackburne], Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, 338.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 58 of 63
�the college when Daggett was professor of divinity and during his presidency; the first year of 1767
marked by his democratic policy of inclusion, listing students alphabetically and according to merit, not
social status:
September 20, 1765, General Thomas Gage writing to Sir William Johnson, referred to a group
of Yale graduates as “the pretended patriots, educated in a seminary of democracy;” April 22,
1766, The Corporation deliberated on insubordination of students and decided that disorders
had “arisen very much from the Spirit of the Times . . .;” September 10, 1766, Resignation of
President Thomas Clap; December 17, 1767, David Avery (B.A. 1769) wrote to Eleazar Wheelock
(B.A. 1733): “It is not he that has got the finest coat or largest ruffles that is esteemed here at
present. And as the class hence forward are to be placed alphabetically, the students may
expect marks of distinction put upon the best scholars and speakers;” 1769, The Senior Class
agreed to appear at Commencement “wholly dressed in the manufactures of our own Country;”
October 16, 1770, The General Assembly paid the outstanding debt of the College (216 pounds)
and the Corporation then established the professorship of “Mathematicks and natural
Philosophy” [following the example of the Hollis professorship at Harvard]; June 28, 1775,
Student military company drilled for General George Washington and escorted him as far as Mill
River on his way to Cambridge . . .; October 23, 1776, Permission given to the Senior Class for
instruction in rhetoric, history, and the belles lettres, "provided it may be done with the
Approbation of the Parents or Guardians of said Class;" . . . July 5, 1779, Yale students assisted in
checking the advance of British troops under Gen. William Tryon. James Hillhouse (BA,1773)
“commanded on that day the 2d Company of the Governor’s Foot Guards” and the volunteers
included former President Daggett “who fought, was wounded, taken prisoner, and
maltreated.”239
Yale patriots and Rev. Daggett’s students included Nathan Hale (1755-1776), who volunteered to gather
intelligence in New York for General Washington, answering the request of his classmate and fellow
graduate of the Class of 1773, future Major Benjamin Tallmadge (1754-1835), who became head of
intelligence-gathering in New York. After Hale was captured by the British and hung as a spy, Tallmadge
was responsible for establishing and operating the Culper Spy Ring responsible for securing intelligence
in New York that prevented West Point and Washington himself from capture by the British in 1780, and
spared the French Navy from British attack at Newport, RI, so it could sail south to Yorktown, VA,
resulting in the American victory October 19, 1781, eventually ending the American Revolution.
Rev. Daggett would die after the bayonet wounds received in the defense of New Haven. His life story
answers to the highly political and controversial print source that appears to have influenced the
composition of his portrait, evidencing the connectivity of print sources chosen according to the political
persuasion and interests of the subject, which was a chief modus operandi of Copley’s prescient
compositions. The similar attitude of the subject and rendering of the composition for the ministerial
portraits of both Rev. Daggett and his relation Rev. Mayhew, evidence the skill of John Singleton Copley
in the characterization of Yale’s sixth President (pro tempore).
239
‘Yale History Timeline,’ Yale University Library, 1760-1769,
https://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=296074&p=1976325 and 1770-1779,
https://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=296074&p=1976326
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 59 of 63
�15 ’Liberty Further Extended’ by Copley into the future: Abolition on the eve
of the Civil War
Copley’s American patriotism was noted by Elkanah Watson (1758-1842), Massachusetts born
businessman and diplomatic courier for Benjamin Franklin during the American Revolution. Watson
described Copley’s ceremonial addition, in London, of an American flag to his portrait (fig. 29a), an event
Copley’s granddaughter, Martha Babcock Amory (1812-1880), included in her book of family letters:
Copley and I designed [the background] to represent a ship, bearing to America the intelligence
of the acknowledgement of Independence, with a sun just rising upon the stripes of the union,
streaming from her gaff. All was complete save the flag, which Copley did not deem prudent to
hoist under present circumstances, as his gallery is a constant resort of the royal family and the
nobility. I dined with the artist, on the glorious 5th of December, 1782, after listening with him to
the speech of the King, formally recognizing the United States of America as in the rank of
nations . . . immediately after our return from the House of Lords, he invited me into his studio,
and there with a bold hand, a master’s touch, and I believe an American heart, attached to the
ship the stars and stripes. This was I imagine, the first American flag hoisted in old England. 240
While the colors flown by Copley’s ship carried overt iconology indicative of a new national identity, he
also included allegory against the Black Atlantic slave trade conducted under that flag, with the intent of
messaging for America to extend ‘Liberty’ to the abolition of Black enslavement. His allegory below the
flag, hinted of the horrific forced Middle Passage voyage of the enslaved from Africa, as directly below
the ship’s decks, he detailed a black inkwell with a gold ring or ‘chain-link’ analogous to a slave collar
symbolizing not only the relatively free colonist ‘enslaved’ by Parliamentary tyranny [symbolism seen in
Copley’s first exhibition work A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (1765], but also the enslaved Black population.
To fight in the Revolution, Watson unsuccessfully tried to break indentured service (age sixteen to
twenty-one), made by his father, with Providence merchant John Brown (1736-1803), leading
Providence, Rhode Island merchant and a Son of Liberty who did not extend ‘Liberty’ to the enslaved.
Brown owned and traded enslaved persons, and the name of the slave trader, was on the portrait’s
appropriately lowermost letter. With Brown in mind, Watson, an anti-slavery proponent, believed, “the
instincts that revolt at slavery, and . . . its . . . atrocities . . . should consider . . . How many of the princely
fortunes of New England had their basis in the slave trade!”241
240
Winslow C. Watson, ed., Men and Times of the Revolution; or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson (New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1861), 202-203. Amory (1882), 463.
241
Watson, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, 66.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 60 of 63
�Fig. 29a. Elkanah Watson, 1782 by John Singleton Copley, 1738–1815, Oil on canvas, H. 58 11/16,” W. 47
5/8.” Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of the estate of Josephine Thomson Swann, y1964-181.
Copleyan Allegory supports abolition of enslavement of Black people
Watson’s revulsion to slavery’s “atrocities,”242 written in 1821, the year he loaned the portrait for longterm exhibition at the American Academy of Fine Art in New York City, is reiterated in Copley’s
iconology. Through his Copleyan Allegory, Copley pointed out the need to abolish enslavement, basing
the iconology on Elkanah’s name as found in the Bible. Translated from the Hebrew, it meant, “whom
God possessed/purchased,” (Exodus 6:24 AV) from the chapter freeing “the children of Israel, whom the
Egyptians keep in bondage” (Exodus 6:5), through admonishing signs to ‘let the children of Israel go”
(Exodus 6:11).
242
Ibid., 66.
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 61 of 63
�Applicable to the colonial American facing distressing Parliamentary taxation, the chain-link allegory also
reflected Copley’s first-hand exposure to the slave trade having grown up on Boston’s Long Wharf,
which explains family memories of his earliest “coarse drawings” on nursery walls and in school books,
wherein he “persisted” in “the ‘realistic’
school of coloring . . . painting the sea
crossed by the Israelites of the deepest
and most brilliant shade of red!”243 That
scene (Exodus 14:21-27), secured the
freedom of formerly enslaved people
led by Moses crossing the Red Sea
(Exodus 15:4 AV), demonstrating
Copley’s long-term drive to picture
freedom from ‘enslavement.’ Watson
advised Academy President John
Trumbull, “this painting can never be
replaced . . . Copley assured me it was
his “Chief [Chef] d’oeuvre.”244
Copley’s compositional details (fig. 29b)
aligned beneath the ship, the
meaningfully ‘black’ inkstand with a
gold ring just above the lower left
corner of the most easily read letter
addressed to “John BrownEs[qr]/
Providenc[e],” i.e., slave trader John
Brown of Providence, Rhode Island to
whom Watson was indentured. Copley
thereby built in a redemptive reminder
of Exodus, even omitting spacing in
“BrownEs,” (with the top half of the
cursive ‘E’ barely visible, to form a
plural noun for enslaved “brownskinned” people. He traced “Providen”
with the ‘c’ (phonetic equivalent to
‘see’) on the cusp of the paper, isolating
the root providens of the Latin
Providentia meaning “precaution,”
warning a new nation against
continuing to buy and sell human
beings, but rather provide for them.
This reading of the portrait adds new
meaning to Watson’s correspondence
with John Trumbull (1756-1843),
Fig. 29b. Detail, Elkanah Watson, 1782 by John Singleton Copley,
1738–1815, Oil on canvas, 58 11/16 × 47 5/8 in. Princeton University
Art Museum. Gift of the estate of Josephine Thomson Swann, y1964181. Detail of Copleyan Allegory offering abolitionist symbology,
1782-1862.
243
Amory, Life of John Singleton Copley, 10.
On typescript of Watson’s letter, see Princeton University object files including Carrie Rebora’s correspondence
reconstructing the loan, cited in Emily Ballew Neff, John Singleton Copley in England (London: The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston and Merrell Holberton, 1995), 122n6.
244
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 62 of 63
�veteran of the American Revolution known as the ‘Painter of the Revolution’ and appointed President
(1816-1836) of the American Academy of Fine Arts, concerning the loan and exhibition (1822-1829) of
his portrait at the Academy in New York City. Watson’s portrait was again exhibited at the New-York
Historical Society c. 1858-1862 just before and during the Civil War. The letter containing the name of
John Brown, Providence slave trader took on added significance following the raid led by abolitionist
John Brown (1800-1859) upon Harper’s Ferry, (West) Virginia, on October 17-18, 1859. Watson’s
Memoirs (1856) furthered Civil War era abolitionism; the second edition (1862) coinciding with his
portrait’s exhibition at the New-York Historical Society.245
Abolitionist John Brown’s family in Rev. Lemuel Haynes’s congregation, Torrington, Connecticut
Abolitionist John Brown’s parents numbered among the Torrington, Connecticut congregation of Rev.
Lemuel Haynes church for three years following his ordination in 1785, and John Brown, born in
Torrington, appears to have owned and signed a copy of Rev. Cooley’s book on Haynes.246 This
concurrence further suggests that when Rev. Haynes briefly returned to Granville, Massachusetts
following his Torrington posting and before proceeding to his pastorate in Rutland, Vermont, he began
to formulate an ‘Underground Railroad’ in his adopted hometown to points northward;. This was
followed by Haynes traveling as a missionary based with his congregation at Rutland.
16 Conclusion
‘Congregational Independency’ in Massachusetts provided the theoria of ‘Liberty’ that guided the
oeuvre of John Singleton Copley, an Anglican, who put theory into practice, compassing his portraiture
with subliminal messaging of ’Liberty.’ From Rev. Jonathan Mayhew to Rev. Lemuel Haynes, the theoria
of ‘Liberty’ evolved from considering the rights of white American colonists to the Black enslaved
population, all “mankind,” as Thomas Hollis V had inscribed upon Mayhew’s etching. This extension of
theory into practice and ‘Liberty’ to the abolition of enslavement, as proposed by Rev. Lemuel Haynes
was rooted in the Independency of the Congregational church.
Providing education for all, regardless of religious or racial affiliation, was demonstrated by the Hollis
family’s textbooks of ‘Liberty’ gifted to Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and books written by and gifted by
John Adams to Granville, Massachusetts for the district’s Congregational library. That is why a young
Granville, Massachusetts farmer named Lemuel Haynes became the first Black man to receive a
Master’s of Arts – at Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1804, and preached against enslavement. His
lifetime of education begun in Granville and focusing upon the Bible chapter and verse, created a chain
of events that led to the Civil War and the emancipation of the enslaved.
245
Watson, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, 66, passim.
“At Torrington, where Brown was born, ‘among those in his congregation, were the parents of John Brown,’
(Aseng, African-American Religious Leaders, 99-100). Two years before this was published, Brown vowed: ‘from
this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.’ The year this appeared, the same year as the Amistad
slave rebellion, Brown began considering plans for leading a slave revolt. Two decades later he was executed for
leading the attack on Harpers Ferry.” Quotation from catalog for “First Edition Biography of Rev. Lemuel Haynes by
Rev. Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (1837), signed by
John Brown,” at Auctioneers, University Archives, https://auction.universityarchives.com/auction-lot/first-editionbiography-of-rev.-lemuel-haynes-si_25D4BCB895
246
Corey Phelon Geske, Theoria to practica, page 63 of 63
�
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<i>Theoria</i><span> to </span><i>practica</i><span> and Congregational Independency: From John Singleton Copley's portraiture of ‘Liberty,’ </span><i>Rev. Jonathan Mayhew<span> </span></i><span>identified, to Rev. Lemuel Haynes's </span><i>Liberty Further Extended</i><span>, c. 1776</span>
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© Copyright May 30, 2023, Corey Phelon Geske. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without the permission of the author. Images used herein with permission for publication in this document from Boston University Libraries; Cleveland Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; Harvard University Portrait Collection; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New York Public Library; The Library Company of Philadelphia; Princeton University Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery.
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For the first time, Haynes’s unpublished writings circa 1776, Liberty Further Extended and his poem, The Battle of Lexington, are presented herein as very possibly having been composed in Granville, MA where precepts of ‘Liberty’ seemingly existed as early as 1754 with Haynes’s arrival at five months old.<br /><br />Haynes' subsequent education, fostered his unprecedented life story becoming the first Black man ordained a minister in the United States -- in the Congregational church, bespeaking that Faith’s 'independency' breaking out of the colonial paradigm as did a new Nation.<br /><br />For the first time in publication, John Singleton Copley's portrait (1767) of Congregational Boston minister Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, is herein identified. Having preached, “Britons will not be slaves . . . Let us all learn to be free," Mayhew was respected by John Adams as one of the men most responsible for setting the groundwork of the American Revolution. His emphasis upon ‘Liberty,’ is found in Haynes's unpublished essay Liberty Further Extended . . . the first to apply the precepts of the Declaration of Independence to the abolition of enslavement, bringing to the forefront the hypocrisy of any who supported ‘Liberty’ without extending it to “mankind” in bondage. Copley’s portraiture bears evidence of his effort to do so and his iconology of 'Liberty' extending to the abolition of Black enslavement, is examined and interpreted here.<br /><br />‘Congregational Independency’ in Massachusetts provided the theoria of ‘Liberty’ that guided the iconology of Copley, an Anglican, who put theory to practice, compassing his portraiture with subliminal messaging of ’Liberty.’ <br />From Mayhew to Haynes, the theoria of ‘Liberty’ evolved from considering the rights of white American colonists to the Black enslaved population, all “mankind,” as Thomas Hollis V had inscribed upon Mayhew’s etching by Cipriani after Copley. <br /><br />This extension of theory to practice and ‘Liberty’ to the abolition of enslavement, as proposed by Haynes, whose lifetime paralleled that of the young nation, was rooted in the Independency of the Congregational church.
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As part of the Lemuel Haynes Anniversary Project in Granville, MA, <em>Theoria</em> to <em>Practica</em> . . . by Corey Phelon Geske commemorates Juneteenth 2023 and the 270th anniversaries of the July 18, 1753 birth of Rev. Lemuel Haynes and the incorporation of the district of Granville, Massachusetts, January 25, 1754.<br /><br />Also recognizing ‘America250,’ the Nation’s Semiquincentennial, July 4, 2026, this work is published by the Granville History Digital Collection, sponsored by the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum at the Granville Public Library and the Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation, Granville, MA.<br /><br />For the content in this document most relevant to Rev. Lemuel Haynes please refer to pp. i, ii, v, 2, (Section: "<em>Theoria to Practica</em>: Rev. Lemuel Haynes extends ‘Liberty’ to abolition of enslavement") 38-49, 63.
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Corey Phelon Geske
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Granville History Digital Collection, Granville, Massachusetts
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May 30, 2023
Relation
A related resource
As cited in the text: <br />See the Daniel Rose, Lt. Jacob Baldwin, Rev. Joel Baker . . . Phelon House for additional information:<span> </span><a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/362">CLICK HERE</a><span> </span>for Daniel Rose . . . Phelon House Part One. Part One includes links to Parts 2-5 and Addenda. <br />For mention of Thomas Holllis V,<span> </span><a href="https://granvillehistory.omeka.net/items/show/1341">CLICK HERE<span> </span></a>for Addendum 1,<span> </span>"Baker Quilt: West Granville Needlework at the F.G. (Rev. Joel) Baker House inspires the historic Deerfield Arts and Crafts Movement."
Abolition
American Revolution
Benjamin Franklin
Boy with a Flying Squirrel
Civil War
Copleyan Allegory
Corey Phelon Geske
Daniel Rose House
Deacon David Rose
Elizabeth Clarke Mayhew
Elkanah Watson
Giovanni Battista Cipriani
Harvard
Henry Pelham
John Adams
John Brown
John Greenwood
John Singleton Copley
John Smibert
Joshua Reynolds
Jr.
Jules David Prown
Lemuel Haynes
Lexington
Liberty Further Extended
Mrs. Clarke Gayton
Nathaniel Hurd
Nicholas Boylston
Paul Revere
Peter Pelham
Princeton
Rembrandt
Rev. Benjamin Colman
Rev. Joel Baker
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew
Rev. Lemuel Haynes
Rev. Naphtali Daggett
Rev. Timothy Mather Cooley
Richard Jennys
Sons of Liberty
Susanna Copley
Thomas Hollis III
Thomas Hollis V
Waldron Phoenix Belknap
West Granville Congregational Church
William B. Phelon
Yale.
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21aafdc0112e3ad6ae154308be7e53f0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Stow / Stowe Family File Notes
Description
An account of the resource
A copy of the Stow family notes from the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum's files. <br /><br />These notes include a map showing land owned by the first Stow to come to Granville. The map includes reference to the "Stow Cemetery" which is now known as the <strong><a>Woodlands Cemetery</a></strong>. Many of the Stow family are buried there.<br /><br />Disclaimer: Much of this material is pre-internet. Due to the complexities of researching in the no-tech age some of the information may be inaccurate or not consistent with online records. Users are encouraged to validate the information they collect from this page. The primary value of this collection is in the local history which may not be available online.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Digital Images: Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville, MA., 2023
Bronson
Granville
Hamilton
Massachusetts
Stow
Stowe
Tolland
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91a3689540a24069ebaebf81f8c0792f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1854 Granville Selectmen's Report
1854
Granville
Massachusetts
selectmen's report
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e01b88e02bbb7316e6e33218d3ab5c6f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Town of Granville Reports, 1870
Description
An account of the resource
The 1870 Annual Reports for the Town of Granville, Massachusetts.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Town of Granville, Massachusetts
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1870
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Digital Image: The Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum at the Granville Library (2022)
1870
Annual Reports
Granville
Massachusetts
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75aa8f181ef2382f3d771fd9b696f6b1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Barlow Property Cards, Granville, Massachusetts
Description
An account of the resource
Handwritten cards recording Barlow land transactions in Granville, Massachusetts.
These cards were created by William Heino, a local land surveyor, and donated to the Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum.
Disclaimer: Because the cards were copied from information in the actual property records (located in Springfield) we cannot be certain they are complete and free of transcription errors. They are provided here for general reference purposes. All information should be verified via the actual property records.
Barlow
Granville
Heino
Massachusetts
Property Cards
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7ab075c0dfb22d71fdc64e49d38cf659
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Samuel B. Spelman and Laura Seymour: Granville's Rockefeller Connection
Description
An account of the resource
A newspaper article dated April 13, 1979 describing the lineage of Laura Celestia Spelman, who married John D. Rockefeller. <br /><br />Her grandparents were Samuel B. Spelman and Laura Seymour, both of whom came from old Granville families. Rockefeller said of his Granville-descended wife, <span>"Her judgment was always better than mine. Without her keen advice, I would be a poor man."<br /><br /></span>Rockefeller was an abolitionist who voted for Abraham Lincoln and supported the Republican party.<br /><br />One of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Celestia Spelman's grandsons was Nelson A. Rockefeller, the 41st Vice President of the United States (Dec. 1974 - Jan. 1977) during the Ford presidency.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller">CLICK HERE</a> for information on John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil and was considered the wealthiest person of his time.<br /><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Rockefeller">CLICK HERE</a> for information on Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Granville
Massachusetts
Rockefeller
Spelman
Standard Oil
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3b66aeb6b9cd960f5a1916f0e4e931b5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Granville Sun Newspaper, 1880-1881
Description
An account of the resource
<span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>IMPORTANT</strong></span>: The full text of all editions is available at <a href="https://archive.org/details/granvillesun1880unse/mode/1up"><strong>THIS LINK</strong></a> to the Granville Public Library page on Internet Archive. Please <span style="text-decoration:underline;">click on the link to view the newspapers in full</span>. You may want to <span style="text-decoration:underline;">use the "+" feature on the page to enlarge the print</span> to make it more readable.<br /><br />The Granville Sun was published in West Granville from 1880 to 1881 by William G. Snow. On June 1, 1940 Mr. Snow presented the Granville Library with a bound copy of all editions of the newspaper, which he published out of his home on Main Road in West Granville.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
William G. Snow
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1880, 1881
1880
1881
Granville
Granville Sun
Massachusetts
newspaper
snow
West Granville
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f48976b9cef12f792c33014d1678b01a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Documents, Articles, Other Printed Material
Description
An account of the resource
Documents relating to Granville history.
To view a larger version of any document, click on that document, then click the image thumbnail on the document's page. You will then see a full-size image including a "zoom" function which will make reading text easier.
If you have old Granville documents to add please contact the library.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
1924 Granville Schools Report
Description
An account of the resource
Report from the Superintendent of Schools, published in the 1924 Town of Granville Annual Report.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1924
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Digital Image: Mabel Root Henry Historical Museum, Granville, MA. (2022)