WAIT STILL WINTHROP’S corpse lay silently at home for a week in November 1717, while family members buzzed with activity. They approached the governor, his predecessor, the lieutenant governor, and members of the colony’s council to walk alongside the body as it moved to the burying ground. They bought hundreds of pounds worth of rings, gloves, and clothing—as well as 32 new halberds and 16 new drumheads for the regiment that would accompany the procession. And they ordered the painting of almost fifty black lions on escutcheons bearing the family coat of arms.1
The splendid ceremony they organized was fully worthy of the Winthrop family that had produced Wait Still’s grandfather, the first governor of Massachusetts, as well as his father and brother, both governors of Connecticut. Like these eminent ancestors, Wait Still’s trip to the grave had a military escort and attracted substantial public interest. Besides the regiment, the eminent bearers, and the deceased’s horse bearing the black lion, the procession, a newspaper noted, included “the Chief Gentlemen and Inhabitants both of Town and Country.” The Boston diarist Samuel Sewall, who served as one of the bearers, recorded that “the Streets were crowded with people.”2
But Wait Still’s ceremony differed from his ancestors’. Most notably, unlike his grandfather’s 1649 and his father’s 1676 ceremonies, his 1717 funeral offered participants extensive gifts. A long (and probably incomplete) list records that the family distributed gloves, scarves, rings, and escutcheons to at least 41 individuals or families, 70 officials, 12 council members, and the entire 100-person lower house of the legislature. As a bearer (as well as part of the council), Sewall received each of these gifts. We can presume that the pious layperson went home with a prayer on his lips; we can be sure that he returned with a ring on his finger, gloves on his hands, and yards of material over his shoulders.3
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With the possible exception of the weekly church service (which in these years increasingly featured funeral sermons), funerals were eighteenth-century New England’s most common, most substantial, and most highly developed public ceremony. They were also, for the region’s wealthy elites, its most expensive. Rich families spent freely on the material goods they displayed and gave away at funerals. In a year when all of Boston paid £1700 to the province for poll and property tax, the Winthrops’ ceremony cost almost £600, more than the tax payments from any other locality in the colony—and more than twice as much as all Maine put together.4
Contemporaries would have called the 1717 Winthrop ceremony a “large funeral, ” a burial for well-to-do New Englanders that included extensive gifts, expanded use of mourning attire and funeral decorations, and a substantial number of participants. The large funeral of Winthrop’s time was bigger, more visible, and more elegant than earlier ceremonies, so different that contemporaries worried about the strain of these new demands. The “expence of funerals of late years . . . is become very extravagant, ” Massachusetts legislators complained in 1721, leading to “the impoverishment of many families.”5 Yet despite such anxieties, and the legislative action it inspired, the large funeral remained popular until the Revolutionary era.
This paper examines the origin and significance of the large funeral. During the early years of the eighteenth century, it argues, New Englanders such as Samuel Sewall, whose diary provides the major source for this study, adapted the seventeenth-century Calvinist funeral ceremony to the needs of eighteenth-century elites, dressing up its older structures with genteel material culture. The enormous expense of Wait Still Winthrop’s 1717 funeral at first seems distant from the simple, almost wordless ritual established in the 1630s under Winthrop’s grandfather. But a closer look suggests that the large funeral elaborated upon rather than broke free from that structure, a process that created a more complex version of the earlier system rather than making it completely different. By offering room for expanding material culture, the Puritan funeral allowed wealthy New England families in the eighteenth century to employ the emerging vocabulary of gentility, an increasing emphasis upon carefully restrained self-presentation that provided a means of expanding material culture that could express both the honor and taste of the family. The large funeral dramatized the older burial service, making it more theatrical, more expressive, and more genteel.
Susan Behme Obituary
This reshaping can be seen more clearly by looking at three major issues: what people brought to the funeral; what happened there; and what people brought from it. After examining mourning, ceremonies, and gifts, the discussion concludes by briefly suggesting how the seemingly motley elements of the large funeral disintegrated in the age of the American Revolution.
These changes have often been noticed, but they are seldom explained convincingly. A long series of works beginning with Alice Morse Earle in the late nineteenth century describe the great increase in material goods at early New England funerals. David Stannard suggests that more expansive funerals resulted from inward-turning tribalism, while Laurie Hochstetler has made the case that they carried an increasingly explicit religious content that distinguished them from earlier Puritan practice. But such discussions tend to mine Sewall’s diary and other sources for examples rather reading them closely for a range of practices and their meanings. More important, these arguments have obscured the eighteenth-century funeral’s connection with its predecessors—and given even less attention to the significance of genteel values, and to the later, more revolutionary, changes that swept away the entire structure by the end of the century.6
As these studies note, the examination of early eighteenth-century funerals must rest upon the diary of Samuel Sewall, an untiring participant in and observer of New England life and particularly of funerals. His extensive diary, the fullest diary of a mainland English colonial before the mid-eighteenth century, notes that, in the forty-five years before his 1730 death (the longest unbroken stretch of his diary), he attended more than 500 funerals, an average of one funeral a month. He served as a bearer 140 times, about once every four months. Sewall did not consider these ceremonies burdensome social obligations. He filled his diary with lovingly recorded specifics about the funerals he attended—and even many he had not. As he remarked to his fellow bearers at a ceremony almost exactly ten years before Winthrop’s death, “we were often concern’d in Funerals.”7
Brenda S. Gill
Sewall offers an insider’s understanding of this world. By 1717, he had long been close to nearly all the centers of power within New England, as a Harvard graduate and former tutor, a member of the council, and a respected jurist, as well as a deacon of Old South Church and a close friend of many of the colony’s ministers, including Cotton Mather. With the death of Winthrop in 1717, he became (at the age of 65) the chief justice of the colony’s highest court. Just as important, Sewall was also deeply interested in the larger issues that were at the heart of the changes within funerals. He was first a staunch defender of the region’s traditions—calling Winthrop a “a very pious. . . New-England Man” was high praise indeed. But Sewall also lived in the larger cultural and material world made possible by increased commerce and communication. Sewall himself had helped to create that expansion, as both a merchant and someone who had managed what was at the time the only press in all New England. Used with a range of evidence from the period, Sewall’s diary allows a close look at the changes and the continuities within funerals and their material culture, a series of changes that reveal the ways that Sewall and his contemporaries struggled to preserve their connections with the community within a world that operated on a new scale and according to new standards.8
Samuel Sewall found the months surrounding Wait Still Winthrop’s death particularly difficult. His wife had died three weeks before—an event that “fill’d our House with a flood of Tears.” Other family members and close associates followed. By December, he noted that he had served as bearer for half of the people who had served in that role for his wife only two months ago. He told a correspondent that he felt “the Breakers . . . passing over me, Wave after Wave, Wave after Wave, in a most formidable Succession.”9
Other people recognized Sewall’s situation—and shared it. In the church service the next day, Sewall’s son, a minister, was almost unable to read the note that Sewall had posted asking for prayer. “Our Ruffled Mind can scarcely Think, for Tears, ” mourned a poet writing about Sewall’s wife’s death before describing the widower as being “in Sorrow almost Drown’d.”10
Thomas Hamel Obituary (1939
Sewall and his contemporaries, who often referred to death as “dissolution, ” a dissolving, or breaking apart, understood the agonies created by the death of a loved one. But they also knew of its dangers, especially because the New England tradition had given these difficulties much thought. The first generation of settlers crafted a set of practices that sought to avoid the problems created by excessive grief. The large funeral of the early eighteenth century took shape within the context of expectations
Sewall offers an insider’s understanding of this world. By 1717, he had long been close to nearly all the centers of power within New England, as a Harvard graduate and former tutor, a member of the council, and a respected jurist, as well as a deacon of Old South Church and a close friend of many of the colony’s ministers, including Cotton Mather. With the death of Winthrop in 1717, he became (at the age of 65) the chief justice of the colony’s highest court. Just as important, Sewall was also deeply interested in the larger issues that were at the heart of the changes within funerals. He was first a staunch defender of the region’s traditions—calling Winthrop a “a very pious. . . New-England Man” was high praise indeed. But Sewall also lived in the larger cultural and material world made possible by increased commerce and communication. Sewall himself had helped to create that expansion, as both a merchant and someone who had managed what was at the time the only press in all New England. Used with a range of evidence from the period, Sewall’s diary allows a close look at the changes and the continuities within funerals and their material culture, a series of changes that reveal the ways that Sewall and his contemporaries struggled to preserve their connections with the community within a world that operated on a new scale and according to new standards.8
Samuel Sewall found the months surrounding Wait Still Winthrop’s death particularly difficult. His wife had died three weeks before—an event that “fill’d our House with a flood of Tears.” Other family members and close associates followed. By December, he noted that he had served as bearer for half of the people who had served in that role for his wife only two months ago. He told a correspondent that he felt “the Breakers . . . passing over me, Wave after Wave, Wave after Wave, in a most formidable Succession.”9
Other people recognized Sewall’s situation—and shared it. In the church service the next day, Sewall’s son, a minister, was almost unable to read the note that Sewall had posted asking for prayer. “Our Ruffled Mind can scarcely Think, for Tears, ” mourned a poet writing about Sewall’s wife’s death before describing the widower as being “in Sorrow almost Drown’d.”10
Thomas Hamel Obituary (1939
Sewall and his contemporaries, who often referred to death as “dissolution, ” a dissolving, or breaking apart, understood the agonies created by the death of a loved one. But they also knew of its dangers, especially because the New England tradition had given these difficulties much thought. The first generation of settlers crafted a set of practices that sought to avoid the problems created by excessive grief. The large funeral of the early eighteenth century took shape within the context of expectations
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