Cultural demography: New England deaths and the puritan perception of risk

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 367-392

  Smith, Daniel Scott ^a   Hacker, J David ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039646958     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/206030     Document Type: Article

References (145)

1. Arnold Barnett supplied the figure for mortality risk on commuter flights.
2. Lawrence Stone, "Death," in idem (ed.), The Past and the Present (Boston, 1981), 242-259;
3. David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York, 1977);
4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 111-116;
5. Samuel H. Preston, "Introduction," in idem (ed.), The Effects of Infant and Child Mortality on Fertility (New York, 1978), 1-18.
6. Emphasizing regularities, Jean-Claude Chesnais provides a comprehensive review of national data on the fertility/mortality relationship in the demographic transition - The Demographic Transition: Stages, Patterns and Economic Implications. A Longitudinal Study of Sixty-Seven Countries Covering the Period 1720-1984 (Oxford, 1992), 140-151, 346-354.
7. Michael Haines, "The Use of Model Life Tables to Estimate Mortality for the United States in the Late Nineteenth Century," Demography, XVI (1979), 289-312.
8. David M. Heer, "Infant and Child Mortality and the Demand for Children," in Rodolfo A. Bulatao and Ronald D. Lee (eds.), Determinants of Fertility in Developing Countries (New York, 1983), I, 369-387.
9. See the analogous discussion of "numeracy in children" in Etienne van de Walle, "Fertility Transition, Conscious Choice and Numeracy," Demography, XXIX (1992), 487-502.
10. Ansley J. Coale, "How a Population Ages or Grows Younger," in Ronald Freedman (ed.), Population: The Vital Revolution (New York, 1964), 47-58.
11. Edward Wigglesworth, "A Table Shewing the Probability of the Duration, the Decrement, and the Expectation of Life in the States of Massachusetts and New-Hampshire, formed from sixty-two Bills of Mortality on the files of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789," American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Memoirs (Boston, 1793), II, part I, 133.
12. Barbara J. McNeil et al., "On the Elicitation of Preferences for Alternative Therapies," New England Journal of Medicine, CCCVI (1982), 1259-1262.
13. Paul Slovic, "Perception of Risk: Reflections on the Psychometric Paradigm," in Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding (eds.), Social Theories of Risk (Westport, 1992), 117-152.
14. For a relativistic position on cultural construction of risk, see Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture (Berkeley, 1982).
15. Less extreme is Charles E. Rosenberg, "Introduction, Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History," in Rosenberg and Janet Golden (eds.), Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), xii-xxvi.
16. Lonna Myers Malmsheimer, "New England Funeral Sermons and Changing Attitudes Toward Woman, 1672-1792," unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Minnesota, 1973);
17. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, 1986), 123, 161-162.
18. Luke 12:40. In 1722, sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin satirized the elegy, calling it for "the greatest part, wretchedly Dull and Ridiculous" ("Silence Do-Good, No. 7," in Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. [eds.], The Papers of Benjamin Franklin [New Haven, 1959], I, 23-26).
19. In his bibliography of 39,161 surviving items published in all of mainland British America and the United States before 1801, Charles Evans (American Bibliography [Chicago, 1903-1955], 14v.) lists 789 funeral sermons, half of which appeared after 1785. Of the 19,448 items published before 1786, 501 were funeral sermons. Using the sequence numbers provided by Evans as indicators of the dates of publication, the first 50 relevant cases were taken from vol. I, which covers 1639-1729, vol. IV (1765-1773), and vol. XIII (1799-1800). However, since the final volume lacked a sufficient number of sermons, we also drew 18 cases from the end of vol. XII (1798-1799). We excluded sermons with places of publication outside of New England and those that were originally preached elsewhere but reprinted in that region. We also rejected execution sermons, broadsides announcing the death of an eminent person, and the numerous short eulogies given after the death of George Washington in 1799.
20. Wondrously productive, Cotton Mather published 67 of the sermons on those who perished from a total of 76 for New England between 1721 and 1730; he authored nearly half (23) of the sermons in our first period, which concludes in 1716 (Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England [Ann Arbor, 1981], 161).
21. Mather's most frequent dream, which occurred from early in his life, was of his own death (Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 [New York, 1971], 320).
22. In her more comprehensive survey ("New England Funeral Sermons," 32) Malmsheimer estimates that 75% of the sermons were on men, 25% on women, and 5% on children (those not financially independent of parents). Perhaps as many as 65% of those on men were on ministers, and half of those on women were on the wives and daughters of ministers.
23. Abel Stiles, Death God's Monitor to the Living (Providence, 1768), 2;
24. William Seward, Due Consideration of, and Preparation for our latter End, or Death, Recommended and Urged: In Two Sermons (New Haven, 1772);
25. Malmsheimer, "New England Funeral Sermons," 33-34;
26. Karen Halttunen, "Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror," in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (Chicago, 1993), 67-101;
27. Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Papular Culture, 1764-1860 (New York, 1993).
28. Eliphalet Williams, The Ruler's Duty and Honor, In Serving His Generation (Hartford, 1770), 21;
29. see also Cotton Mather, The Glorious Throne (Boston, 1714), 30-31;
30. John Mellen, The Merit of doing good (Boston, 1765), 21.
31. The biblical texts are, respectively, James 4:14, 1 Chronicles 29:15, Psalms 39:4-5, Job 14:1-2, and Psalms 90:5-6; Cotton Mather, Life Swiftly Passing and Quickly Ending (Boston 1716), 7.
32. Psalm 90:10; Mather, Life Swiftly Passing, 7;
33. Charles Chauncy, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Reverend Thomas Foxcroft (Boston, 1796), 19-20;
34. Mather, Life Swiftly Passing, 7;
35. James Dana, Illustrations on Human Frailty and Vanity (New Haven, 1765), 5;
36. Chauncy, Discourse Occasioned, 18.
37. For a cohort, the expectation of life at a given age is identical to the reciprocal of the death rate after that age. Steven R. Smith, "Death, Dying, and the Elderly in Seventeenth-Century England," in Stuart F. Spicker, Kathleen M. Woodward, and David D. Van Tassel (eds.), Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978), 211;
38. Benjamin Colman, The Duty and Honour of Aged Women (Boston, 1711), 31;
39. Chauncy, Discourse Occasioned, 18.
40. Ebenezer Gay, The Old Man's Calendar. A Discourse on Joshua XIV,10 Delivered in the First Parish of Hingham on the Lord's Day, August 26, 1781 (Boston, 1781; repr. Hingham, 1846), 22;
41. Job Orten, Discourses to the Aged (New York, 1980; repr. Salem, 1801; orig pub. 1771), 29-30;
42. Jonathan Parsons, A Funeral Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Ebenezer Little (Salem, 1768), 14.
43. Colman, A Devout Contemplation on the Meaning of Divine Providence in the Early Death of Pious and Lovely Children (Boston, 1714), 5;
44. Benjamin Wadsworth, Death is Certain, the Time When Uncertain (Boston, 1710), 9;
45. Ebenezer Baldwin, A Funeral Oration in Memory of Mr. Jonathan Lyman (New Haven, 1767), 14;
46. Thomas Wells Bray, The Knowledge of Our End, with the Advantage and Importance of it (New Haven, 1740), 9;
47. William Mason, A Sermon Delivered at Castine (Castine, Me., 1799), 10;
48. Wadsworth, Man's Present State Compared to Withering Grass and Flowers (Boston, 1715), 10;
49. Baldwin, Funeral Oration, 14;
50. John Foot, A Discourse Delivered January 8th, 1769 (New Haven, 1769), 27;
51. William Wells, A Sermon, Preached at Brattleborough (Brattleborough, Vt., 1798), 17;
52. Mason, Sermon Delivered at Castine, 10.
53. Cotton Mather, Corderius Americanus (Boston, 1708), 17;
54. Mather, Life Swiftly Passing, 7.
55. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality (New York, 1975; orig. pub. 1662), 69.
56. Since the bills of mortality did not record age, Graunt inferred mortality before age 6 from information on cause of death. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 1984), 107-110;
57. Mather, Corderius Americanus, 17.
58. Maris A. Vinovskis, "Angels' Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America," in idem (ed.), Studies in American Historical Demography (New York, 1979), 196-198.
59. Joseph Perry, The Character of Moses Illustrated and Improved (Hartford, 1767), 16;
60. Michael Wigglesworth (ed. Kenneth B. Murdock), The Day of Doom: On a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment with other poems (New York, 1966; orig. pub. 1662), 81.
61. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 108-109;
62. Mather, Life Swiftly Passing, 16;
63. Henry Harris, A Sermon Preach'd at the Queen's Chapel (Boston, 1713), 16;
64. George Bisset, A Sermon Preached in Trinity Church (Newport, R.I., 1771), 5.
65. Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York, 1992), 10-47. Some 969 out of 1,000 20-year-olds would survive the next five years, according to Model WEST, Level 13 mortality. See Table 1.
66. Franklin caustically advised, "For the Subject of your Elegy. Take one of your Neighbours who has lately departed this Life; it is no great matter at what Age the party dy'd, but it will be best if went away suddenly, being Kill'd, drown'd, or Froze to Death" ("Silence Do-Good, No. 7," 26);
67. Bisset, Sermon Preached, 8;
68. Seward, Due Consideration, 14.
69. Stiles, Death God's Monitor, 27.
70. Patricia Cline Cohen argues that the Puritans did "not share our notion that a young's person death is untimely or premature," but explains in a footnote that they did not view such early deaths as unnecessary or preventable (A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America [Chicago, 1982], 93, 241).
71. Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, 10, 42-43;
72. Roger Schofield, "Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality in 'The World We Have Lost,'" in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson (eds.), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), 260;
73. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "'The Living Mother of a Living Child': Midwifery and Mortality in Post-Revolutionary New England," William and Mary Quarterly, XLVI (1989), 27-48. The percentage of women who eventually died from maternal causes must be multiplied by the total number of children born to them - including those women who died before the end of childbearing years.
74. Cotton Mather, Eureka the Vertuous Woman Found (Boston, 1704);
75. Cotton Mather, idem, Memorials of Early Piety (Boston, 1711);
76. Colman, The Duty and Honour of Aged Women (Boston, 1711), ii;
77. Cotton Mather, An Essay to Describe the Good Works of A Vertuous Woman (Boston, 1713);
78. Colman, Duty and Honour of Aged Women;
79. Increase Mather, A Sermon Concerning Obedience and Resignation To the Will of God (Boston, 1714), iv.
80. Linda A. Pollock, "Embarking on Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society," in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London, 1990), 47-49;
81. Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society: 1650-1850 (New York, 1985), 19-22.
82. Slovic, Baruch Fischoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein, "Behavioral Decision Theory Perspectives on Risk and Safety," Acta Psychologica, LVI (1984), 183-203.
83. Gordon W. Jones (ed.), The Angel of Bethesda (Barre, Mass., 1972), 235-248;
84. Fischer, Albion's Fatal Seed, 813.
85. See the balanced survey by Andrew Wear, "Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England," in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985), 55-100;
86. Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville, 1991), 7-35;
87. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder; Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, 1990), 196-210;
88. Edward Shorter, Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1991), 55-74.
89. Jones, Angel of Bethesda, 14-19.
90. On Cotton Mather's use of Newtonian science, see Middlekauff, The Mathers, 279-304.
91. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988), 126-138.
92. Jabez Fitch, An Account of the Numbers that have died of the Distemper in the Throat, Within the Province of New Hampshire, With some Reflections thereon, July 26, 1736 (Boston, 1736), 7;
93. reprinted in Rosenberg (ed.), Disease and Society in Provincial Massachusetts: Collected Accounts, 1736-1939 (New York, 1972).
94. See also the general discussion in Cohen, Calculating People, 81-108;
95. Eliphalet Porter, A Sermon Delivered to the First Religious Society (Boston, 1799), 9.
96. Fitch, Account of the Numbers, 1-7.
97. Another ministerial study reported the differential impact within families. John Brown, The Number of Deaths in Haverhill, and Also Some Comfortable Instances Thereof Among the Children, under the Late Distemper in the Throat, with an Address to the Bereaved (Boston, 1738; 2d ed.),
98. cited in Cohen, Calculating People, 90-91.
99. What Fitch and Brown failed to report is the distribution by number of children in the families that lost no children in the epidemic; i.e., they offer no demographic concept of population at risk; Penuel Bowen, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Reverend Samuel Checkley (Boston, 1770), 31.
100. See William Lockwood, A Sermon Delivered at the Funeral of Mrs. Jerusha Woodbridge (Middletown, 1799), 18;
101. Isaiah Parker, A Funeral Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Josiah Bowles (Boston, 1800), 17;
102. Edward Dorr, A Discourse Occasioned by the Much Lamented Death, of the Honorable Daniel Edwards, Esq (Hartford, 1765), 19-20;
103. Parsons, To Live is Christ, To Die is Gain (Portsmouth, 1770), 38;
104. Cotton Mather, Nepenthes Evangelicum (Boston, 1713), 42;
105. Increase Mather, A Sermon Concerning Obedience (Boston, 1714), iv;
106. Samuel Moody, The Children of the Covenant (Boston, 1716), 52.
107. John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953).
108. Deficiencies in sources or organization are mainly responsible for this gap in the literature. Nearly all of the published volumes of New England vital records are organized by surname rather than year; furthermore, the completeness of the records declines between the seventeenth and midnineteenth centuries. John B. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630-1822 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 247-249.
109. Mary J. Dobson, "Mortality Gradients and Disease Exchanges: Comparisons from Old England and Colonial America," Social History of Medicine, II (1989), 281-284.
110. See also Ernest Caulfield, "The Pursuit of a Pestilence," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, LX (1950), 21-51.
111. Ronald A. Bosco, "Introduction," in idem (ed.), The Puritan Sermon in America: Humiliation and Execution Sermons (Delmar, N.Y., 1978), I, xxi-xxxxvii.
112. According to Charles Shively, drought was the most common reason for the proclamation of a fast (Shively, "A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860," unpub. Ph.D. diss. [Harvard Univ., 1968], 5).
113. Dennis D. Melchert, "Experimenting on the Neighbors: Inoculation of Smallpox in Boston in the Context of Eighteenth Century Medicine," unpub. Ph.D. diss., (Univ. of Iowa, 1973);
114. Caulfield, "A True History of the Terrible Epidemic Vulgarly Called the Throat Distemper which Occurred in his Majesty's New England Colonies between the Years 1735 and 1740," in Rosenberg (ed.), Disease and Society in Provincial Massachusetts: Collected Accounts (New York, 1972), 5-113;
115. Brown, The Number of Deaths in Haverhill;
116. Joseph Grafton, A Sermon, Occasioned by the Death of Samuel Bixby, Who Died Sept. 2;, aet. 17; Jonathan Shepard, Who Died Sept. 28, aet. 29; James Ward, Who Died Sept. 29, aet. 23; Michael Bright, Jun., who died October 10, aet 20 (All of the small pox) (Boston, 1793), 8.
117. For the range of disease and death phenomena, see the study of Rev. Ebenezer Parkman's diary by Rose Lockwood, "Birth, Illness and Death in 18th-Century New England," Journal of Social History, XII (1978), 111-128.
118. William H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), 227-228.
119. In America, attachment to Protestant Christianity dampened and channeled the rationalistic thrust of the Enlightenment. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976).
120. Schofield and David Reher, "The Decline of Mortality in Europe," in Schofield, Reher, and Alain Bideau (eds.), The Decline of Mortality in Europe (Oxford, 1991), 1-3.
121. No pessimist, Adam Smith, for example, in 1776 casually referred to the "very uncertain duration of human life" (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [New York, 1937; orig. pub. 1776], 101).
122. See especially Stannard, Puritan Way of Death.
123. The themes persisted in funeral sermons preached during the first half of the nineteenth century in Schenectady, New York. Robert V. Wells, "'From Remembering Death to Remembering Life': Changing Styles of Funeral Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Schenectady, New York," paper presented at the Social History Association meetings, 1993.
124. Shively, "History of the Conception of Death," 3-4.
125. James H. Cassedy, "Church Record-Keeping and Public Health in Early New England," in Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson and J. Worth Estes (eds.), Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts 1620-1820 (Charlottesville, 1980), 259-262.
126. The quotation from Farrell continues as follows: Statistics were the leg-irons to be clapped on the thugs of ignorance and superstition which strangled Truth in lonely byways. Nothing was able to resist statistics, not even Death itself, for the Collector, armed with statistics, could pick up Death, sniff it, dissect it, pour acid on it, or see if it was soluble. The Collector knew, for example, that in London during the second quarter of 1855 . . . that out of 10,157 tailors 108 had passed to a better world; that 139 shoemakers had gone to their reward out of 26,639 . . . and that was still only a fraction of what the Collector could have told you about Death. If mankind was ever to climb out of its present uncertainties, disputations and self-doubtings, it would only be on such a ladder of objective facts. (James Gordon Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur [New York, 1973], 186).
127. Daston, Classical Probability, 298-301;
128. John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore, 1979), 69;
129. Lawrence B. Goodheart, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse (Kent, Ohio, 1990), 145.
130. See the revealing reflections on the contrast between medieval artistic renderings and modern notions of mortality risk by the statistician Karl Pearson, "The Chances of Death," in idem (ed.), The Chances of Death and other Studies in Evolution (London, 1897), 1-41.
131. Spencer Lavan and George Huntston Williams, "The Unitarian and Universalist Traditions," in Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (eds.), Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions (New York, 1986), 354-375;
132. May, Enlightenment in America, 158-159;
133. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine, 14;
134. Goodheart, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist;
135. see also Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, 1993), 28-34.
136. For an argument linking the decline of Calvinism to the flourishing of the life-insurance industry after the 1830s, see Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York, 1979).
137. For an emphasis on the importance of the shift in focus from gambling to benefit the gambler to insurance that benefits a family, see Daston, "The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance, 1650-1830," in Lorenz Krüger, Lorraine J. Daston, and Michael Heidelberger (eds.), The Probabilistic Revolution. I, Ideas in History (Cambridge, 1987), 237-260.
138. Preston, Effects, 10-11.
139. Smith, "Population, Family, and Society in Hingham, Massachusetts," unpublished Ph.D. diss., (Univ. of California, 1973), 248-253.
140. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 45-47.
141. The interpretation of secularization as the declining scope of religious authority fits the American case during the nineteenth century. See Mark Chaves, "Secularization as Declining Religious Authority," Social Forces, LXXII (1994), 749-774;
142. Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture;
143. Slovic, "Beyond Numbers: A Broader Perspective on Risk Perception and Risk Communication," in Deborah G. Mayo and Rachelle D. Hollander (eds.), Acceptable Evidence: Science and Values in Risk Management (New York, 1991), 48-65.
144. Slovic, "Perceptions of Risk," Science, CCXXXVI (1987), 280-285.
145. With the exceptions of nuclear power and x-rays, and to a lesser extent, police work and nonnuclear electric power, the similarity of experts' ranking of risks with those of educated groups in the population is impressive. W. Kip Viscusi, Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk (New York, 1992), 21-22.