Lately we've had a lot of great research tips from mayim and others. All I had in reserve was more stories about long-gone people, and I had no time to do anything else, so this week we'll make do with that. I picked this one in honor of lovely Dedham, Massachusetts, where my wife dragged me last night to get her 5 Guys burger fix.
Back in November I mentioned The Burgess Genealogy: Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess, Who Were Settled at Sandwich, in the Plymouth Colony, in 1637, by Rev. Ebenezer Burgess.
As the title suggests, that book (published in 1865) traces the descendants of my ancestors Thomas and Dorothy Burgess. I expressed my consternation that Rev. Burgess “killed off” one of my direct ancestors prematurely:
According to his book Martha Burgess died at almost fifteen in February 1718. According to the Ashford, Connecticut town records, she married George Cheadle in 1721 and had several children, including my 5x-great-grandfather John Cheadle, a very early English settler of Pomfret, Vermont.
Here I’m going to take a closer look at Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, who in addition to writing the definitive Burgess family genealogy was the pastor of the First (Allin) Congregational Church of Dedham for its first forty years. His life, his town, and his book all contain things that piqued my curiosity, and on occasion my anger.
What is my relation to this guy? I always start with that question. Rev. Ebenezer’s Burgess line is: Prince (1749-1832); Ebenezer (1707-1768); Ebenezer (1673-1750); Jacob (~1632-1719); Thomas and Dorothy. My Martha Burgess and his grandfather Ebenezer the First were second cousins, having a pair of great-grandparents in common. That makes Ebenezer and Martha’s granddaughter, my 4x-great-grandmother Azubah Cheadle Churchill, fourth cousins. I come six generations after Azubah, so by my count Rev. Ebenezer was my fourth cousin, six times removed. Close enough to call family, right?
Ebenezer Burgess was born April 1, 1790 in Wareham, Massachusetts, near the start of Cape Cod. If you have a very good arm, Wareham is a stone’s throw from Sandwich, where our common ancestor Thomas Burgess settled in 1637. Ebenezer’s father was Prince Burgess, who had served as a minuteman and a Lieutenant in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, participating (as did several of my direct ancestors) in the Battle of Rhode Island.
Ebenezer Burgess's hometown (Wareham, Mass.) became a major cranberry center after he moved away
Ebenezer’s mother was Martha Crowell Burgess. Her parents were Stephen Crowell and Bathsheba Hall. Apparently I am related to Rev. Burgess multiple ways, because his grandmother Bathsheba Hall’s sister Bethiah also is my ancestor. His grandfather Stephen Crowell’s mother was Bethiah Sears (I guess Bethiah was the "Emma" of the 1710s), whose sister appears on my tree as well. The Sears family (who I believe were the ancestors of the Sears-Roebuck Sears) was quite prominent in the Yarmouth-Dennis-Brewster area of Cape Cod. Stephen Crowell’s father, John Crowell, is descended from an interesting guy named John Crowe who was an early settler in Barnstable, Cape Cod. More on Barnstable another day.
Ebenezer’s parents married in December 1775, a year after the death of Prince Burgess’s first wife Mercy Nye, who was Martha Crowell’s cousin. Ebenezer, named for his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather, was the ninth of Prince Burgess’s eleven children, and the seventh of the nine he had with Martha.
Ebenezer apparently was intelligent and precocious. He was master of a grammar school in his hometown of Wareham at the age of fifteen, and graduated from Brown in 1809, when he was nineteen. During his years at Brown he was admitted as a member of the church in Wareham after he publicly expressed his belief that he had been “savingly renewed” in Christ, a requirement for admission then. Following graduation he stayed four more years in Providence, first as overseer of Brown’s University Grammar School and then as a college tutor. After a brief period of Bible study with a minister in Franklin, Massachusetts, not far from Providence, he attended the newly-established Andover Theological Seminary, graduating at the top of his class in 1815.
The Andover Theological Seminary as Ebenezer would have known it two centuries ago. Following relocations and mergers, the school is no longer in Andover, but in Newton.
Upon leaving Andover Ebenezer accepted a position as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the University of Vermont. UVM, founded in 1791 (the year Vermont became the fourteenth state), was the first university in the United States with a charter specifying its strictly non-denominational character. When Ebenezer got to Burlington, however, the school was embroiled in a bitter power struggle over religion.
Although UVM was chartered in 1791, the university’s first president, Massachusetts-born Daniel Sanders, did not take office until 1800, when the first class (only four students!) enrolled. Sanders, very popular with students, was a Unitarian criticized by the more conservative elements in the university community as too lax with prayers. He did, however, enjoy the support of a majority of the university trustees, and all was well until the War of 1812 struck.
When the war began the United States Army established its northern headquarters in Burlington. More than four thousand soldiers arrived in the then-tiny town, bringing with them a pneumonia epidemic that killed many local people, including five of President Sanders’s eight children. (Recent excavation on the UVM campus uncovered coffins from this period.) In 1814 the government seized the university, turning its buildings into more housing for soldiers. Many of the students enrolled at other colleges and President Sanders, in mourning and owed several years’ back pay, resigned and accepted a pastorship back in Massachusetts.
Excavation of skeletons from the War of 1812 by the University of Vermont
The university’s Board of Trustees was bitterly divided then over the Unitarian-Congregationalist split (most of New England was, as will be discussed in a future diary). After much debate the trustees hired the Calvinist Rev. Samuel Austin of New Haven, Connecticut, as the next President. It was Rev. Austin who hired Ebenezer Burgess, a young man who shared his religious views. The religious liberals among the trustees, however, made it difficult for Rev. Austin to feel comfortable: the board forbade the teaching of Jonathan Edwards’s works. This must have been a crushing blow for someone who studied at Yale under Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and revered the father of the “Great Awakening” so much that he edited a volume of his writings.
Because the federal government’s compensation for its seizure of the campus went to pay pre-existing debts, the university had no money to pay either Rev. Austin or young Professor Ebenezer Burgess. Thus, in 1817, the first year of James Monroe’s presidency, Ebenezer left Vermont to undertake a mission for the newly-formed American Colonization Society. This fledgling organization, which became quite prominent in that period, sought to create a “homeland” in Africa to which emancipated slaves in the United States would be “repatriated.” Francis Scott Key, who wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner," was a financial backer.
Apparently Ebenezer Burgess was judged suitable for this mission because he spoke some Spanish and because, while at Andover, he had taken a keen interest in the “colored race” and published articles on the topic in the Boston papers. He and Samuel Mills, who had recruited him, sailed to London from Philadelphia in November 1817, Ebenezer’s first trip outside the United States. A particularly remarkable incident occurred when the ship seemed destined to sink in a storm, but was saved by a sudden change of wind. Ebenezer credited his heartfelt prayers on deck.
In the spring of 1818 Ebenezer and Mills spent more than two months exploring the western coast of Africa, meeting with local chiefs and British colonial officials. Ebenezer apparently caught malaria while in Africa, and Mills died on the journey home. The report of their journey, which Ebenezer prepared, served to solidify the Society’s thinking, and within two years of his return the Society launched its first colonization effort in what would become Liberia, with its capital called Monrovia for James Monroe.
Ebenezer was offered the chance to be superintendent of the new colony, but declined for fear of illness and other reasons, although he remained active in the American Colonization Society for years to come, serving as the vice president of its Massachusetts chapter in the 1840s. A town in Liberia was named “Millsburg” after the missionaries Samuel Mills and Ebenezer Burgess.
An excerpt from American Colonization Society: An Avenue to Freedom? by Allan E. Yarema
A home in Millsburg, Liberia, named for Ebenezer BURGess and his expedition partner Samuel Mills. Other than the palm tree, this home would fit just fine in some parts of Massachusetts.
Still supporting the American Colonization Society almost 25 years after his journey to Africa
After his trip to Africa, Ebenezer studied with a Calvinist minister in Newark, New Jersey, but soon was caught up in another major episode in the Unitarian vs. Congregationalist flap, known as the “Dedham decision.”
The “Dedham decision” is too large a topic to be covered in this diary, so I’ve decided to post a separate diary on that question sometime soon. Suffice it to say here that the First Parish in Dedham, nearly two hundred years old at the time, split in two in 1818. The original parish became Unitarian and the hardline Calvinists within it left to form the First Congregational Church across the street. They invited Ebenezer Burgess, a devoted Calvinist, to be their first pastor. He served there for forty years.
The Allin Congregational Church in Dedham, still in its original 1820 building. Rev. Ebenezer was the first pastor, and he stayed for 40 years.
Rev. Ebenezer married Abigail Bromfield in 1823 and their family life was said to be happy. They had seven children, three of whom died in childhood. As a father he was said to be “tenderly vigilant and firm,” yet “wisely indulgent” and “affectionate.” Frequent visitors to his home said he was “noticeably thoughtful of the comfort and welfare of all, domestics included.” Apparently he disliked egotism and ostentation.
Rev. Ebenezer Burgess's grave. He is buried in the center or Dedham, with family buried all around him.
Biographical sketches (which may have been written by Rev. Ebenezer himself or his friends) report that Rev. Ebenezer was tall and dignified, “with a great deal of that indescribable quality which we call presence.” Some called him “the last Puritan,” and noted his reverence for the Pilgrims of early Plymouth. Even in the mid-1800s he was said to be of the “old school,” with “a touch of primitive New England stateliness.” Though dignified, neat, punctual and temperate, he was known as kindly and generous. For a banker who amassed a fortune in the Age of Dickens.
Rev. Ebenezer Burgess
I have little in common with a Calvinist worldview, so although I find Rev. Ebenezer a very interesting (and decent) man, some passages in the introduction to his Burgess genealogy rubbed me the wrong way. Writing at the close of the Civil War in 1865, Rev. Ebenzer called his introduction “Lessons Derived from Genealogical Research.” The lessons he took differ in some ways from those I take.
He first noted the tedium of the work and stated rather archly that the compiler must “prosecute his work with little sympathy from others, and deny himself the hope of any pecuniary reward.” Next he stressed the “brevity of man’s earthly existence,” which is all too true, especially in the olden days. Then he cited the mutual obligation of care family members owe to each other. So far, so good.
But the Calvinist preacher of forty years could not resist a Victorian-era moral lecture:
From The Burgess Genealogy: Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess, Who Were Settled at Sandwich, in the Plymouth Colony, in 1637, by Rev. Ebenezer Burgess
Of course, as you might imagine, he declares his family (OK, our family) on the right side of that line. Having done the research, Rev. Ebenezer proclaimed himself happy to find
a kindred of several thousands with few blots upon their shield of honor.
Any one of the family, who may look over this volume, will be aroused to act a worthy part, or the blame will be his own. Magistrates, physicians, clergymen, officers of churches, men and women of sound sense and true patriotism, have preceded him. If there are hoary infidels, besotted drunkards, and slothful paupers in this catalog, it has not come to the writer’s knowledge.
Maybe the infidels, drunkards, and paupers were the ones who never answered his letters?
Stressing that he enjoyed the work and expects no thanks, he immodestly asserts that many, many people will refer to the book regularly and be heartened to come from such glorious stock. He expresses the view that “its value will chiefly appear in its salutary influence on the industry, integrity, and piety of those in humble life.” In other words, “the poor relations will clean up their act once they learn they’re related to me.”
Rev. Ebenzer then attempts to show his liberality by noting that, although the early American Burgesses were all Puritans, by 1865 there arose “a diversity of religious denominations in some branches of the family. But as a matter of taste and to avoid offense, no religious denomination has any precedence or is even recognized in this volume. An idle curiosity will search in vain to learn the religious connection of any particular person, whether clergyman or civilian. No one can censure such impartiality.” In other words, “I hate Unitarianism but I won’t call them out in print.”
Imagine, then, my reaction to the last paragraph of the introduction:
From The Burgess Genealogy: Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess, Who Were Settled at Sandwich, in the Plymouth Colony, in 1637, by Rev. Ebenezer Burgess.
Translation: “I learned to live with those Unitarians. And in our family we have some Baptists and a Mormon or two. But
Thank God Thomas got the heck out England and we don’t have any
Catholics. Ecumenism has its limits.” Well, as Clark Gable said in one of my grandfather’s off-color jokes, “Sorry, padre.” Now, I've got my problems with the Catholic Church (I imagine the things I don't like are the things Rev. Ebenezer Burgess would like), and I'm no longer really a part of it, but this stuff still gets my Irish up.
Now that the heretofore peacefully resting spirit of Rev. Ebenezer is duly horrified, I will note that he is absolutely correct: his hard work on the book saved “from oblivion many names and dates” that otherwise would have been lost to “dust and worms,” providing “the genealogist of some future century” (that’s me!) “less trouble and more accuracy.” I particularly like that, as I’ve tried to do with these posts, he wrote a number of essays about the family intended “to relieve the dull monotony of statistics.” So I’ll give him some slack, even if he did hate Catholics and kill off my ancestor prematurely.