href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@36989@[email protected]#f_10" id="fna_10" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[10] The entries recording these cases are very singular. At first the full name of the person, or persons in the case of husband and wife, is written, followed by the words “confessed and restored” in full. Somewhat later, about the year 1763, the record becomes regularly “Confessed Fornication;” which two years later is reduced to “Con. For.;” which is subsequently still further abbreviated into merely “C. F.” During the three years 1789, 1790 and 1791 sixteen couples were admitted to full communion; and of these nine had the letters “C. F.” inscribed after their names in the church records.

I also find the following in regard to this church usage in Worthington’s “History of Dedham” (pp. 108, 109), further indicating that the Groton and Braintree records reveal no exceptional condition of affairs:—

“The church had ever in this place required of its members guilty of unlawful cohabitation before marriage, a public confession of that crime, before the whole congregation. The offending female stood in the broad aisle beside the partner of her guilt. If they had been married, the declaration of the man was silently assented to by the woman. This had always been a delicate and difficult subject for church discipline. The public confession, if it operated as a corrective, likewise produced merriment with the profane. I have seen no instance of a public confession of this sort until the ministry of Mr. Dexter (1724-55) and then they were extremely rare. In 1781, the church gave the confessing parties the privilege of making a private confession to the church, in the room of a public confession. In Mr. Haven’s ministry, (1756-1803) the number of cases of unlawful cohabitation, increased to an alarming degree. For twenty-five years before 1781 twenty-five cases had been publicly acknowledged before the congregation, and fourteen cases within the last ten years.”

It will be noticed in the above extract that the writer says he had “seen no instance of a public confession of this sort” prior to 1724, and that until after 1755 “they were extremely rare.” In the case of the Braintree records, also, it will be remembered there was but one case of public confession recorded prior to 1723, and that solitary case occurred in 1683.

The Record Commissioners of the city of Boston in their sixth report (Document 114—1880) printed the Rev. John Eliot’s record of church members of Roxbury, which covers the period from the gathering of the church in 1632 to the year 1689, and includes notes of many cases of discipline. Among these I find the following, the earliest of its kind:—

“1678. Month 4 day 16. Hanna Hopkins was censured in the Church with admonition for fornication with her husband before thei were maryed and for flying away from justice, unto Road Iland.” (p. 93.)

During the next eighteen years I find in these records only seven entries of other cases generally similar in character to the above, though the Roxbury records contain a number of entries descriptive of interesting cases of church discipline, besides many memoranda of “strange providences of God” and “dreadful examples of Gods judgment.” It would seem, however, that the instances of church discipline publicly administered on the ground of sexual immorality were infrequent in Roxbury, as in Dedham and Braintree, prior to the year 1725. As will presently be seen, a change either in morals or in discipline, but probably in the latter more than in the former, apparently took place at about that time.

So far as they bear upon the question of sexual morality in Massachusetts during the eighteenth century, what do the foregoing facts and extracts from the records indicate?—what inferences can be legitimately drawn from them? And here I wish to emphasize the fact that this paper makes no pretence of being an exhaustive study. In it, as I stated in the beginning, I have made use merely of such material as chanced to come into my hands in connection with a very limited field of investigation. I have made no search for additional material, nor even inquired what other facts of a similar character to those I have given may be preserved in the records of the two other Braintree precincts. I have not sought to compare the records I have examined with the similar records I know exist of the churches of neighboring towns,—such as those of Dorchester, Hingham, Weymouth, Milton and Dedham. So doing would have involved an amount of labor which the matter under investigation would not justify on my part. I have therefore merely made use of a certain amount of the raw material of history I have chanced upon, bringing to bear on it such other general information of a similar character as I remember from time to time to have come across.

Though the historians of New England, whether of the formal description, like Palfrey and Barry, or of the social and economic order, like Elliott and Weeden, have little if anything to say on the subject, I think it not unsafe to assert that during the eighteenth century the inhabitants of New England did not enjoy a high reputation for sexual morality. Lord Dartmouth, for instance, who, as secretary for the colonies, had charge of American affairs during a portion of the North administration, in one of his conversations with Governor Hutchinson referred to the commonness of illegitimate offspring “among the young people of New England”[11] as a thing of accepted notoriety; nor did Hutchinson, than whom no one was better informed on all matters relating to New England, controvert the proposition.

And yet, speaking again from the material which chances to be at my own disposal, I find, so far as Braintree is concerned, nothing to justify this statement of Lord Dartmouth’s in the manuscript record book of Col. John Quincy, which has been preserved, and is now in the possession of this Society. Colonel Quincy was a prominent man in his day and neighborhood; and the North Precinct of Braintree, in which he lived and was buried, when, nearly thirty years after his death, it was incorporated as a town, took its name from him. As a justice of the peace, Colonel Quincy kept a careful record of the cases, both civil and criminal, which came before him between 1716 and 1761, a period of forty-five years. These cases, a great part of them criminal, were over two hundred in number, and came not only from Braintree but from other parts of the old county of Suffolk. Under these circumstances, if the state of affairs indicated by Lord Dartmouth’s remark, and Governor Hutchinson’s apparent admission of its truth, did really prevail, many bastardy warrants would during those forty-five years naturally have come before so active a magistrate as John Quincy. Such does not seem to have been the case. Indeed I find during the whole period but four bastardy entries,—one in 1733, one in 1739, one in 1746, and one in 1761,—and, in 1720, one complaint against a woman to answer for fornication. Considering the length of time the record of Colonel Quincy covers, this is a remarkably small number of cases, and, taken by itself, would seem to indicate the exact opposite from the condition of affairs revealed in the church records of the same period, for it includes the whole Hancock pastorate. This record book of Colonel Quincy’s I will add is the only original legal material I have bearing on this subject. An examination of the files of the provincial courts would undoubtedly bring more material