John Singleton Copley showing the minister with the hint of a smile.
Although Martha Lamb portrayed Jonathan Parsons as an affectionate and indulgent husband, a grandson’s memoir commented that his “natural temper was hasty and rather unlovely,” and that “it cost him a struggle to keep it under, to the end of his life.” But John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) portrait of the minister in middle age seemed to confirm Mrs. Lamb’s impression of his amiable temperament. Observing a pastel copy that showed Parsons in black robe and clerical collar with the hint of a smile, she remarked that a “fair, frank, manly, good-humored face looks down.” She also claimed, without any known evidence, that his “passion for fine clothes, for gold and silver lace, and ruffled shirt fronts” caused distress among “some of the good Puritans in his church.” Today those details allow Parsons to be described as Phoebe Griswold’s “dandy of a husband.”
Only the outlines of Mrs. Parsons’s life can be established. She grew up in a prominent Lyme family, married young, and faced repeated tragedy when six of her thirteen children died before adulthood. Her response when bitter contention divided Lyme’s church and when her brother Matthew Griswold (1714–1799), later Connecticut’s governor, served as her husband’s most outspoken advocate is not known. When Parsons’s troubled ministry in Lyme ended in 1745, she moved at age twenty-nine to Newbury, Massachusetts, where she died a quarter of a century later in 1770. A funeral sermon praised Phoebe Parsons’s exceptional capabilities. It commended her mental endowments, her Christian simplicity and integrity, her knowledge of divinity, and her rare acquaintance with church history. It also noted her liveliness and keenness of wit.
The funeral sermon that Rev. John Searle preached in Newbury after the death of Phoebe Parsons in 1771 commended her knowledge and integrity and noted her keenness of wit.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Out of Darkness
To bring the “natives of New England” living on a reserve in Lyme’s east parish “out of their heathenish state,” Jonathan Parsons joined his wife’s uncle in a request for assistance from the General Court.
The humble memorial of us, the subscribers, shows that, whereas your Honors’ memorialists, being ministers of the Gospel in Lyme in which town dwells about thirty families of Indians, natives of New England called the Niantics, the most of which continue in their heathenism notwithstanding all the good laws already made for the natives being Christianized.
Three years after his marriage, Parsons joined Rev. George Griswold in a “humble memorial” submitted to Connecticut’s General Court. The petition requested assistance in an ongoing effort to Christianize thirty families of “Niantic Indians” in Lyme’s east parish. Noting that “the younger sort of them” seemed “desirous of learning,” the ministers urged education as “a leading step to conversion.”
The memorial, written a century after the Pequot Wars, followed ongoing efforts to lead the “heathen” Niantics “out of darkness” and persuade them “to attend the public worship of God’s house, and to desire a schoolmaster to teach their children and youths to read.” The ministers argued that the chiefs resisted because they “would not be concerned with one religion or have a school unless that the English would deal honestly with them respecting their land.” Three hundred acres had been allotted as a reserve for the Niantics, but the boundaries remained uncertain and unenforced. Incursions on Niantic land had brought Court intervention at least since 1663, when a committee was appointed “to determine the differences betwixt the Indians at Niantic and the English, respecting burning their fence, or any other complaints presented to them respecting those Indians.” When Lyme’s ministers reported the Niantics’ protest in 1734 that “the English, their neighbors, had encroached on their property,” they advised that if the chiefs “could have the bounds of their land settled, they would willingly hear a sermon.” Their only requirement was to be “settled in the quiet and peaceful enjoyment of their land.”
A detailed map of the Lyme shoreline drawn by Rev. Ezra Stiles located the meetinghouses in the west and east parishes, the houses of Matthew Griswold and George Griswald, and the wigwams and burying ground of the Niantics at Black Point.
The Court once again appointed a committee to “inquire into the wrongs complained of by said Indians,” then specified boundaries and affirmed that “these shall always be and remain to be the bounds of the said Indian lands.” Assured two years later in 1736 that “the said Niantic Indians desire their children may be instructed,” the Court committed £15 from the public treasury to hire “some suitable person to instruct the said children to read, and also in the principles of the Christian religion.” The next year Governor Joseph Talcott (1669–1741) confirmed that “our school of Indians at Niantic prospers.”
In a letter published in the journal Christian History describing the Great Awakening’s impact in Lyme’s east parish, George Griswold reported in 1744 that religious concern among the Niantics had “increased for a considerable time.” He described them as a “poor, ignorant people” who for ages past had lived “without God in the world” and “did not seem to have any thing of religion among them” but to be “generally given to Sabbath-breaking.” But two rousing sermons delivered by the itinerant evangelist James Davenport (1716–1767) in 1741 had served as a catalyst for conversion. That year Parsons added the names of Nehemiah, Penelope, Hannah Jeffrey, and Sarah Jeffrey to the baptismal list of Lyme’s first church, and the following winter in the east parish “twenty or upward of this tribe of Indians,” Griswold wrote, had been “hopefully converted.” Some had reformed their “excessive drinking and Sabbath breaking,” and there had been only “two or three instances of excess,” which were followed by manifestations of “deep repentance.”
Ezra Stiles sketched the dome-shaped frame of Eliza and Phoebe Moheage’s wigwam when he visited the Niantic reserve in 1761, and he described its earthen floor, central fire pit hearth, and raised platform for bedding and furnishings.
To facilitate conversion, church members in the east parish made special accommodation for native customs in January 1744/5. After considering “the case of Ann Chesno, an Indian Woman,” they voted “to admit her into the church without requiring a confession for putting away her Indian husband,” agreeing that she had acted “according to the Indian law.” That same year, when “Hannah Jeffrey, (Indian)” offered “a confession for the sin of drunkenness and laxity” in Parsons’s west parish, it “was read and accepted” by Lyme’s first church members. But by then, Griswold reported, “the great sense of divine things seem[ed] to be in a great measure abated among those Indians,” and the school for native youth “had so little good effect, that it was given over.”
When Scottish-born physician Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712–1756) visited the Niantic reserve in 1744 while traveling on horseback through New England from Maryland to Maine, he noted in his diary seeing “thirteen or fourteen huts or wigwams made of bark” in “the Indian town of Niantique.” The memorial from Lyme’s ministers had reported thirty families of Indians in Niantic a decade earlier, but that number steadily declined. When Newport minister Rev. Ezra Stiles
