What is it about the clannish Mathers? The kings of the Puritans: Richard, Increase, Cotton, Samuel?My trip to Boston a couple years ago increased my interest in Increase Mather and other early leaders of that historic town. Reading Philbrick's Mayflower further stoked it, a fire originally lit by Puritan cemeteries with the strange and wonderous art on the gravestones across from our hotel. Once I walked out there in the morning, before breakfast, in the gloam. Who were these hard souls?
The Spriett oil of Mather in this post is the cover of The Last American Puritan, and I happened across the Harvard archives while searching for the painting. It turns out Increase, a Harvard president, tried to keep the university Christian just as centuries later Pope JPII would try to keep Catholic universities Catholic.
A photograph from Harvard's archives is captioned: "Increase Mather wrote his Queries Worthy of Consideration to support the insertion of a religious test into the College Charter of 1700. This document contains a list of five questions testifying to the religious character of the College." Shades of Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
Ode to Dead Kings
Of village greens and burying grounds
and wigs and guileless smiles
like dinosaurs they roamed the earth
once upon a time...
In languished drawer'd compartments
their ink scripts darken-yellow
now catalogued and tender-kept
vintaged like bass cellos.
I love dynastic families
who chart or thwart the tides
who labor a tradition
to synthesize, demise.
Their turn on earth "when we were kings!"
cry the Adams/Mathers family,
Richard, Increase, Cotton, Sam-
Quincy, John & Henry...
The son of the last Mather listed in the poem above appears to have gone to Cleveland for commercial reasons:
Samuel Mather's son, also named Samuel Mather (1771-1854) was a shareholder of the Connecticut Land Company. One of his sons, Samuel Livingston Mather (1817-1890) settled in Cleveland in 1843. Three years later, in 1846 he was one of the founders of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company (later the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company).
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