Thomas Prince (1687-1758), the senior minister of Old South Church in Boston from 1718 until his death in 1758, was a leading American proponent of the new natural sciences and the British Enlightenment. Yet he was a theological conservative who hoped to preserve the traditional Puritan doctrine of God’s active role in nature and in New England history and life. Many of his sermons and other writings were, in a sense, a species of journalism: like the work of Increase (1639-1723) and Cotton Mather (1663-1728) before him, they were descriptions of and meditations upon current events. In these sermons, he presented what he took to be scientific disquisitions on how God could guide natural and human events in a way that was consistent with the laws of nature. In addition to sermons and histories, Prince also created, in collaboration with his son, the first successful magazine in America. The Christian History, launched in 1743, reported the news of the religious revivals of the so-called Great Awakening.

This Prince sermon is an account of the Siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745. It is an example of news as divine providence. Prince argues that the victory of the New England expeditionary force was the result of natural occurrences and forces, yet it was divinely ordained. The patterns of events—“trains of coincidence,” he calls them—revealed the hand of God. “Some extraordinary Events,” he writes, “without being properly term’d miraculous, have such lively Characters of their being the Doings of GOD.” Though Prince attributes the New Englanders’ success at Louisbourg to God, he also lavishes praise on Massachusetts Governor William Shirley (1694-1771), who had organized the expedition. For loyal English subjects such as Thomas Prince, English governors and monarchs frequently enacted the will of God. 

Click the image below to view a portion of this sermon.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> In New England, even in the age of newspapers, which began modestly in 1704 with the launch of the Boston News-Letter, the sermon remained a vital public communication medium for the discussion of news. Though most sermons, especially Sunday sermons, dealt with piety and theology, some sermons were linked directly to public events. For New Englanders the news of the day often carried religious meaning. Preachers discerned in natural and political occurrences the providential hand of God. These event-related sermons sometimes focused on routine and scheduled events such as elections, funerals, or executions. They also commented on unexpected events such as earthquakes, comets, storms, crimes, shipwrecks, and military victories and defeats.

In Boston in 1737 one of the most influential ministers was Benjamin Colman (1673-1747), who had assumed the pulpit of the new Brattle Street Church in 1699. Early in the morning of March 4, 1737, a fire swept through the workshop of cabinetmaker John Brocas. The fire was quickly extinguished, but in a crowded, wooden city such as Boston, a building fire was always a terrifying hazard and, therefore, compelling public news. Diarists such as John Burt and Thomas Prince noted the Brocas fire in their diaries, and over the following week all the Boston newspapers, including the Weekly Journal, carried reports of it. And on the very morning of the fire, the Reverend Colman preached a sermon on it. “It is of the Lord’s Mercies that we are not consumed,” Colman declared, quoting from Lamentations, chapter three, “because His Compassions fail not; they are new every Morning.” One of Colman’s listeners was John Burt, who mentioned in his diary that he attended services that day at the Brattle Street Church.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The New England Weekly Journal was founded in 1727 as a literary paper, along the lines of the Spectator in London and New England Courant in Boston, the newspaper that launched the career of Benjamin Franklin. But the Weekly Journal was more aligned with the local religious establishment than the Courant had been. One of its founders and an occasional contributor was Thomas Prince, who cared more about providential news and religious revival than the clever satire that characterized much of the Courant’s content. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted much attention to the earthquake of 1727 and to the revivals that began in the 1730s at Northampton, led by Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). The Weekly Journal’s printers were Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769) and Timothy Green (1703-63), who also published many sermons and pamphlets on religious revivals. Kneeland was a member of Prince’s church.

By 1737 the New England Weekly Journal had become less literary and more newsy, with the usual assortment of European news culled from London newspapers, items from other American colonies, and local Boston news. The news often recounted events that seemed to carry providential meaning. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted more attention than other Boston papers to the execution of Hugh Henderson. Henderson’s jailhouse repentance was the central theme of the newspaper’s coverage and of a sermon and poem written for the event, all published by Kneeland and Green. During the brutally cold winter of 1737, the newspaper carried many short news items from Boston and from around the country about fires and deaths. This March 8, 1737, issue has an item about the fire in John Brocas’s woodworking shop, as well as a preview story about an upcoming town meeting, always an important venue for the making and sharing of news. At the March town meeting, the citizens of Boston were expected to discuss two vital issues of public policy made more serious by the severe winter cold: “some more Effectual method for preventing the Danger of Fire by Chimneys” and “Providing the Town with Wood.”

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more issues]]> John Burt (1716-75) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1736. At the time he kept his diary, he was reading theology with a local minister in Boston. He later accepted a call to the pulpit in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spent his career there until his death. Burt’s diary for 1737 is written into an interleaved almanac, the same issue of the Ames Almanack that Thomas Prince used for his diary that year. Like Prince, Burt intermingled personal, professional, and public events in his entries. He wrote about dinners and church services as well as fires, accidents, and deaths—and the market riot in March, during which a mob tore down several of the city’s market sheds. Some of those events, such as the fire at John Brocas’s woodworking shop and the market riot, were reported in the local newspapers and discussed in sermons that Burt attended. At times, Burt probably learned about an event before it was written up in the newspapers; at other times, he may have gleaned his information from the papers.

Although the Prince diary and the Burt diary include some of the same events, they also have variations. As a young man not yet part of Boston’s elite, Burt had a slightly different perspective than Prince on the news of the day. In his entry for March 4, for example, Burt writes about a salacious bit of news he got by word of mouth: “I heard that there was a whore house kept by one Green broke & a list of those that frequented it carried to Major Savage. There were in it some of the greatest Gentlemen to live in town.” Brief reports of this news event did appear in a couple of the Boston newspapers, but without mention of a list of the brothel’s patrons. The event did not appear at all in Prince’s diary, though Prince and most of the people of Boston undoubtedly knew about it via the age-old news medium of gossip.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more pages from this diary]]> From 1716 until his death in 1743, William Cooper (1694-1743) was Benjamin Colman’s colleague in ministry at Boston’s Brattle Street Church. Like Colman and like Thomas Prince at Old South Church, Cooper frequently preached on current events, including natural occurrences, which he believed were laden with religious significance. Cooper shared Prince’s fascination with the natural sciences as well as his devotion to the doctrine of divine providence.

The most striking natural occurrence in Boston in 1737 was the extraordinarily cold weather. Cooper took the “Irresistable Power of God’s Cold” as his subject in a sermon preached in January. In the sermon, Cooper struggles to explain the science of cold to his shivering listeners; the published version of the sermon even includes a footnote to Robert Boyle’s 1665 Experimental History of Cold. But the physical causes of cold—“frigorisick particles,” Cooper hypothesizes—were but “second causes only.” God was the “first cause,” and “these particles are of God’s making.” And what message did God send with his cold? According to Cooper, the frigid winter was a display of God’s restraint as well as his power. Yes, some Bostonians had frozen to death, but the city so far had been spared the communal judgment of a major fire, which, he said, loomed as a serious threat with town pumps and docks frozen. But perhaps most important, God’s cold called people to charity. “Next to the love of God,” Cooper declares, “we shou’d keep up a warm love to our neighbour . . . . Therefore the colder the season is, the warmer shou’d our charity be; for then the needs of the poor are greatly increased.”

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]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Thomas Prince (1687-1758), born in Sandwich, Massachusetts, was a leading public figure in Boston as senior minister of Old South Church from 1718 until his death. During that forty-year career, Prince was an avid news consumer as well as an important news maker. His surviving diary from the year 1737 illustrates how a prominent person of that era tracked local public news events and blended them together with family and professional activities. The news that Prince recorded included local deaths, fires, accidents, strange weather events, and other public occurrences. Many of the events that Prince wrote into his diary also appeared as news items in one or more of the five local weekly newspapers of Boston. Occasionally, Prince cross-referenced his diary entries with newspaper stories. The diary also illustrates a common diary format of that era: Prince wrote his diary on blank pages interleaved into a 1737 Nathaniel Ames Almanack, a popular New England almanac. In this way, the quotidian rhythms of the natural and political worlds printed in the almanac were intertwined with the rhythms of the diarist’s daily life.

For example, in his entries for March 1737 Prince writes about sermons, meetings, and dinners with local ministers and political friends. He notes when his son Tommy comes home from Harvard for a family visit. But he also records public news, including a fire in cabinetmaker John Brocas’s workshop in the heart of the city, the death and funeral of Harvard President Benjamin Wadsworth (1670-1737), and the collapse of a church gallery in Northampton—events that also appeared in the Boston newspapers. In the typical laconic style of his diary entries, he also recorded the biggest news of the year in Boston: the destruction by an angry mob of the town central market sheds. 

A published transcription of Prince's 1737 diary is available here, courtesy of The Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Transcription of Thomas Prince's 1737 diary (Courtesy of The Colonial Society of Massachusetts)]]> View more pages from the Prince Family Papers]]>