New book opens window on early America

Letters from colonial America’s earliest years, written by one of the most important figures in the colonies have been collected, many for the first time in a new edition edited by a professor of English at the university.

“The Correspondence of John Cotton” (2001: North Carolina Press) are the result of a 15-year odyssey by John Bascom Professor Sargent Bush that took him all around the United States, Britain and Holland. That the letters have been collected at all qualifies as something of a miracle and a testimony for preservation efforts, he says.

“All the letters are between 350 and 380 years old, and many of them are in abysmal condition, showing the wear and tear of that long span of American history between then and now — water damage, mildew, holes of various sizes, fading,” Bush says.

Some of the manuscripts had been housed in Boston’s Old South Church, “in a leaky belfry at the time of the Revolution,” he says. “The church was gutted by British troops, who stabled their horses in it when the building wasn’t being used as a hospital.”

Another cache was in the possession of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, in the process of writing a history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when the Stamp Act riots broke out in August 1765. “Rebellious American colonists raided his house on a rainy night and threw his papers into the street. One of the rain-damaged letters I retrieved still has grit ground into it, perhaps by the boot of one of those enthusiastic Sons of Liberty,” Bush says.

Cotton corresponded with Oliver Cromwell, John Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, Thomas Hooker, and many others. He also was a leader in the creation of the Congregational Church in America. “John Cotton was a prominent voice in early America, the intellectual leader of the first generation of colonists. I see my work with this correspondence as a reclamation of an important part of our nation’s cultural history,” Bush says.