Introduction: A Minister and His Diary

by Ross W. Beales, Jr.

Ebenezer Parkman was born in Boston in 1703, the youngest son of William and Elizabeth (Adams) Parkman. His father was a shipwright, and his parents belonged to the New North church of which his father was a founding member and later a ruling elder. Parkman attended the North Latin School and entered Harvard College at the age of fourteen. Upon graduation in 1721, like many other young men destined for the ministry, he taught school and preached where opportunity and need afforded. He was called by the people of Westborough in 1724; married Mary, or Molly, Champney; and was ordained on October 28, 1724, at the age of twenty-one.1

For the next fifty-eight years, he served as Westborough’s minister, weathering the discords and tensions of both the Great Awakening (he was a moderate New Light) and the American Revolution (he was a reluctant Whig). He served as clerk, or secretary, of the Marlborough Association of ministers; participated in ordinations and ecclesiastical councils; and was called upon to preach the sermon at the annual convention of ministers in Boston in 1761.

By education and calling, by sustained and dedicated service to his people and to his profession, Ebenezer Parkman was hardly a common man. At the same time, he was not, in most respects, an exceptional man. Like ministers before and after him, he labored in his vineyard but made no lasting mark on history in ways that normally define historical importance. Surely he had been a good and faithful man, one whose loss was keenly felt by those who knew him and had benefited from his ministry and friendship.2 The experience and memory of that ministry were his principal legacy to those who knew him, for he left little else: no extensive lands or great fortune, no endowment for his alma mater or his church, no school of apostles to carry on a theological vision, no long list of printed sermons or treatises to memorialize his thought. He was a witness and sometimes a very minor participant in the great events of the eighteenth century. While we may certainly respect and admire his faith and fidelity to his calling, he was not exceptional in his public life and contributions.

Nonetheless, Ebenezer Parkman did leave a remarkable legacy, not to his own generation but to later generations who would attempt to understand his age. This was not a legacy of published works, for in his long ministry he published only two sermons. His legacy was a collection of manuscripts—sermons, correspondence, a commonplace book, an account book, notes on ecclesiastical councils, his parishioners’ relations of spiritual experience and confessions of sin, the records of the Westborough church and of the Marlborough Association, and, most importantly, his diary. On February 19, 1719, while a student at Harvard, he started the diary that he kept until a last, incomplete entry on December 5, 1782, four days before his death at the age of seventy-nine. Day after day, with few interruptions and with remarkable constancy, he recorded the small facts of his world and observations about that world.

As a minister, he noted the full range of his pastoral duties: sermons that he composed and preached (and often repeated); conferences with prospective communicants; visits to the sick and dying; baptisms, catechizing, marriages, and funerals; his wide range of reading, both religious and secular;3 exchanges with neighboring ministers; attendance at ordinations and ecclesiastical councils; fast days and Thanksgivings; gifts from parishioners; and town deliberations over his salary and wood supply.

Like other rural ministers whose salaries were never sufficient to support a family, Parkman followed a second calling, that of a farmer. While he lent his hand only occasionally to the physical work of farming, he recorded the weather; hiring workers; the sowing, tending, and harvesting of crops; clearing brush and building walls; slaughtering animals; exchanging services with neighbors; purchasing and training oxen and horses; marketing surplus animals in Boston; and many other activities that impinged upon his daily life.4

Parkman was also head of a family and a household, and he recorded many details about his family’s life: the birth, illnesses, marriages, and deaths of children and other family members; decisions about education and apprenticeships; the comings and goings of his wives, Molly, who died in 1736, and Hannah Breck, whom he married in 1737; household servants; visits and correspondence with immediate and distant kin; the birth of grandchildren; and many other dimensions of family life.5

The records of family life are, one must emphasize, both incomplete and one-sided. As a man, he lived in and focused his attention largely on a man’s world. Thus, we know far more about his sons than his daughters, and he recorded much more information about his male field workers than about female servants. So, too, his wives appear in the diary only on an irregular basis. Altogether, however, the amount of information in the diary is extraordinary.

Parkman destroyed the first six volumes of the diary that covered his years at Harvard and contained “numberless puerilities and better destroyed than preserved.”6 Other volumes were dispersed and lost after his death, but much of the diary remains. Indeed, the surviving portions amount to more than 2,000 single-spaced pages in typewritten form (or more than 1.1 million words), covering about forty years of his life. It is this diary that makes Ebenezer Parkman truly exceptional, and for more than a century, portions of the diary have been accessible to historians, genealogists, and antiquarians.

How the diary was dispersed, preserved, and handed down through the generations remains obscure, but ultimately portions of the diary were donated or loaned to, or purchased by, the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.7 The diary’s historical importance was recognized as early as 1842 when Joseph Tracy published The Great Awakening, a history of the eighteenth-century religious revivals that swept through the American colonies. Tracy included excerpts from the diary for 1742 that described the effects of the revival in Westborough.8 Tracy did not acknowledge his source for the diary, and for nearly a century and a half, the diary for 1742 remained in private hands. In 1889 Harriette Merrifield Forbes published The Hundredth Town: Glimpses of Life in Westborough, 1717–1817, which helped to stimulate an interest in Westborough’s past. Forbes included brief excerpts from Parkman’s diary in her history as well as passages from his daughter Anna Sophia’s diary.9 Local interest in the minister’s diary was so strong that the Westborough Historical Society sponsored the publication, under Forbes’s editorship, of several years of the diary, then still in private hands.10

Historians made little use of Parkman’s diary until the 1930s, when Clifford K. Shipton began the first of his fourteen-volume continuation of George Langdon Sibley’s Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University. For some forty years, Parkman’s diary remained Shipton’s “secret weapon,”11 providing anecdotes and useful information about Harvard graduates with whom Parkman came into contact. In Shipton’s judgment, “this meticulously kept record of daily life in a typical New England town is a record of the social history of Massachusetts provincial life nowhere equaled for length, for completeness, or for sustained interest.” Indeed, Shipton had read “all of the available diaries, which number in the hundreds,” and concluded that “by far the most interesting and important is the journal which Ebenezer Parkman kept for sixty-two years.”12 Of course, there was nothing “secret” about Parkman’s diary: its location was known, and scholars had access to it—as long as they, like Shipton, had the time and patience, as well as a clear purpose, to read through its many pages. In his capacity as Director and Librarian at the American Antiquarian Society, Shipton encouraged Francis G. Walett to undertake the enormous task of transcribing and editing the diary for publication in the Society’s Proceedings. The first fruits of Walett’s labors appeared in 1961,13 and for the next five years the Parkman diary was a regular part of the Proceedings. A change in editorial priorities resulted in the discontinuation of the Society’s publication of the diary in 1966. Although incomplete, Walett’s accomplishment was indeed impressive. Starting with the earliest extant fragments of the diary and continuing through 1755, the Parkman diary occupies some 1,000 pages of the Proceedings.14

Despite this major effort, more than half the diary remains in manuscript: the diaries for 1736 and 1742, which the American Antiquarian Society acquired in 1985, and some twenty-four extant years from 1756 through 1782. Historians have only begun to use the diary in any systematic way.15 Both a treasure and a challenge, the diary has proved daunting to those who use it. Its very size is an obstacle, but equally important is the diary’s often prosaic contents, for Parkman lived on the periphery of those events that traditionally make up the stuff of history. His home was in Westborough, not Boston. He was acquainted but not intimate with many of the leading figures of eighteenth-century Massachusetts. He witnessed great events, notably the Great Awakening and the Revolution, but he did not affect or even describe them in any particularly memorable way.16

He was well aware of his limited vision and reflected upon his “Seclusion from most of those Objects which Engage the Busy and active part of the world.” Not “in the midst of the Crowds, Employments and accidents,” he was “in Retirement,” with little more to write about than “Domestick affairs, and personal concerns.” Indeed, “when under Confinement to so narrow a Sphere of motion,” it was “rare” to have anything of “very great importance or weight to interest the world in.”17

There was indeed little to record except his daily activities, but how much deserved note, and how much time could one devote to compiling a record? So much of his time was “consumed in much the Same manner, the Same Business or Amusements” that it would be difficult “to say which took us up most, and it would be too great a Labour to insert all.”18 Why, then, did he create this document and persevere in its elaboration over so many years?19 From an earlier generation, the diaries of Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth are deeply introspective documents whose authors struggled with their God and their souls; indeed, the authors of those diaries frequently give the reader little sense of time, place, or events.20 Nor is Parkman’s diary an encoded document such as William Byrd II’s famous and literally secret diary.21 By contrast, one always knows where Parkman is, and his diary is filled with the small events of life: observations on the weather; his own comings and goings and those of family members, neighbors, and friends; illnesses and deaths; sowing and harvesting; preaching and ministering. In this, his diary resembles that of Joshua Hempstead,22 but Parkman also revealed an emotional side—for example, his devastation at the death of his beloved first wife Molly, his description of a parishioner’s thundering outrage when Parkman inadvertently omitted a request for prayers,23 his resigned sorrow at the death of children,24 the anger of a parishioner who was offended at Parkman’s questions to his ill wife,25 or his gratitude when a neighbor helped in a time of need.26

One may speculate that Parkman possessed a certain compulsive drive and energy to sustain his commitment to the diary over so many years. His reflections suggest a wider purpose. The first surviving volume of the diary, number seven, is titled “Diurna: or An Account of Remarkable Transactions of Every Day.” Two biblical texts accompany this title. Proverbs 14:6 instructs that “A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth,” while Psalm 90, verse 12, implores, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Self-knowledge, particularly within the context of faith, and an awareness of life’s uncertainties, yet the certainty of death, appear to have guided Parkman, at least in part, in determining to keep a diary and especially in persevering over more than sixty years.

Despite the loss and destruction of portions of the diary, the remaining pages are a monument to Parkman’s perseverance, which was all the more remarkable because many of the events he recorded seem so unremarkable. Day-in and day-out, he rarely failed to make some sort of entry; the lacuna typically occurred on Saturdays when he was preparing sermons for the Sabbath. Clearly he was conscious that others would read the diary, and he found nothing in those first six volumes but a source of shame. At one point he had seen these early volumes as a source of instruction. Thus, on New Year’s Day 1746, he read through his journals for the years when he was sixteen through eighteen years old, finding them useful reminders of his “egregious folly and Vanity.” He was full of “Shame and Grief”: as he reflected, “O what a Price had I in my Hand to get Wisdom—but how little Heart to improve it!” The next day he continued his review for his “deep Abasement and Sorrow before God,” imploring God, “remember not against me the sins of my Youth and my Transgressions.” Two years later, also in January, he reviewed his college journals “with great Sorrow and Shame.”27 Finally, in January 1752, during a protracted illness, he destroyed the first six volumes of his diary.28

During the first years after graduation from Harvard, Parkman was less than assiduous in keeping a regular diary. Thus, on January 1, 1726, a Saturday, he confessed that other than his preparations for the Sabbath, he had “little to remark concerning this Day.” One day was pretty much like another, and most days “rolled away without anything worth noting upon them.” Some pages in his diary were blank because he had wasted the day (“Diem perdidi”) or had done nothing of “importance either to Myself, or anyone Else.” After finishing his sermons late in the evening, he reflected upon himself and his soul that he might be better prepared for the Sabbath. He focused particularly on both his “grievous Neglect of the Affairs and Concerns of my Soul and preparations for Eternity” and particularly his “omission of this Method of keeping a journal (or Diary) so long as I have.” He regretted that when he “did make a Business of it, there was so much time and pain spent in Vanity,” and he therefore resolved to “prosecute other Aims and purposes, and to confine myself more severely and strictly to Studies of Grave and Serious Subjects, to Enquirys into my own Deportment, and to such observations on the Demeanour and Conduct of these as that thereby I may learn the most Suitable regular method of forming my own Thoughts and Actions.”29 Parkman thus provides a clue as to the goals of his diary: he was to discipline himself that he might be “severely and strictly” confined to that which was grave and serious, that he might examine his own conduct, and that thereby he might affect his thoughts and actions.

But what he did insert had the effect of jogging his memory, bringing to mind other, perhaps more weighty matters, “an hint being Sufficient to bring the whole circle of actions or accidents into our minds and view again.” What was “but a Trifle” might “best Serve to direct us to the whole Series.”

What Parkman may have considered “a Trifle,” when accumulated with other entries into a “whole Series,” can reveal important dimensions of eighteenth-century life for which other records are silent or incomplete.30 Few eighteenth-century American diaries are as long and as detailed as Parkman’s, and few diaries permit the historian to examine the content and context of one life, one family, and one community over such an extended period. Although Parkman was certainly not writing for historians, this complete transcript of the extant portions of his diary is for historians, for genealogists, and for others willing to search the immense riches of Parkman’s “trifles.”