Bezaliel

I am haunted by something I just found in my research, so I thought i'd talk about it. him His name is Bezaliel.

i've been writing a biography of John Leverett (1662), first secular president of Harvard, and I noticed that he was a lot like my older brother, older by two years. Studied hard, went to Harvard, did well at Harvard, was generally very serious. As an oldest brother, he took responsibility and succeeded. As a younger brother, I was a little wilder.

I always thought John Leverett grew up alone. He had siblings: Bezaliel (1664, died young), Sarah (1667, died at the age of three), and another one born in 1674, when John was 12. But in my research I found that Bezaliel lived until he was at least ten.

One man was dragging another man into court because of some stolen ribbon which had been found on the second man's work-bench. But the second man got to the bottom of the problem: it was Bezaliel, who had stolen the ribbon and left it in the second man's workspace. Bezaliel was reprimanded by the judge and Hudson was told to reprimand him in front of a Constable. Actually I'd like to reread that little passage.

But what it did was to make me realize that John's life was more like my brother's; he had a little brother who was around, for all of ten years, at least, stealing ribbons and such.

Bezaliel must have died soon after that, because there is no record of him marrying, or going to school, or anything like that. No record of his death, either. He just disappeared so that records say, "died young." He's a mystery.

He would have been too young to fight in King Philip's War (1675-1676), but not too young to die in it. It kind of messed everything up, and records were a bit hazy for a while. His grandfather was governor at the time, though. You'd think someone would have noticed.

Just makes me wonder. This was downtown Boston, 1674, about three hundred years before I got there, and found my brother over there at Harvard, working hard, and succeeding.

uh oh

https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/680#ch12

In the Suffolk County records, July 29, 1673:

Hudson Leverett sent'd:
"Hudson Leverett bound over to the Court to Answer for his rash indiscreete & dangerous speeches of which hee was convict in Court: the Court Sentenced him to pay one hundred pounds in mony fine to the County & to bee imprisoned for one month & to pay Fees of Court & charge of prosecucion."

Hmm said the bear. A month in the slammer, in July of 1673. I wonder what he said?

Hudson's travails

When one encyclopedia called Hudson Leverett "disreputable," I actually got kind of mad. I knew that he had fallen out with the Puritan church, had refused to join, had moved way off into the city where he was hard to find, with his second wife, step-daughter, and his own son and daughter, one by his new wife. There were things about him that people didn't like: that he wasn't an upstanding member of the church or the downtown community. But "disreputable?" I hadn't found anything that would cause that.

I've been wading through the legal records of County Court in Boston, and he appears in there a lot. He actually was a practicing lawyer, although it's been said by many that law was not a legitimate trade in this era and that one could hardly make a living practicing it. OK, so I understand that he had a rough time bringing up his three children (not counting John, who was in Harvard by the 1670s, almost fully grown) while practicing law, and at the same time being completely overshadowed by his father's rising star; his father was elected Vice Governor in 1672 and then Governor in 1674.

But around that time, Hudson's own life began to fall apart. His wife gave birth in 1674, but the child wasn't recorded until later, and even then, without a name, and the note: Here begins to fayle the record. Somebody was no longer keeping track, as if his wife was sick now, and he refused to deal with the church (the best record-keeper) and even tell them who the child was. I suspect this was Mary, not Thomas; by 1679, his first wife Sarah was dead, he'd remarried Elizabeth and taken on her daughter, and soon he was out in Roxbury with Elizabeth, her daughter, Mary, and Thomas. Thomas could have been born before he married (which would explain why it wasn't recorded), and Sarah could have died before 1679; both possibilities have come up.

But here's the clue I found. In 1674 (the year his father became governor), he was sued by Henry Bull for "non-payment of 2,101 pound of Virginia Tobacco remaining due on a bill or specialty under the hand of saide Hudson Leverett bearing the date of 14th December 1669...." It appears that, back when John was seven, Hudson had bought this tobacco and never paid for it. It appears from the above that the 2,101 pounds is money, not pounds of tobacco, but I can't be sure of that. It appears that the 2,101 pounds is what's left of the bill, still unpaid, that this Henry Bull has to sue him for, because it appears he never will pay it if he's not forced to by the court.

Wow, take a few deep breaths.

You have a guy who refused to join the church in a small, righteous puritan town. I know how these small towns work. If you're on the wrong side, you stay on the wrong side, and it gets worse, until you're involved in pretty much every anti-establishement activity known to the town. In other words, trouble finds you. Now I have no idea about the nature of tobacco dealing in Boston in 1669, but Hudson was apparently right in the center of it. He couldn't have bought all this tobacco for personal consumption (could he?)...but must rather have been dealing it much as one would deal other smokable things in the modern world.

And yet, he fell behind on his bills, and five years later he still hadn't paid this one.

My new working theories are the following: his money problems started well before 1674. In 1674 his father was being elected governor, but his wife was having a baby, not recording it, and falling into a sickness from which she would not recover. His salary as a lawyer was not covering his bills and his tobacco-dealing side-hustle didn't prove to be lucrative, as either he'd traded a lot of tobacco for alcohol, or he'd simply lost the money, and it was beginning to catch up to him. There is general evidence of an alcohol problem (he would later be sued by an old friend, a barkeeper, presumably for unpaid tab. I have to finish going through these records and put them in time order; I'm not sure what else I'll find.

I'm beginning to get a sense of "disreputable;" not paying a two-thousand pound bill for tobacco begins to qualify.

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. (2017). Vol. 29, Records of the Suffolk County Court 1671-1680, Part 1. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/694#ch16.

John Leverett, President of Harvard

I'm deep into a biography of John Leverett (1662-1724), first secular President of Harvard, a person who changed the nature of education in the colonies for good.

He may have descendants, but they are not Leveretts; he only had two daughters who lived, and one only lived until her twenties. One who died at the age of thirteen was especially painful for them, but such things were common in the early 1700's. It was a difficult time - bad financially, a lot of disease around, and the colony was not sure whether it would be attacked at any minute.

John Leverett emerged as a strong opposite of Cotton Mather - after the witch trials, the Harvard Corporation wanted anyone except Cotton Mather to run the place, and John, though he wasn't a minister, was at least capable of doing it. He was especially good at taking care of the books and ensuring that people got paid. The enrollment increased dramatically while he was there, and this forced him to look into making new buildings for them to occupy. Harvard became the larger college that it is today by surviving the first two decades of the century.

All the while, Cotton Mather was sniping at him. He wrote about the flagrant antics of Harvard students and how something should be done about it. He tried to get the Hollis grant switched over to Yale, just to spite John.

But in the end, the Corporation and the Overseers did John in by themselves, just putting a financial squeeze on him so that he went further in debt with every passing year. He was unable to leave, because he was so busy fighting forces bent on his destruction.

John had friends, a group of people who put him in power, and who championed his cause. Cotton Mather, on the other hand, had alienated virtually everyone and they were painfully aware that he had used his influence in the pointless deaths of 19 people during the Salem witch trials. There was no doubt that he was considered a kind of loose cannon who could do just about anything if he was mad enough at someone.

Upon John's death, in 1724, Cotton thought he had his last big chance to have the Presidency. But no, the Corporation tried three people and finally settled on one who accepted, and this concluded the chapter: they would pick anyone but Cotton. Cotton died frustrated in that regard.

John's biggest legacy was that Harvard survived: a new building was being built, where his old house had stood; students were filling up the place; it now had traditions that had survived many perilous years. John had participated in those traditions, in some cases preserved them or brought them back, and put his own mark on the place that is still noticed today.

Puritan Leveretts

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