American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

PARKMAN, EBENEZER

(5 September 1703, Boston-5 December 1782, Westborough, MA). Education: B.A., Harvard College, 1721. Career: Teacher, 1721-22; preacher, Westborough, Newton, Hopkinton, Worcester, 1722-23; minister, Westborough, 1724-82.

Ebenezer Parkman is the sort of man we would normally know nothing about. He was not a great theologian, a celebrated preacher, an institution builder, or famous in any other way in his own time. He was simply a country parson, typical of the hundreds who ministered to the Congregational church throughout colonial New England. He is extraordinary simply because he left a long and well written diary that lets us know about him and through him about the ordinary day-to-day life of the Puritan clergy.

Parkman's father was a pious shipwright, who became a ruling elder of North Church. He must have been proud to send a son to Harvard and the ministry, and must have struggled more than most parents to pay the bills. Parkman was ordained minister at Westborough in 1724, and a few months later he married Mary Champney, whom he called "Molly."

As minister at Westborough, Parkman did the things hundreds of other Congregational clergymen did: he raised children, preached and made pastoral visits, argued with his people about his salary, and met with fellow clerics in the local ministerial association. Like many clerics he was a doctor as well as a pastor, although he admitted in his diary that when he visited a sick parishioner, "my heart has often trembled within me." Like other country parsons, he was also a farmer, and like them, he often needed help from his people bringing in the crops. One might answer, "When my grass and com will move into my bam without hands, I'll leave to help Mr. Parkman-not before." Another would reply, "He is laboring for our souls, and why shall I refuse." Such was the material with which the ministers worked, some men and women devoted to church and pastor, others not.

In Parkman's career one sees the degree to which the early ministers served as moral "watchmen" for the entire community. One evening Parkman attended a barn raising and a supper that lasted until ten at night. He went home, but others stayed behind to continue the party. So Parkman got out of bed, returned to the house, "and admonished them and sent them home." Later he admitted in his diary that "this exerting my authority gave me great uneasiness," but he was determined do his "duty as watchman in this place and as having care of their souls."

During the Great Awakening Parkman, like many other ministers, was not fully identified with either Old Lights or New Lights. He entertained George Whitefield* at his parsonage during the evangelist's first missionary journey to New England, and he opposed the efforts of the local clerical association to adopt a condemnation of Whitefield during his second visit. But Parkman was troubled by uneducated itinerant preachers coming through his region, and he discouraged people from crying out in his church.

He was equally nonplussed, as were other clergymen, by the early tumult of the Revolution. He called the Stamp Act riots of 1765 "a melancholy occurrence." He became a patriot as much to keep company with his family and his parish, as from political principle. After Lexington and Concord he signed a patriotic manifesto "for peace sake and to avoid a rupture among us." Only when his eldest son, Ebenezer, joined the revolutionary army, did Parkman wish heart and soul for an American victory.

Parkman died in 1782, in the fifty-eighth year of his ministry, four days after making the last entry in his valuable diary.

Bibliography
A: Zebulon Advised ... Counsels for Them Tiult Go to Sea (Newport, R.I., 1738); Reformers and Intercessors (Boston, 1757); The Love of Christ (Boston, 1761);-. Francis G. Wallett, ed., ''The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 71 (1961),93-227, 361-448 [covers 1719-38]; 72 (1962), 31-233, 329-481 [covers 1739-46]; 73 (1963), 45-120, 385-464 [covers 1747-48]; 74 (1964), 37-203 [covers 1749-50]; 75 (1965), 47-199 [covers 1751-53]; 76 (1966), 71-201 [covers 1754-55].
B: SHG 6, 511-27.