The Stamford Historical Society, April 17, 2005 – March 31, 2006

Portrait of a Family: Stamford through the Legacy of the Davenports

John Davenport:
The American Career of an International Puritan

Lecture by Francis J. Bremer, Ph.D., April 17, 2005
at the Stamford Historical Society

[1]

My purpose today is to argue the significance of John Davenport for some bigger stories. The fact is, that outside of the circles of the Davenport family and specialists in early American history or Stuart England, most do not recognize the name of John Davenport. Textbooks of American history neglect him other than an occasional passing mention as the founder of the New Haven colony.

One part of the explanation is that as a society we have done much to block out our pre-Revolutionary past. For too many of our fellow citizens, America begins at Williamsburg and the crisis that precipitated the Revolution. When the city of Boston celebrated its three hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1980 the commemorative program carried a picture of Paul Revere on the cover. It sometimes seems as if every month brings a new study of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams or another one of the “Founding Fathers,” while you can’t find a biography of John Cotton, Thomas Hooker or John Smith in print – and no amount of searching will find a full length biography of John Davenport.

If a truncated view of the American past is one reason for the neglect of Davenport, another is the current refusal of most academicians to seriously engage with the topic of religion in our national culture. I stand before you as a self-proclaimed northeastern liberal who will nevertheless castigate liberals in general for their disdain for religion and their eagerness to confuse faith with fanaticism. The politicization of religion in recent years has accentuated this. For example, two days after last Fall’s presidential election, Gary Wills, an excellent historian who teaches at Northwestern University, wrote a column in the New York Times entitled “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” In it he argued that “America … was a product of Enlightenment values – critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity.”  This, of course, relates back to my earlier concern – for it is only by ignoring what chronologically is almost the first half of our history (if we start the clock with the English efforts to colonize Roanoke in the 1580s) that we can sustain an argument that ignores our puritan roots and marginalizes religion in general.

Given these tendencies, recovering the importance of John Davenport becomes not only a service to those who already are familiar with his story, but a way of helping our fellow citizens to better understand our past and better appreciate the forces we face in the modern world.

Before getting into the heart of my presentation, I would like to make a few general comments. First, while I have long recognized the significance of the founder of New Haven and written about him in the general context of Anglo-American Puritanism, I have not made him the focus of the sort of intensive archival research that might lead to new conclusions about the man and his ideas. So this is more a distillation of what I currently know about him rather than a statement of new findings. We’ll get together in a few years for that! Second, I recognize the irony of the fact that as far as making the argument for recognizing Davenport’s importance, I am here preaching to the choir and I am humble enough to recognize that little of what I say today will be new to many in the audience. And finally, I want to mention that the images that I will be using to illustrate the talk are a combination of pictures that I have taken myself and scans of portraits and sketches from other sources.

John Davenport 1597-1669/70
The Founder
John Davenport 1669-1730/31
Abraham Davenport 1715-1789
James Davenport 1716-1755
John Davenport 1752-1830
James Davenport 1758-1797
Abraham Davenport 1767-1837
Theodore Davenport 1792-1884
Amzi Benedict Davenport 1817-1894
Theodore Davenport Jr. 1834-1913
John Davenport 1840-1910
Benjamin Butler Davenport 1871-1958
Elizabeth Davenport Spence 1907–1998
The Benefactress
Noah Welles 1718-1776
Galen Carter 1832-1893
Samuel Fessenden 1847-1908
Charles Henry Crandall 1858-1923
Charles Davenport Lockwood 1877-1949

Stamford’s Colonial Period 1641–1783
The Later 18th Century
and Stamford’s American Revolution
The Coming of the Railroad,
Immigrants and Industrialization

When Davenport worshipped at Holy Trinity and studied at the town grammar school the outcome of the Reformation was still in doubt. The great reformers of the sixteenth century such as Luther and Calvin had challenged the teachings of the Catholic Church on the means to salvation, had rejected the authority of the pope, and over a period of time had developed new emphases in worship. Personal concerns had driven Henry VIII into the arms of the reformers, but from the break with Rome in the 1530s until 1597, when John Davenport was born, the character of England’s national church was contested, both between Protestants and Catholics and also between those who were content with the new reforms and those who felt further purification was necessary. No greater evidence could be found of the depth of religious convictions than the story of the martyrs of Queen Mary’s reign, whom the young John Davenport read about in John Foxe’s massive Acts and Monuments of the Christian Religion, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs. The stories and the woodcuts that illustrated them testified as perhaps nothing else can to the importance of religion in the lives of those who came to settle America – this was a world in which men and women would willingly die in the service of their God, and would also feel compelled to execute those who threatened to undermine a godly society.

Coventry was a center of religious reform and Davenport was raised in a godly household. From there he went to Oxford, where he matriculated at Merton College in 1613. After two years he transferred (migrated is the precise term) to Magdalen College, but he left the university before completing his degree. By this time he had experienced a spiritual rebirth, so that his intellectual consent to Calvinist doctrine was strengthened by the rapture of God’s caress. He left Oxford to accept a chaplaincy at Hilton Castle in county Durham where he honed his preaching skills. Like many young puritan preachers, he was perhaps something of a prig, indulging in moralistic criticism of his patron’s family. That might have had something to do with his brief stay there, though a more likely explanation was a call in 1619 to be curate of the parish of St Lawrence Jewry in London.