| Samuel Willard | |
|---|---|
 Samuel Willard (1640-1707) |
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| Born | January 31 1640 Concord, MA |
| Died | September 12 1707 (aged 67) Cambridge, MA |
| Occupation | Minister |
| Spouse | Abigail Sherman (m. 1664) Eunice Tyng (m. 1679) |
Samuel Willard (1640-1707) was a Colonial clergyman. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts; graduated at Harvard in 1659; and was minister at Groton from 1663 to 1676, whence he was driven by the Indians during King Philip's War. The Reverend Willard was pastor of the Third Church, Boston, from 1678 until his death. He strenuously opposed the witchcraft trials, and served as acting president of Harvard from 1701. The Reverend Willard published many sermons; a folio volume entitled A Compleat Body of Divinity was published posthumously in 1726.
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Early Life
Willard's parents were merchant Simon Willard and Mary Sharpe, who had emigrated from England to New England in 1634, settling first in Cambridge, and then in 1635, with Rev. Peter Bulkley, established the town of Concord, Massachusetts, where Samuel was born the sixth child and second son. After the death of his mother, his father remarried twice, and Samuel was one of seventeen children born to the family. (Van Dyken, 13-14) At the age of fifteen, Willard entered Harvard College in 1655, graduating in 1659, and was the only member of his class to receive an M.A. (Sibley, 13).
Ministry in Groton
In 1663, Willard began preaching in Groton, Massachusetts, then at the very frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The town's first minister, John Miller, had become ill, and when he died, the congregation asked Willard to stay, amnd he was officially ordained by them in 1664. (Van Dyken, 26-27) On August 8, 1664, Willard married Abigail Sherman of Watertown, MA, and in 1670 he became a freeman, with full privileges of citizenship. In 1671, a 16-year-old girl in town, Elizabeth Knapp, fell ill and appeared to be possessed. Willard wrote about the strange behavior Groton was destroyed on March 10, 1676 during King Philip's War, and the 300 residents abandoned the town. Willard and his family removed to Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Ministry in Boston
Willard preached at Boston's Third Church during the illness of Rev. Thomas Thacher and gave an election-day sermon on June 5. The Third Church called Willard to be its Teacher, an associate pastor, on April 10, 1678, and then when Thacher died on October 15, Willard became their only pastor. Members of the congregation included a variety of influential members of the colony: John Hull, Samuel Sewall, Edward Rawson, Thomas Brattle, Joshua Scottaw, and Hezekiah Usher, and Capt. John Alden, the son of John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth.
Leading Harvard
Willard became the acting president of Harvard in 1701 until his death in 1707.
Works by Samuel Willard
- Some Miscellany Observations On our present Debates respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue Between S. & B. -- see http://www.17thc.us/docs/willard.shtml
- A Compleat Body of Divinity, 1726
- "A briefe account of a strange & unusuall Providence of God befallen to Elizabeth Knap of Groton" in Samuel A. Green, ed., Groton In The Witchcraft Times, Groton, MA: [s.n.] 1883 -- see http://history.hanover.edu/texts/groton/grointro.html
Further reading
- Seymour Van Dyken, Samuel Willard, 1640-1707: Preacher of Orthodoxy in an Era of Change (1972) ISBN 0802834086
- Ernest Benson Lowrie, The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard (1974) ISBN 0300017146
- http://www.pragmatism.org/american/willard_samuel.htm
- John Langdon Sibley. "Samuel Willard," pp. 13-36 of Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge Massachusetts, Vol. II, 1659-1677. Cambridge: Charles William Sever, 1881.
References
- This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Increase Mather |
President of Harvard College acting 1701–1707 |
Succeeded by John Leverett |
