Background
Peter Foulger was the son of John Folger of Norwich, England, and his wife, Mirriba Gibs.
Peter Foulger was the son of John Folger of Norwich, England, and his wife, Mirriba Gibs.
He emigrated to Massachusetts with his parents about 1635 and probably accompanied Thomas Mayhew, Jr. , in 1642 from Watertown to Martha’s Vineyard. There he was employed as a schoolmaster and surveyor and helped Mayhew in his missionary work among the Indians. Cotton Mather praised him in the Magnolia (Hartford, 1853, II, 429-30) as “an able godly Englishman well learned in the Scripture”; Thomas Prince, in his appendix to Experience May- hew’s Indian Converts (London, 1727. p. 291), repeated this commendation word for word.
In the summer of 1659 Tristram Coffin and his party stopped at the Vineyard on their way to inspect Nantucket Island, which they proposed to buy from Thomas Mayhew. Folger went with them as surveyor and interpreter in their dealings with the sachems. He was on the Island surveying in 1661 and 1662, and was so useful to the new proprietors that on July 4, 1663.
They offered him a half-share of land if he would remove there with his family. Teacher, Indian interpreter, weaver, miller, clerk of the town and court, he was an indispensable citizen. Once he did get into bad odor by joining the “insurrection” of the halfshare men, an abortive effort of the proletariat to wrest the political control from the original shareholders. Folger’s little part in it was construed as contempt of court, and for want of a bond of £20 he was put in the Nantucket jail— “Where never any English-man was put, ” he wrote to Governor Edmund Andros, “and where the Neighbors Hogs had layed but the Night before, and in a bitter cold Frost and deep Snow.
They had onely thrown out most of the Durt, Hogs, Dung, and Snow. The Rest the Constable told me I might ly upon if I would . ” (Starbuck, post, p. 54). He survived even this indignity, however, and resumed his old place in the community.
Folger was the author of A Looking-Glass for the Times, or The Former Spirit of New England Revived in This Generation (Boston, John Foster, 1676). “It was written in 1675, ” said his grandson in the Autobiography, “in the homespun verse of that time and people, and addressed to those then concerned in the government there.
It was in favor of liberty of conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, and other sectaries that had been under persecution, ascribing the Indian wars and other distresses that had befallen the country, to that persecution, as so many judgments of God to punish so heinous an offense, and exhorting a repeal of those uncharitable laws.
The whole appeared to me as written with a good deal of decent plainness and manly freedom. ”
The piece consists of four octosyllabic couplets followed by one hundred and five ballad quatrains. It is a good pamphlet, with decent plainness and manly freedom in abundance, but with no poetry, bolger’s courage in publishing it has been slightly overestimated, for at that time Nantucket belonged to the first place medicine and science.
He joined the Baptist church at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1675 and later immersed a convert or two in Waiptequage Pond. It is on record that at least one of his Indian friends regarded this new aquatic doctrine as heretical.
In 1644 Folger married Mary Morrils, an indentured servant, whom he had bought for £20 from the Rev. Hugh Peters.
The money was wisely spent; and their youngest child, Abiah, born on Nantucket August 15, 1667, became the mother of Benjamin Franklin.
