Thomas Brattle was a British American-colonial merchant and official of Harvard College. He served as treasurer of Harvard College and was a member of the intellectually elite Royal Society.
Background
Thomas Brattle was born on June 20, 1658 in Boston, the son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Tyng) Brattle. His father, a trader and landowner, held various political offices in the colony, commanded several expeditions against the Indians, and on his death in 1683 was rated the wealthiest man in New England. He also had eight siblings, including William Brattle and Catherine Winthrop.
Education
Before attending Harvard University, Thomas Brattle attended the Boston Latin School. This school was open to all boys regardless of class, and served to educate and prepare the young men for university.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1676 in a class of three students, was executor and chief beneficiary of his father's will, returned in November 1689 from travel and study abroad, and spent the rest of his life in Boston, where his public spirit, his intellectual attainments, and his liberalism in politics and in religion were of marked service to the community.
Career
Nothing is known of his business affairs except that Thomas Brattle evidently managed them as well as he did the finances of Harvard College, of which he was treasurer from 1693 until his death. His relations with the Harvard Corporation, however, were not entirely peaceful. His inclinations toward the forms of the Church of England led him to become the chief organizer in 1698 of the Brattle Street Church, whose members dispensed with the "relation of experiences" as a qualification for membership, used the Lord's Prayer, had the Bible read without comment as a part of the services, and deviated in other particulars from the principles of the Cambridge Platform.
Thomas Brattle thus brought down on himself the enmity of Increase and Cotton Mather. Much controversy ensued. By amending the new charter of Harvard College Increase Mather succeeded in having Brattle, his brother William, and John Leverett excluded from the Harvard Corporation, but the Brattles were reinstated in 1703 when the Mather power was failing, and the long, rancorous warfare ended with the election of Leverett to the presidency in 1707.
Highly honorable to Brattle was his letter dated October 8, 1692, addressed to an unnamed clergyman, in which he examined the Salem witchcraft proceedings in detail and condemned them as "ignorance and folly. "
He is said to have been an F. R. S. , but his name does not appear in the lists of the Society's members in T. Thomson, History of the Royal Society (1812) or in the Records of the Royal Society. That fact, however, is not decisive, for Brattle's status may have been similar to Cotton Mather's.
Religion
As a child, Thomas Brattle was exposed to radical forms of the Puritan faith, primarily through his father's participation in the controversial founding of the Third (South) Church. Later he leaned toward the Church of England and for this reason incurred the displeasure of Cotton Mather.
Brattle owned the first organ ever brought to New England and willed it to the Brattle Street Church, which on theological grounds felt obliged respectfully to decline it. According to the provisions of the will it was thereupon offered to King's Chapel, the Episcopalian society, which accepted it.
Views
Brattle met influential Puritan leader Cotton Mather while attending
the Boston Latin School. Although the two men agreed on many social and political ideologies later in life, they did not see eye to eye during their time at the Boston Latin School.
He was also an influential protester against the persecution of “witches” in 1692 and, in that year, circulated a pamphlet “giving a full and candid account of the delusion called witchcraft. ”
Membership
Brattle was a member of the Royal Society.
Personality
In the Boston that was witnessing the old age of Increase Mather and the childhood of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Brattle was an admirable, and a significant, personality.