A Homecoming: The Bulkeley Family in New England

Abstract

COTTON MATHER has reminded us that New England was some sort an ecclesiastical country above any in this world.' The pillars of that world were the great Puritan divines who served as spokesmen for and interpreters of their society. So exalted was the calling to serve God in the pulpit, that many families passed the station down from generation to generation. In the southern colonies, a Robert King Carter might leave 300,000 lordly acres to his sons, and in the middle colonies Israel Pemberton willed a counting house to his heirs; but in New England great clerical families flourished, passing an estate in piety from father to son. The Reverend Charles Chauncy described one of these families when he characterized Peter, Gershom, and John Bulkeley. Gershom, he said, have heard mentioned as a truly great man, and eminent for his skill in chemistry; and the father of Gershom, Mr. Bulkeley of Concord, was esteemed in his day one of the greatest men in this part of the world. But, by all I have been able to collect, the Colchester Bulkeley surpassed his predecessors in the strength of his intellectual powers.2 The Bulkeleys are almost forgotten now, but they exemplify one important aspect of the Puritan experience in the New World. For three generations they sought to understand what it meant to be a colonist in a strange land; out of this painful process there slowly emerged a selfimage of New England. Long before the Puritans established a Bible Commonwealth in the New World, the Bulkeleys were a locally notable family in England. Members of that comfortable class known as the gentry, they abandoned their ancestral home in Cheshire County in the mid-sixteenth century, acquiring the manor of