John Saffin

John Saffin (born November 22, 1626 in Exeter , England ; died July 18, 1710 in Bristol , Massachusetts ) was a New England merchant, lawyer, and occasional poet.

life and work

Saffin, born to Puritan parents in England, moved with his family to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 at the age of eight . In his manhood he gained considerable wealth as a merchant and served for many years in various positions in various committees of the colony. In 1686 he was the last speaker of the House of Representatives of the Massachusetts Colony under the original charter , and after its revocation and the conversion of Massachusetts into a crown colony from 1701 Supreme Court Justice.

In 1700, Saffin engaged in a perennial conflict with Samuel Sewall over the legality of slavery, which was followed with great interest by the Boston public . Saffin, who had acquired his fortune through slave trade among other things, had promised his slave Adam around 1694 that he would be released within seven years if he showed himself obedient and worked hard. When in 1700 the slave pressed for the promise to be kept, Saffin refused to release him, and so he escaped and sought refuge with Sewall. Sewall and Saffin fought lengthy court cases over the next few years, which ultimately led to the slave's release. After Sewall had published his abolitionist treatise The Selling of Joseph in 1700 in order to be able to disseminate his views in print, in 1701 Saffin published his own justification ( A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entituled, The Selling of Joseph ). In it he presented slavery as a godly state; In an attached eight-line poem The Negro Character , he went on to say that blacks were naturally cowardly, lustful, vengeful, devious and rude.

Saffin's lyrical works remained unknown until well after his death. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that one of his descendants bequeathed Saffin's commonplace book to the Rhode Island Historical Society . In 1928 a facsimile of this 198-page notebook was published , which contains, among other things, letters, personal and business notes and around 50 poems from a period of over 40 years. Saffin's poems span a wide spectrum of lyrical forms. Like many of his contemporaries, he tried anagrams and acrostics , elegies , satires and occasional poems, as well as eulogues and epitaphs , including one for his late son Thomas, and several poems about his wife Martha, who died in 1678. Like the other love poems, these are quite unusual for his time; the subject can only be found in the Puritan literature at best from Anne Bradstreet .

swell

• John Saffin, His Book (1665–1708): A Collection of Various Matters of Divinity, Law, & State Affairs Epitomiz'd Both in Verse and Prose . Harbor Press, New York 1928. [Facsimile of Saffin's notebook]

literature

• Kathryn Zabelle Derounian: “Mutuall Sweet Content”: The Love Poetry of John Saffin . In: Peter White (Ed.): Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice . Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1985.
• Albert J. Von Frank: John Saffin: Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts . In: Early American Literature , Volume 29, No. 3, 1994.
• Alyce E. Sands: John Saffin: Seventeenth-Century American Citizen and Poet . Ph.D. Diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1965.
• Lawrence W. Towner: The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery. In: The William and Mary Quarterly . Third Series , Vol. 21, 1964, pp. 40-52.
• Brom Weber: A Puritan Poem Regenerated: John Saffin's “Sayle Gentle Pinnace” . In: Early American Literature , Volume 3, 1968.