John Eliot Square District

At the heart of Massachusetts’  Roxbury Heritage State Park ,  John Eliot Square District  commemorates the English Puritan minister and evangelist  John Eliot  (1604-1690). After immigrating from England to  Wampanoag, Pawtucket, and Massachusett homelands , Eliot and his wife Anne (also sometimes called Hannah in the historic record) settled in Roxbury. In that village, they raised their children, participated in civic and social life, and were pillars of their church. 

Eliot is most famous today for his Christian  evangelism among Indigenous communities . Less well known now is his youngest son, Benjamin Eliot (1646-1687), born right as his father’s missionary project was hitting its stride. John Eliot hoped that Benjamin would succeed him as Roxbury, Massachusetts’ minister. However, Benjamin’s disability complicated his parents’ plans for his future. 

Editors of Samuel Sewall’s diary observed in a footnote after the quote cited above describing Benjamin's disability: “Some obscurity has always hung over [Benjamin’s] history, to be explained probably by the fact stated in the text.”

How could a historic site like John Eliot Square combat that “obscurity,” particularly when Benjamin’s disability has historically been erased through imprecise, vague language like “the fact”?

Writing in the late nineteenth century, the historian Robert Boodey Caverly praised “John Eliot, The Apostle” as a colonizing hero, claiming: “History points to no man of so much force, against such embarrassments; of so much perseverance, against such discouragements; of so much patience, under such provocations; of so much laborious industry, with an apparently slender constitution; of so much endurance, under severe hardships and keen sufferings and with so much faith and consecration to his God and to his fellow-man, - never failing, never faltering.”

Not every subsequent historian has been so uncritical. In the 1980s,  Francis Jennings  characterized missions to Native communities as a “racket,” suggesting Eliot and his fellow evangelists were self-aware conmen, thinking of evangelization as a potential moneymaker.

Colonizers actually living in “New England” weren’t generally that enthusiastic about evangelizing among Native communities, but Englishmen overseas in the “motherland” were more likely to be excited by the prospect of founding Protestant missions to compete with those founded by Catholic French and Spanish colonizers to their north and south. Courting English financial backers for missionary projects via the  New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel  was a key motivator for Eliot’s surviving writings.

Missionary work was established as a family affair in New England. For example, the  Mayhew family  evangelized on the island  Noepe  (also known as Martha’s Vineyard) across generations. It isn’t surprising that Eliot wanted to see his children get involved with pastoral and missionary work, since ministers’ sons often eventually became ministers themselves.  

Benjamin Eliot, born November 2, 1646, was the Eliots’ youngest child. An entry in an  Eliot family genealogy  notes that Benjamin graduated from Harvard College in 1665, “and was noted for piety and ability.” The same genealogical entry claims that Benjamin’s talents were recognized by his peers, so he was invited by “several” congregations to serve as a pastor. 

However, “it had been a cherished object with his father that he should succeed him in his charge at Roxbury, and he was accordingly settled there as his colleague. His father’s wish was not, however, destined to be gratified, as Benjamin died on the 15th of Oct., 1687,” at the age of 41.

In 1685, when attending the Puritan minister  Cotton Mather ’s ordination, Sewall expressed surprise at seeing Benjamin, observing “Mr. Benjamin Eliot was there who hath not been at Town these many years.” Benjamin doesn’t appear to have traveled frequently or regularly taken prominent roles at social events, assuming a lower profile than his famous father.

Why was Benjamin singled out among Eliot’s sons as the one likeliest to assume his father’s ministerial position? The evidence available suggests that perhaps Benjamin and Benjamin’s family made unconventional choices, at odds with usual Puritan social norms of inheritance and generational lines, in order to ensure that Benjamin was in a socially secure position and close to his parents in Roxbury. 

Eliot’s other sons were every bit as well-educated as Benjamin.  John Eliot, Jr . was a minister in Newton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1657. As the first-born son, it would have made more sense in the context of English norms of  primogeniture  if he had been positioned to take over for his father in Roxbury. Additionally, John Eliot, Jr. spoke  Wôpanâak  (the Wampanoag language) well enough to preach in it, like his father did, and was considered a person of high standing in the colonies. Unlike Benjamin, John Eliot, Jr. was a married man and had a family to support, bolstering his claim to the ministerial office. 

Similarly, the second-eldest Eliot son,  Joseph , ministered at Guilford, was a Harvard alumnus, was married, and was a serious theologian. An  undated letter  from Joseph to Benjamin survives, in which Joseph answers a question Benjamin had posed to him: “how to live in this world, as yet to live in heaven?” 

Joseph’s letter in response is detailed and affectionate, and concludes with sage advice for his troubled brother:

Joseph might have diagnosed anything unusual that he noticed about his brother as an affliction curable by prayer. Puritans of the day often used disability  “as a metaphor to describe individuals alienated from God.”  However, Benjamin appears to have been passionately religious, which makes sense considering his family of ministers.

In seventeenth-century English colonies, there was an expectation of community care for fellow English Puritans. (It’s important to note - this obligation didn’t extend to people outside of the church.) In 1630, the future governor of  Massachusetts Bay ,  John Winthrop famously wrote :

This language of being knit together, each individual functioning according to their particular aptitudes like a small part of a whole body, was key to Puritan ideals about the value of a community of believers. 

Historian of disability  Kim Nielsen  observes that in seventeenth-century “New England” colonies, physical disabilities were commonplace, although legal definitions of physical “disability” were rare. Disability status was determined by whether a person could support themselves and contribute in socially recognized and valued ways to their communities.

Early English colonial legislations tied disability to ability to perform specific sorts of labor. For example, the  Massachusetts Body of Liberties , written in 1641, stated: “6. No man shall be pressed in person to any office, worke, warres, or other publique service, that is necessarily and suffitiently exempted by any naturall or personall impediment, as by want of yeares, greatnes of age, defect of minde, fayling of sences, or impotencie of Lymbes.”

The language used to describe disability has evolved throughout history. Descriptions of disability are informed by the models of disability used to understand disability. For example, the “functional model” views disability as an innate deficit impeding a person’s ability to function in everyday situations. It is reflected in outdated terms, rooted in ableism, once used to describe cognitive disabilities, like “low-functioning.” 

Recognizing how positive or negative perceptions of disability informs language choice has led to recognizing the  ableist origins  of many words or phrases once frequently used to describe disabilities. Questions about how best to describe disabilities still exist today. For example, debate about  “person-first” language (i.e., “a person with a disability”) as opposed to “identity-first” language  (i.e., “a disabled person”) continues today, raising questions about what values we communicate through the words we choose in everyday conversations. 

The phrases  Samuel Sewall  casually used in his diary to describe Benjamin Eliot’s demeanor and mental condition are no longer frequently used. For example, “touched in his understanding” is an archaic turn of phrase. Being “touched” has a wide variety of connotations, today and historically. In this situation, Sewall probably meant that Benjamin was a little unpredictable, out of step with Puritan social conventions. Perhaps he had trouble remembering new information or reading social cues.

The idiom  “touched in the head”  was used in the seventeenth century to describe someone deemed mentally unstable or noticeably eccentric. Being “touched” could also mean that a person was strongly affected by emotions, or even that they were a little tipsy. 

Sewall, though, didn’t use the more common phrase “touched in the head.” He implied that Benjamin’s “understanding” was what had been touched. “Understanding” also carried specific seventeenth-century cultural connotations and baggage. “Understanding” connoted intellect and judgment - perhaps speaking to what we’d today term an intellectual disability or an impulse-control disorder.

Benjamin evidently knew that being perceived as “distracted,”  a word we’d today likely gloss as “insane,” was a social negative. We can deduce this by the fact that Sewall reports that Benjamin’s “extravagant” singing was curtailed by his father saying that the onlooking children would think he was distracted. Unlike being physically disabled, which wasn’t necessarily a source of shame (particularly for relatively privileged social elites like the Eliots), “insanity” or cognitive impairment could lead to negative social consequences, both for an individual and their family. 

Kim Nielsen observes that cognitive disabilities attracted more legal and social attention across New England than disabilities now typically classed as physical disabilities. People deemed incapable of understanding laws or participating in civic life were labeled “distracted persons” or “idiots.” People considered “distracted” were thought to not always have been “non compos mentis” (“not of sound mind”). The family of “distracted” persons often hoped that their condition would be temporary, so the Eliots may have wondered if Benjamin’s “distraction” might disappear eventually.

 The word  “idiot” has clearly ableist origins . In seventeenth-century usage, people labeled “idiots” were thought to have been born cognitively disabled, and their condition was considered permanent. This is why disability advocates have called for people to avoid using the term when what you mean is “uninformed” or “ignorant.” Language evolves, but shades of former meanings linger in words and continue ableist patterns of thinking.

John Eliot Square District currently places the focus directly on the missionary, outside of the context of his family and his broader community. This kind of memorialization is sometimes linked to the  “great man theory.”  The theory attributes historical developments primarily to the actions of a series of white men acting alone, to the exclusion of everyone else who might be part of the story. 

 What might it look like to interpret John Eliot Square not as a memorial to a specific individual, but instead as a reminder of families - Native and settler - who lived in overlapping communities and shared responsibilities to that place? How might that interpretation be more in line with  disability justice  principles?