PHIPPS, THE FIRST OF OUR SELF-MADE MEN

By the Reverend Cotton Mather.

SIR WILLIAM PHIPPS, the first royal Governor of Massachusetts and high sheriff of New England, has the distinction of being the prototype of the American self-made man. Also he was the first American-born colonist to receive the honor of knighthood.

This biography of Phipps, by Cotton Mather, for many years pastor of the North Church in Boston, is taken from his Magnalia, (London, 1702), regarded as the most important book of American authorship in colonial times. Phipps and the author mere close friends; in fact, it was through the influence of Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather, the agent of the colony in England, that Phipps was appointed Governor of Massachusetts, under the new charter.

Phipps was a man of great energy and determination; and he appears to have been strictly honest in his private dealings, though he deemed it no sin to steal from Frenchmen.

WILLIAM PHIPPS was born Feb. 2, 1650, at a despicable plantation on the river of Kennebeck, and almost the furthest village of the Eastern Settlement of New-England. And as the father of that man, which was as great a blessing as England had in the age of that man, was a Smith, so a gunsmith, namely, James Phipps, once of Bristol, had the honor of being the father to him, whom we shall presently see, made by the God of Heaven as great a blessing to New England, as that county could have had, if they themselves had pleased. His fruitful mother, yet living, had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was William, one of the youngest, whom his father dying, left young with his mother, and with her he lived, keeping of sheep in the wilderness, until he was eighteen years old; at which time he began to feel some further dispositions of mind from that providence of God which took him from the sheepfolds, from following the ewes great with young, and brought him to feed his people.

His friends earnestly solicited him to settle among them in a plantation of the east; but he had an unaccountable impulse upon his mind, persuading him, as he would privately hint unto some of them, that he was born to greater matters. To come at those greater matters, his first contrivance was to bind himself an apprentice unto a ship-carpenter for four years in which time he became a master of the trade, that once in a vessel of more than forty thousand tons, repaired the ruins of the earth ; Noah's, I mean ; he then betook himself an hundred and fifty miles further afield, even to Boston, the chief town of New-England; which being a place of the most business and resort in those parts of the world, he expected there more commodiously to pursue the spes majorum et meliorum, Hopes which had inspired him.

At Boston, where it was that he now learned, first of all, to read and write, he followed his trade for about a year; and by a laudable deportment, so recommended himself, that he married a young gentlewoman of good repute, who was the widow of one Mr. John Hull, a well-bred merchant, but the daughter of one Captain Roger Spencer, a person of good fashion, who having suffered much damage in hi,, estate, by some unkind and unjust actions, which he bore with such patience, that for fear of thereby injuring the public, he would not seek satisfaction, posterity might afterward see the reward of his patience, in what Providence hath now done for one of his own posterity. Within a little while after his marriage, he indented with several persons in Boston, to build them a ship at Sheeps-coat River, two or three leagues eastward of Kennebeck; where having launched the ship, he also provided a lading of lumber to bring with him, which would have been to the advantage of all concerned. But just as the ship was hardly finished, the barbarous Indians on that river, broke forth into an open and cruel war upon the English ; and the miserable people, surprised by so sudden a storm of blood, had no refuge from the infidels, but the ship now finishing in the harbor. Whereupon he left his intended lading behind him, and instead thereof, carried with him his old neighbors and their families, free of all charges, to Boston ; so the first action that he did, after he was his own man, was to save his father's house, with the rest of the neighborhood, from ruin ; but the disappointment which befell him from the loss of his other lading, plunged his affairs into greater embarrassments with such as had employed him.

But he was hitherto no more than beginning to make scaffolds for further and higher actions! He would frequently tell the gentlewoman his wife, that he should yet be captain of a king's ship; that he should come to have the command of better men than he was now accounted himself ; and, that he should be owner of a fair brick-house in the green-lane of North-Boston ; and, that, it may be, this would not be all that the Providence of God would bring him to. She entertained these passages with a sufficient incredulity; but he had so serious and positive an expectation of them, that it is not easy to say, what was the original thereof. He was of an enterprising genius, and naturally disdained littleness : But his disposition for business was of the Dutch mould, where, with a little show of wit, there is as much wisdom demonstrated, as can be shown by any nation. His talent lay not in the airs that serve chiefly for the pleasant and sudden turns of conversation ; but he might say, as Themistocles, though he could not play upon a fiddle, yet he know how to make a little city become a great one. He would prudently contrive a weighty undertaking, and then patiently pursue it unto the end. He was of an inclination, cutting rather like a hatchet, than like a razor ; he would propose very considerable matters to himself, and then so cut through them, that no difficulties could put by the edge of his resolutions. Being thus of the true temper, for doing of great things, he betakes himself to the sea, the right scene for such things ; and upon advice of a Spanish wreck about the Bahama's, he took a voyage thither; but with little more success, than what just served him a little to furnish him for a voyage to England; whither he went in a vessel, not much unlike that which the Dutchmen stamped on their first coin, with these words about it, Incertum quo Fata ferant. Having first informed himself that there was another Spanish wreck, wherein was lost a mighty treasure, hitherto undiscovered, he had a strong impression upon his mind that he must be the discoverer; and he made such representations of his design at White-Hall, that by the year 1683 he became the captain of a King's ship, and arrived at New England commander of the Algier-Rose, a frigate of eighteen guns, and ninety-five men.