Joshua Scottow

Who was Joshua Scottow?

Joshua Scottow, was a colonial American merchant and the author of two histories of early New England: Old Men's Tears for Their Own Declensions and A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony Anno 1628.

Scottow emigrated to Massachusetts between 1630 and 1634 with his widowed mother Thomasina and older brother Thomas. He settled in Boston and was admitted to membership in the Old Church in 1639. He married Lydia in 1640, and they had seven children. He acquired considerable wealth trading with Acadia, dealing in waterfront property, and developing frontier settlements near Scarborough, Maine. He served as a captain in King Philip's War. He was survived by his wife and four children, three daughters and a son Thomas, who graduated from Harvard College in 1677.

Scottow was a devout supporter of the Massachusetts theocracy. His two histories are examples of a rhetorical form popular in Puritan New England known as the jeremiad, the importance of which was demonstrated by Perry Miller and again, with different emphasis, by Sacvan Bercovitch. Miller’s famous “declension thesis” derives its name from Scottow’s title. Both histories declare that the founding generation of New England was “animated as with one soul” for the achievement of a millennial religious mission and that the present generation has lost its focus and loyalties. Scottow’s language is replete with biblical and classical references; and he applies the biblical signs and figures to demonstrate New England’s providential destiny, while at the same time lamenting the woeful present state of a society confounded by internal “declension” and threatened by Indians, Quakers, witches, imperial officials, and the French. Scottow’s Christian typology and typological exegesis are used to resolve the apparent contradictions between New England’s current fallen state and both its “original” mission and its guaranteed millennial destiny.