Benjamin Tompson (1642-1714)

The son of a respected Massachusetts minister, Benjamin Tompson was raised by a foster family following the death of his mother in his infancy, while his father was serving as a missionary in the southern English colonies. Educated at Harvard, for most of his life Tompson taught school, relocating periodically between three Massachusetts towns: Boston, his hometown Braintree, and Charlestown. Schoolteaching at the time was not a lucrative activity, and Tompson shifted employment frequently, several times having to sue communities for compensation for his employment. In addition to teaching, he pursued a literary career and seems to have had a greater desire to publish his work than many of his contemporaries. One of his earliest efforts, The Grammarians Funeral, was written in 1667 but not published until 1708. This poem was unusual as an elegy, playfully employing puns and other linguistic tricks based on Latin grammar, even though it was written to commemorate the death of a real Boston Latin scholar and schoolmaster. In 1676 he published New Englands Crisis, a poetic account of King Philip's War, which was published in Boston and also in London in two printings of a revised edition. New Englands Crisis is Tompson's best-known work, but he also supplied prefatory poems for his former student Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and for William Hubbard's Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (1677). In 1699, Tompson's position as one of New England's foremost literary figures was recognized when the new royal governor, Lord Bellamont, arrived, and Tompson was placed in charge of the literary welcome, a pastoral skit which he wrote and in which he performed. Beyond his published works, just a few manuscripts by Benjamin Tompson remain. Presented here is his best known work, New Englands Crisis, in its entirety.

New Englands Crisis