From the July 25, 1743 Boston Evening Post, following an advertisement for the return of "an escaped negro fellow, lusty, stout, and comely," the following:
--Your abrupt Departure from me, and forsaking of me your Wife and
tender Babes, which I humble acknowledge and confess I was greatly if not
wholly on the Occasion of, by my too rash and unadvised Speech and Behaviour
towards you; for which I now in this publick Manner humbly ask your
Forgiveness, and here-by promise upon your Return, to amend and reform, and
by ny future loving and obedient Carriage towards you, endeavour to make an
Atonement for my past evil Deeds, and manifest to you and the whole World
that I am become a new Woman, and will prove to you a loving dutiful and
tender wife.
If you do not regard what I have above written, I pray you to
hearken to what you Pupil, Joshua Gilpatrick hath below sent you as also to
the Lamentations and Cries of your poor Children, especially the eldest, who
(tho' but seven Years old) all rational People really conclude, that unless
you speedily return will end in his Death, and the moans of your other
Children are enough to affect any humane heart....And why, my dear Husband,
should a few angry and unkind Words, from an angry and fretful Wife (for
which I am now paying full dear, having neither eat, drank nor slept in
quiet, and am already reduced almost to a skeleton, that unless you favour
me with your Company, will bereave me of my Life) make you thus to forsake
me and your Children? How can you thus for so slender a Cause as a few rash
words from a simple and weak Woman, chuse you to part from your tender
Babes, who are your own Flesh and Blood? Pray meditate on what I now send,
and reprieve you poor Wife and eldest Son (who take your Departure so
heavily) from a lingering tho' certain Death, by your coming home to them
again as speedily as you can, where you shall be kindly received, and in the
most submissive Manner by your Wife, who is ready at your Desire, to lay her
self at your Feet for her past Miscarriage and am with my and your
Children's kind love to you, your loving Wife, Margery Sullivan
Summersworth, New-Hampshire. July 11, 1743
My dear and loving Husband,
Little is known of how the family headed by the tall, patriarchal schoolmaster John Sullivan and his beautiful, vain, hot tempered wife got on in the pinched, gossipy atmosphere of a small New England town but it is clear that Sullivan, like Joseph Kennedy, supplemented whatever national ambitions his sons may have held with the basic skills necessary to cut figures in the military and political world at large. But if we consider some of his ex-patriot contemporaries John William with the Pretender Charles Stuart or Thomas, or Owen Roe, or xxx, a certain pattern emerges: linguists by tradition and necessity, did acts of a priestly cast, they left skulking about their native lands to make their fortunes in the world. Penniless outsiders, their service could be as well described as talk and bluff as by the usual praise of honest service as tutors, masters, keepers of difficult young boys and girls. True, as often as not they might be prey to certain hazards of that role, leaving town hastily followed by the threats of some family. The dangers of the Irish schoolmaster were labor to be proclaimed by English writers including Thackery, Meredity, and Frocede. In advancing the boys' careers, Master John's change of name and religion doubtless proved advantageous -- his freedom was said to have been bought by a local clergyman. In Puritan New England where, according to historian David Doyle, "papery, Irishmen, continental monarchies, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and servility were all linked in a grand arc of witchcraft threatening the fail light of liberty and pure religion." Master John's change of name and religion were doubtless prudent steps toward acceptance. Whether the family ever achieved genuine acceptance whatever that may have meant in those functions times, in the town is another matter --
Master John's inclination toward idleness, peripatetic scholarly interests, his noticeable arguments with his wife -- once when John was three his father refused to come home from Boston until his mother apologized for her "rash and unadvised Speech and Behavior." The tall, patriarchal schoolmaster may have changed his name from the Gaelic Owen to the English John, from the Irish O'Sullivan to the vaguely continental Sulevan, his religion from Catholicism to Anglicism, have let it be known that his redemption had been purchased by a protestant clergyman; but just how effective these disguises may have been in offsetting certain suspicious signs -- a facility in Latin, eccentric and purposeless scholarly curiosity, and a domestic life that featured fiery outbursts of temper from his beautiful Cork-born wife and occasional disappearances to Boston by the Master himself. For none of this behavior would pass unnoticed in a village where Puritan suspicions and horror of idleness prevailed, and it is of credit to Master Sullivan that he managed to find an important role for his character and moreover provide, in that forlorn little mill town, intellectual and sustenance to his spirited sons that would launch them into international prominence.
Exactly how Master Sullivan, the loquacious schoolmaster, fond of big words and ideas, spouting fancy phrases, tinged with a vague irreverence related to his neighbors we can only speculate. But we may presume that the elder Sullivan, arriving at Berwich with his child wife whom he had, they said, paid for in xx, may have been viewed as a barbarian and a scholar, a wild Irishman, and though he might fashion himself the intellectual of the icy little village of Durham, was he not at heart a barbarian, and when in the frosty nights of November the good townsmen heard his spoiled sons, John and James and Benjamin, stumbling through the town, shouting and hooting, with their swaggering Latinisms, it was, they dimly perceived, as if those same Gaelic chieftains had risen from their graves once again to curse the lives and marry the daughters of civil men.