Robert Treat Paine Papers, Volume 4
I rec’d yours1 by Mr. Spooner in which I hear of your welfare but am Sorry that you dont know when you Shall return but I hope this week I Look for you Last week very much. I want to know where Capt. Godfrey team has been down or not I have been Looking out for it in hope of having Somthing to eat thats fresh theres nothing here under four Shillings pound & that hardly fit to eat. I expected you would have wrote about Seth coming or Said Somthing about the team but not one word. Mr. Paddelford is going So dada.
Our family are well. My Love to all friend.2
Not located.
According to his diary, RTP returned to Boston on Mar. 23 for the Maritime Court (see below), returning home on Apr. 3. On Apr. 11 he entered in code in his diary: “Had all my children baptized at my house by Mr. Turner.” Rev. Caleb Turner, a 1758 Yale graduate, was minister of the First Church of Middleboro.
Several years earlier in a letter to his wife, John Adams made a reference to Paine’s “Unhappy Affair in his Family, his Church and Town” which remains obscure (John Adams to Abigail Adams, Nov. 18, 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, 1:328). Part of the problem undoubtedly relates to RTP’s “contest” with Caleb Barnum, the minister of Taunton, the first one settled there after the dismissal of Paine’s brother-in-law Josiah Crocker. The printed record of this concern dates to Samuel Emery’s 1853 history of the Ministry of Taunton (2:8), which states that Barnum’s “contest with the Hon. Robert Treat Paine, respecting the baptism of his children, showed him the determined supporter of the rights of his church against that distinguished and eminent parishioner.” However, in a footnote to this text Emery admitted that “the particulars of this ‘contest,’ as Mr. [Francis] Baylies [a local historian] calls it, are not known to me. . . . [Paine] took great interest in theological subjects, and in one instance at least, came in collision with the views of Mr. Barnum, his minister, and the church.”