Thomas Prince

Thomas Prince 1687-1758, American clergyman, scholar, and historian, b. Sandwich, Mass., grad. Harvard, 1709. From 1709 to 1717 he was abroad; he studied in London and preached at a Congregationalist chapel in Suffolk. Returning (1717) to Massachusetts, he became copastor (1718) of Old South Church in Boston, a position he held until his death. He bequeathed to his church his large and excellent library; during the British occupation of Boston, some of the volumes were destroyed, but the many books and manuscripts that were preserved are now in the Boston Public Library. Prince published a number of sermons, A Vade Mecum for America: A Companion for Traders and Travelers (1732), and Psalms, Hymns & Spiritual Songs … the New England Psalm-Book Revised and Improved (1758), but he is best remembered for his informative Chronological History of New England (Vol. I, 1736; Vol. II entitled Annals of New England, 1755). Designed by its author to cover the years 1602 to 1730, the annals are carried only to Aug. 5, 1633. An edition of his history published in 1852 has a memoir of Prince by S. G. Drake.

Prince, Thomas (1687–1758), member of a prominent Massachusetts family, graduated from Harvard (1709), preached in England, and became pastor of the Old South Church in Boston. He was an orthodox Congregationalist, as appears in his many published sermons, writings on the Indian conversions of Experience Mayhew, and pamphlets on remarkable providences. His Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals (1736) was carefully based on such sources as the manuscript History of Plimmoth Plantation by Bradford, and on the plan of recording events in the order of time with exactness and brevity. Because he conceived of New England's history as the apex of the preceding history of the world, his introductory chronology presents great events from Adam to the accession of James I, but even the body of his text does not get beyond the year 1633. His religious orthodoxy was disturbed when he fell under the sway of Whitefield's evangelicalism, which he describes enthusiastically in The Christian History (1744–45). In 1758 he made a metrical translation of The Psalms, Hymns, & Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testaments. The enormous library in which he carried on his zealous scholarship was partly destroyed during the Revolutionary War.