In 1672, at age eighteen, John Tappin of Boston died at Fairfield in Connecticut. Little is known about Tappin or his untimely death. The 1673 funeral sermon given by Samuel Wakeman, Fairfield’s minister, became the first of many sermons published as advice to young men in New England. The title page reads: A Young Man’s Legacy to the Rising Generation: Being a Sermon Preached upon the Death, and at the Desire of John Tappin of Boston, Who Deceased at Fairfield the 10th of October 1672, Being in the Nineteenth Year of His Age. Wakeman’s sermon did not mention details of Tappin’s life, his death, or his legacy. It merely stated: “His [presumably, Tappin’s] surviving Friend and Companion, who held him very dear, and with whom he left it to prosecute this his desire, hath been unsatisfiedly urgent with me in this behalf, That the earnest desire of the dying … which seconded by others, hath drawn me to this.”Footnote ¹ According to Wakeman, Tappin wanted him to preach his funeral sermon to other young men, like Tappin, calling them to God before it was too late.

By the mid-eighteenth century, publication of advice to young men flourished in New England. Three groups were central to this growth. One consisted of the ministers who wrote and published their advice sermons as part of a growing body of prescriptive literature. These individuals sought new ways to exert their moral influence and remain relevant while New England’s population expanded and diversified. A second group, printers, began taking new jobs and experimenting with new formats. They were motivated by profit. Most important was the third group, the readers. These were young men, who may appear as passive recipients but who, through financing, purchase, and readership, became active influencers of the prescriptive literature written for them. Each of the three groups contributed to the success of advice literature, but without readers, sermon printing (which constituted nearly half of all advice literature in this period) would have dwindled. A focus on readers and their influence on the process of advice publication offers insight into issues of religion, commerce, and masculinity during this period.

This study takes a cross-sectional approach to encompass multiple prescriptive literature types, specifically ministerial literature, funeral sermons, execution ballads, and other forms of printed advice as part of a larger body of prescriptive literature targeting young men.Footnote ² Bibliographers, Virgil Hetzel in particular, set a precedent for integrating these various literature types under a single heading.Footnote ³ This study will employ the terms “prescriptive” or “advice literature.” Integrating different prescriptive literatures, the study shows that young men’s monetary investment in publishing advice for their peers reinforced their sense of manhood and advertised their masculine participation in New England’s future. Little can be learned about individual readers, but the demand by readers for particular literature in a commercial market and religious community can reveal much about their interests, values, and aspirations.Footnote ⁴ Prescriptive literature for young men speaks to understanding readers and young men as aspirational actors and active participants in the creation of a stratified social hierarchy and the formation of masculine ideas about whiteness, Protestantism, and belonging.

By the eighteenth century, New England’s young men had begun financing the publication of advice literature themselves. Financing advice literature, with their names printed in the front matter or dedicated to a society to which they belonged, appealed to young men because it had both a communal and a public effect. Some investments were relatively small. For example, a broadside or pamphlet might cost a penny at most.Footnote ⁵ These publications focused on exciting news or allowed individuals to contribute to the funeral service for a fellow community member, as in the case of Tappin. Yet other prescriptive literature positioned young men to display their manhood.Footnote ⁶

Investing in the prescriptive publications or subscribing to the printed books allowed a young man to distinguish himself as a man rather than as a child or a woman. Further, it allowed him to distinguish himself from other young men in the community within what became a granularly stratified social hierarchy. Through societies and joint financing ventures, young men could cultivate business contacts and form trust relationships, but the public aspect was even more important. With his name or society printed in a book, a young man advertised and signaled like-minded values to a wider public that extended his business network. When a book was printed for a group, group members often became the distribution network for the publication, giving a young man a tool through which he indicated his values in an act of self-fashioning.Footnote ⁷ Young men displayed not only their wealth and education but also their morality through financing prescriptive publications. This had become an important aspect of business in seventeenth-century Europe that extended across empires.Footnote ⁸ While ministers might suspect the sincerity of the young men, advice sermons given for societies helped ministers to extend their influence. For printers, advice literature represented a reliable investment. Though specific to New England, the aspirational goals of young men reflected anxieties felt across the British Atlantic world, but prescriptive literature reveals the unique ways in which the population of New England sought to cope with changes in society.

Through the lens of prescriptive literature, it becomes clear that young men invested in advice as readers and consumers. What began in the 1670s as a conscious effort of Protestant ministers to cultivate a new audience of young men became increasingly reader driven in the eighteenth century. A Young Man’s Legacy to the Rising Generation was a “special sermon,” defined as a sermon addressed to a targeted group. Ministers addressed special sermons to specific groups, including young men, young women, young people, servants, children, parents, and Native Americans. The difference between young men and these other targeted groups is that young men formed societies that funded publications. As a result, young male readers—primarily young, white, Protestant men who aspired to become community, commercial, and household leaders—helped shape the contours of the prescriptive literature written for them. The literature they sought validated their desire for improvement, prosperity, and order in their society. It secured their sense of importance and leadership in New England.

New Englanders mirrored concerns of a larger global Atlantic trade network, focused on order and self-improvement, but they adapted it to their own communities and local concerns. In advice sermons, ministers drew on local events as talking points. From the untimely death of young men like John Tappin to the execution of young men for murder, current affairs and examples infused advice to young men with an immediacy that imbued it with poignancy. As overseas trade entangled the young men of New England, communities feared losing not only young people but also strong masculine leadership. Economic anxieties about vulnerability pervaded the Atlantic world and plagued young men especially.Footnote ⁹ All young men, regardless of race or class, occupied thresholds, to paraphrase Victor Turner, existing in a liminal state simply because of their age as they balanced on the cusp of adulthood.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, young men at the turn of the eighteenth century faced the complexity of a trade economy unknown to their forebears. In New England, communities feared that young men would become vulnerable to the influence of London’s markets and politics.Footnote ¹¹ Sensing their own waning power with the new colonial charter in place, ministers sought new methods to exert political and cultural influence, so they spoke to these anxieties in sermons. They voiced a fear that New England would be punished with the deaths of its young men for ill behavior within the communities, and, without men, New England would become weak and feminized in the hands of the rising generation.Footnote ¹² These concerns bled into the advice offered to young men.

Studying advice books, an ephemeral form of literature, is useful for scholars because what emerges is an understanding of highly local concerns. This study validates the established patterns observed by scholars wherein empire influences colonial actors (such as anglicization) or print influences readers and adds another layer of complexity by looking at readers. Recognizing the influence of readers in the publication process, the study emphasizes that neither imperial relationships nor publishing practice functioned unidirectionally.Footnote ¹³ Both empire and publishing functioned in multiple directions. The individual reader in empire bore an important role in determining what reading material was marketed and sold to them. Though trends felt in the wider global and Atlantic world did resonate, study of prescriptive literature shows how young male readers and consumers shaped the way in which New England wrestled with these challenges. Readers consumed and responded to prescriptive literature in ways that changed the shape of authorial intention by the 1760s. Previous studies have considered gender, class, and racial distinctions that materialized in New England during this period in the courts, in rhetoric, and in religion.Footnote ¹⁴ This study adds a new dimension to the discourse by considering young men as readers, financers, and consumers of print.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, advice to young men shifted from instructing them in their transition to manhood to a new, more flattering image of young men seeking a competitive edge over their peers. The growth in young men and their societies financing publication of advice, the sales of multiple printings, and new editions of prescriptive publications suggest that the market demand by young men drove the shift. By the end of the Seven Years’ War, advice literature treated young men as “reasonable creatures,” offering more secular and business advice that reinforced their sense of masculinity by defining their place in the social hierarchy as a starting point for self-improvement.

Initiated as an effort by ministers to reach young men in the 1670s, the publishing landscape of prescriptive literature for young men began its transition to a reader-driven market within the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Among the publications addressed to young men in New England, 87 percent of the titles were sermons, and the non-sermon advice books were likewise moralistic in tone.Footnote ¹⁵ Advice to young men accounted for about 5 percent of the total published sermons in New England and comprised 48 percent of advice literature published during the period.Footnote ¹⁶ A steady rise in publications to young men began in 1717, with a gradual decrease until 1733. During this period, 38.4 percent (thirty-three titles) of the total titles in this study were published. A second spike in publishing occurred in the 1760s, with 21 percent (eighteen titles) published.

Throughout the period, defining masculinity and manhood for listeners and readers, ministers worked to reach the audience of young people in general, and young men specifically. Advice works began distinguishing young women from young men in the latter part of the seventeenth century. Women were frequently directly addressed in what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich usefully terms “works of practical piety,” citing approximately twenty-seven penned by Cotton Mather alone, beginning with Vertuous Woman Found, a 1668 funeral sermon for Mary Brown of Salem.Footnote ¹⁷ Though communities often sponsored funding for works aimed at young women, the present study found no instances of societies of young women sponsoring advice publications for themselves, unlike young men. The category of young men was distinct, delineating age in a way that was not done for women who began their education earlier, married younger, and would not have been regarded as community members.Footnote ¹⁸

Though Increase and Cotton Mather directly influenced the initial push and appearance of advice to young men, readers drove the continued and even heightened interest in addressing young men in the decades that followed.Footnote ¹⁹ Notably, though Increase Mather made use of community funding, even sponsoring publications via groups of ministers, he did not use societies of young men. In contrast, his son, Cotton Mather, financed two publications through societies of young men in 1709 and 1710, the first two society-sponsored publications. Cotton Mather had personal insight into the interests and motivations of these societies because he had started his own society of young men at age sixteen.Footnote ²⁰

Societies of young men sustained and perpetuated the prominence of prescriptive literature in the eighteenth century. In urban areas, young men of the middling class formed clubs and societies for entertainment, for religious and philosophical debate, and for “mutual moral oversight.”Footnote ²¹ Societies of young men subsidized print runs of prescriptive publications. Such societies were the single most consistently acknowledged group of funders for advice printing between 1709 and 1758.Footnote ²² Society-sponsored publications rose to a peak in the 1720s, when one-third of the sponsored publications in this study were published. Society sponsorship tapered off thereafter, with only three published in the 1730s, and one in 1758. Young men were living farther from their families, often in urban environments, to pursue work, trade, and education.Footnote ²³ They sought a new but familiar sense of community that they had left behind with their families and friends, finding fellowship within the societies they formed, often in partnership with a minister, in their new towns.Footnote ²⁴ These societies funded printing of reading material, especially spiritual works encouraged by the ministers who helped organize the societies.

The mechanism for official group-sponsored funding had been in place since the earliest election sermons given annually at the opening of the New England legislature.Footnote ²⁵ The Honorable Artillery Company would collect money for printing the sermons and, because the money was collected ahead of printing and each soldier received two copies, these publications had a guaranteed audience.Footnote ²⁶ The method of issuing two copies to each soldier was likely useful for subscription among societies of young men as well, allowing young men to keep one copy and share the other. Colonial Anglo-Americans, like their English counterparts, had become accustomed to subscribing to projects involving risk and capital, from lotteries and explorations to road building and construction.Footnote ²⁷ Meanwhile, the printer’s investment was so small that he seldom even supplied the paper but merely set the type and pulled the press.Footnote ²⁸ Societies likely made use of a similar system to assure the printer that the venture would not result in a financial loss.

The same young readers who were members of societies became a market for new materials. Ministers and printers could cater to reader interests with new formats such as London reprints. Reprinting advice literature from London became a popular trend that continued into the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ William Burkitt’s The Poor Man’s Help and the Young Man’s Guide, the first reprint from London, was put to press in Boston in 1716. The publication proved so successful that two more editions appeared in 1725 and 1731. Initially published in London in 1701, the work prescribed specific times and places for prayer, and the prescriptions would have been familiar and welcome to young men in New England in the 1720s. Three other titles from London were reprinted during the same period. The Life of Mr. Thomas Beard, published in London in 1711 and 1715 under the title The Holy Seed, was an autobiographical work by a young, dying man. Ministers distributed the book gratis to Boston’s societies of young men from an unnamed donor who, according to William Cooper’s preface, paid more than thirty pounds to print and distribute copies because he had read the advice book himself as a youth and found it inspirational.Footnote ³⁰

Popular in London in the 1710s, the book appealed to young men in New England in the 1730s. The Anglo-Atlantic world was shrinking as merchant traffic, news, and business grew more frequent.Footnote ³¹ Communities, though glad for the industry and prosperity of young men, feared the influence of Europe in general, and London in particular.Footnote ³² At the same time, young men felt vulnerable to their business partners overseas and feared disconnection from the London political scene.Footnote ³³ The concerns in New England mirrored concerns about commerce facing the broader, global Church of England, so the idea that older sermons from London would resonate with readers in New England twenty years later seems reasonable.Footnote ³⁴ With mutual fear and the need for reassurance feeding the information cycle, it is no wonder that young men cherished not only the society of their peers but also the words of an earlier generation’s young men.

Ministers and printers courted their young male readers and subscribers with flattering words and sometimes a list of their names printed in the front matter. In Cooper’s preface to the Life of Mr. Thomas Beard, he addressed the work “To the Societies of Young Men,” describing them as future community leaders, heads of households, and voting citizens. He was not alone in addressing his words of advice to a cohort of young New England men. More fully imagining the youth of his congregation as future full-fledged community members, Benjamin Colman asked young men to choose a pious life. He explained that piety would make them “good Neighbours … useful to our Town and Country” since they might someday serve as magistrates or ministers.Footnote ³⁵ Not only were young men the future voting citizenry of their towns but, equally, if not more importantly, they were the legacy of their religious communities. As Solomon Stoddard wrote in 1717, “they that are Young now are like to be the pillars of the Church, thirty Years hence.”Footnote ³⁶ Devoted to the young men of New England perceived to be future leaders, these works necessarily excluded the young men who would not be leaders, by virtue of their outsider status, and all women. With the self-fashioning inherent in sponsoring publications and displaying their morality and education, young men set themselves apart from and above peers in the eyes of community readers. The authors and printers imbued their chosen audience with not only a sense of duty but one of superiority.

With a well-established consumer base and productions funded by societies of young men, by the eighteenth century printers had developed a keen understanding about what would entice their readers. Producing cheap broadsides and execution sermons, they learned what new publications appealed to their young male consumers so they could reprint and profit quickly. Successes became a template for future ventures that proved profitable through the 1730s. Broadsides, designed for public posting and circulation, with illustrations, and sometimes in verse, could be sold cheaply among large crowds that gathered for public executions. The crime itself, detailed in newspapers, acted as built-in advertising for the printers.Footnote ³⁷ They leveraged the readership of their newspapers to help bolster the success of their other publishing ventures and made use of their newspaper distribution networks for their other work.Footnote ³⁸ Ministers collaborated with the local printers, selling the corresponding advice sermons with details of the crime, a life narrative of the criminal, a confession, or a ballad as other formats for advice literature.Footnote ³⁹ Ministers wrote this literature to help their audience see themselves in the condemned, to learn from their mistakes, and to shame the culprit, but viewers and readers were drawn in by the details of the crime and punishment.Footnote ⁴⁰ The broadsides and pamphlets printed and sold at the event usually cost only a few pence, and the events themselves could draw thousands, so the minister had a captive audience, and the printer could sell to a concentrated market.

Printers actively marketed even popular works like broadsides to young men to assure profit, but New England printers rarely printed without subsidy because of the inherent risk.Footnote ⁴¹ During his career as a printer, Timothy Green published sixteen pieces of prescriptive literature addressed to young men, only three of which had no subsidized funding. At least three were broadsides relating an execution, and a fourth was connected to several news articles.Footnote ⁴² Green had published The Vain Youth Summoned twice previously with some subsidy. It sold well and was therefore a stable investment for him to print again at his own risk, though not all his ventures were successful. Upon his death, “large quantities of these sermons … [were] sold under the value of common waste paper.”Footnote ⁴³

Financing by readers remained important throughout the eighteenth century. Though execution sermons persisted as a stable investment, other forms of advice to young men began to change as religious revivalism and the First Great Awakening divided New Englanders. From the 1730s, the definition and contours of New England manhood were revisited because of the perceived effeminacy of religious enthusiasm. Religious revivalism began to divide young male readers into new groups, altering the print landscape. This reordering accounts for a brief downturn in the advice publications for young men in the late 1730s and 1740s. On May 7, 1733, Nathanael Baker fell from his horse and died. An elegy published shortly thereafter portrayed Baker as a humble young man, beloved and mourned by the community in dramatic terms.

The anonymously authored elegy was so dramatic that one commentator likened it to “an eruption of artificially stimulated emotion,” using it as an exemplar of religious revival literature bemoaning the death of a young man.Footnote ⁴⁵ The funeral elegy was similarly ridiculed by Benjamin Franklin in the New England Courant, publishing this “receipt to make a New-England Funeral Elegy”:

Although Franklin noted that an untimely and horrible death would be elegized for any community member, young men’s deaths captured audience interest. Newspapers of the time frequently reported on the horrors befalling young men, ranging from lightning strikes to village raids by Native Americans.Footnote ⁴⁷ Opponents who spoke of the revival movement criticized the use in sermons of “emotionally charged words” such as those elegizing Baker.Footnote ⁴⁸ The words were feared to be dangerous. Critics denounced the “display of ‘tender feeling’ [which] evidenced godliness,” characteristic of evangelicals (both male and female), as effeminate to discredit evangelical men. Rationality, self-control, and moderation became hallmark “manly” traits in the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁹

Though prescriptive publications for young men decreased in numbers during the 1730s and 1740s, revivalism expanded readership and printing generally. More people were reading and buying print, but the shift in the religious landscape made it more difficult to target New England audiences. This shift resulted in new and renewed efforts to market to young male New Englanders. George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent sowed religious discord by criticizing congregationalist ministers.Footnote ⁵⁰ The most zealous congregationalist ministers’ power collapsed, but others adapted. A liberal contingent emerged by the 1750s, including Jonathan Mayhew and Ebenezer Gay.Footnote ⁵¹ In the midst of the revivals, Whitefield introduced new print techniques with a “print and preach” approach.Footnote ⁵² He would advertise through newspaper coverage via an agent, his work was listed in sales catalogs, and his sermons, which he printed and distributed himself, would be sold to the crowds gathered to hear him speak.Footnote ⁵³ New England ministers and printers adapted their styles to more closely fit Whitefield’s model, in order to remain relevant and effectual. Confronted with a huge volume of printed matter and divergent ideas, readers became consumers who wanted to be both informed and entertained, and young men began reassessing what constituted “manly” traits.Footnote ⁵⁴

Redefining and bolstering notions of manhood created new fractures among young men as a language of societal hierarchy developed. This new language formed lines of distinction, especially by the 1740s as New England society diversified. One broadside cautioned “all children and servants that they be sure to be obedient to their parents, and masters and mistresses.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Another execution broadside described its audience as “young People, and Servants of all Sorts.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Servants found themselves grouped with youth (and even more frequently with children) in terms of address, regardless of age. This was especially true for enslaved people whose servitude was perpetual, unlike the case for many white servants.Footnote ⁵⁷ Advice literature for servants, sometimes funded by their masters, instructed servants to request their masters’ permission to do anything outside of assigned tasks, and offered counsel that “he that is not a good Servant is not a good Christian.”Footnote ⁵⁸ According to ministers, not only were servants relegated to perpetual youth but, should they fail in their permissive existence, they would be failing in their religion.

Hierarchical language appealed to readers because, for those who held high aspirations, it validated their sense of superiority and masculinity, in terms of virtue, business, or morality. The appeal of a hierarchy held true among high-ranking apprentices and servants as well. Earlier advice books directly addressed all servants regarding conduct and community. In contrast, advice books for servants, published from the 1740s, addressed young men working as apprentices who might one day become masters themselves, ignoring those who would remain enslaved or in servitude for their entire lives. New England servants and middling young men had greater cause to distinguish themselves from one another, resulting in more defined levels of class stratification than seen outside the Anglo-American colonies.

Boston was a growing city, but it was small relative to London. In a colony, fewer opportunities existed, as fewer people lived there, so every level of stratification became more valuable. In England, a landed gentry system, institutional restraints, and enormous income disparity between classes meant that the structure of the social hierarchy was fixed, and status was less malleable. With a greater necessity for every New Englander to demonstrate their social position, and fewer structures in place, greater granularity emerged within the social hierarchy, such that, by the 1760s, the young lawyer John Adams was very concerned in trying to establish whether a man was a yeoman or a laborer, apparently a vast legal distinction that would not have concerned an overseas counterpart.Footnote ⁵⁹ If buying the right book could help young men advance, they would seize the opportunity. At the same time, even for dependent individuals, each person sought to exercise the maximum independence possible within their situation. Responding to demand, printers sought to corner the market, advertising directly to the aspirations of their young male readers.

A reprinting of the 1740 London book A Present for an Apprentice had obvious appeal in mid-eighteenth-century New England, where young men were anxious to set themselves apart from and above their peers.Footnote ⁶⁰ In a granularly stratified society, every man wanted to distinguish himself as better than himself before, and better than other men—more prosperous, more deserving of respect, and more manly. A Present for an Apprentice promised to provide “a sure guide to gain both esteem and estate.” It offered advice to young men, instructing: “while an apprentice, his behaviour after he is free, care in setting up, company with the ladies, choice of a wife, behaviour in courtship, and wedding-day, complaisance after marriage, [and] education of children.”Footnote ⁶¹ Barnard advised young male readers to buy a horse only for healthy exercise and to never attend masquerades because of the ill behavior that arose when people wore masks.Footnote ⁶²

This title was not the first book in Boston to give apprentices practical life advice, but it was the first to include more general advice rather than just teaching arithmetic and how to draft accounts letters.Footnote ⁶³ The same book was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 in Philadelphia. A London literary magazine published a review of A Present for an Apprentice. The reviewer praised the work as containing “a system of morality and œconomy as persons of all ranks might improve by.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Rogers and Fowle in Boston and Franklin in Philadelphia printed the London reviewer’s praise as an advertisement in the forematter of their editions. In doing so, they fulfilled their readers’ desires: a book calculated to help any man, of any rank, advance in society, to achieve more than his fellow servants, to exercise greater agency, and perhaps to become a master. That multiple editions were published indicates that the advertisement worked, and the book found its market: a middling, white, male servant who wanted to prove his ascendancy.

With the onset of war in New England from the mid-1740s, white notions of manhood changed, affecting advice to young men and embracing the challenges and opportunities presented by the new, more stratified social hierarchy. An image of Protestant masculine bravery emerged, sharply contrasted with images of the feminine, Catholic, Native American, and French. The largest-scale war in the colonies to date meant that more young men than ever were leaving home to fight. Before the war, advice focused on young men as aspiring to become householders, family men, husbands, and community leaders like their forbears. Ministers took for granted that these young men needed to be guided in their transition from boy to man. The onset of warfare in New England gave rise to an “imperial masculinity” built around “abstract concepts like Anglo-American nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for empire.”Footnote ⁶⁵ With this new imperial masculinity, advice took into account that young men who had faced battle had proved their manhood on the battlefield. Instead, advice literature offered readers peer-like guidance about their ability to raise their place in the social hierarchy. Three works printed in the 1760s were composed as dialogues, a new format that placed young men on equal footing with their male relatives and the ministers in the community.Footnote ⁶⁶ These dialogues discussed topics ranging from warning against overconfidence following success in war to how to conduct business in an honorable manner. Ministers affirmed young men’s sense of manhood and encouraged them in their secular pursuits to achieve within the social hierarchy.

Advice to young men took on distinctly gendered terms in the wake of war, regarding not just military matters but also business. The dangers of the business world were cast in feminine terms: creditors were harpies with a “restless, predatory passion,” and a life of luxury was “seductive.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In his diary in 1759, John Adams wrote that he had to choose “a life of effeminacy, indolence, and obscurity” or “a life of industry, temperance, and honour.”Footnote ⁶⁸ He believed the authors he read and the ministers he heard: he needed to work diligently and rationally to be manly; to do otherwise was effeminate. Artillery sermons of the 1750s suggested that “manhood and bravery were intertwined,” and the young “New England soldiers did not just hear sermons passively.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The binary opposition of masculinity and effeminacy characteristic of advice in the 1670s in reference to the future of New England’s rising generation was now leveraged to inspire courage in battle and industriousness in business.

In this period of intense conflict, language vilifying French and Native American foes became common in addresses to young men that reinforced the Protestant, masculine image. In print, New England ministers “linked Catholicism to femininity and corruption in contrast to the manly piety and virtue of Protestantism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Ministers increasingly marginalized Native Americans in print. In 1763, Benjamin Lord used Native Americans to draw a distinction between New Englanders and any people perceived as other or outsiders. He wrote: “Dear YOUTH, young men especially … would it not appear dreadful, if by your means … religion stops? And though it may be carried to another people, to the heathen in the wild deserts of America; yet sad indeed … if it be no more found with you?”Footnote ⁷¹ Lord’s implication was clear: though Native Americans or others might convert to Christianity, they could not be fully capable or worthy of carrying forward the New England legacy. Comparisons of Native Americans to animals became more common, while French Catholics were portrayed as weak and unmanly.Footnote ⁷² These images marked a sharp contrast with the image of New England white Protestant young men, described with “Fortitude both of Body and Mind, Courage and Valour join’d with bodily Strength” by the end of the Seven Years’ War.Footnote ⁷³

With the image of the physically strong, battle-hardened imperial man cemented by 1763, readers were happy to subscribe to and pay additional fees for fine copies of work that catered to that image of themselves. Jonathan Mayhew dedicated Christian Sobriety, a sermon collection from 1763, to the young men in his ministry. He presented the publication with a list of over fifty subscribers among the young men—full congregants, not members of a separate society of young men.Footnote ⁷⁴ At least ten advertisements appeared in newspapers announcing Mayhew’s work, in The New-Hampshire Gazette, New Hampshire Journal, Boston Evening-Post, and Boston Post-Boy, at the time of the first edition in 1763. Several of the advertisements included an overview of each of the sermons in the collection.Footnote ⁷⁵

Mayhew achieved celebrity in terms of political controversy but, for young men, the manner of address set his work apart from others.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the dedication, he wrote:

Popular and prolific, Mayhew’s work spoke to young men with respect and as adult community members.Footnote ⁷⁸ Christian Sobriety was republished in 1767, after Mayhew’s death, no longer with a list of subscribers and in two bound volumes “on a fine waiting paper.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Unlike earlier advice to young men, these volumes were designed to be kept, displayed in a library, and cherished. Mayhew’s work was indeed cherished by some, notably John Adams, a Mayhew protégé, who praised Mayhew’s work as foundational to the American Revolution.Footnote ⁸⁰ Young men bought copies, inscribed their names, read, revisited, and kept Mayhew’s sermons.Footnote ⁸¹

On the surface, Mayhew’s book, and other prescriptive literature for young men in this period, seemed more fraternal than paternal toward young men. Yet, Jeff Osborne makes a strong case that this reconfigured eighteenth-century manliness was simply a new form of paternal authority.Footnote ⁸² And, although Mayhew spoke to young men with the language of individual liberties, he virulently attacked “effeminate” passions, “crazy monks” (Catholics), “superannuated enthusiasts” (evangelicals), and “heathens” (Native Americans).Footnote ⁸³ His sense that no man should be enslaved clearly did not extend to those in perpetual servitude or enslaved Black or Native American people in New England. His language appealing to young men as “reasonable creatures” struck a chord with his readers, and those who invested in his book sought not only to distinguish themselves but to elevate themselves in the social hierarchy.

The appeal of work like Mayhew’s stemmed from ministers telling and printers printing what readers wanted to hear. They told their eager listeners and readers how to excel in their secular and community business and how to elevate themselves in society. Rather than advice focused on obedience, piety, and prayer characteristic of the 1670s, prescriptive literature of the 1760s advised young men to cultivate a good reputation, to gain knowledge with seriousness, and to conduct business with sincerity.Footnote ⁸⁴ Though this information was not dissimilar to the advice given to young men in England, it possessed specific, local connections. Ministers and printers tailored prescriptive literature for young men in New England to its readers, affirming their manliness and their place in society, and encouraging them to do better. Young men bought into this advice, viewing it as an investment in their success and in their future.

With few exceptions like Mayhew’s sermon collection, prescriptive literature for young men was ephemeral in nature.Footnote ⁸⁵ These books were printed in smaller format: octavo or duodecimo. Many, like the funeral sermon of John Tappin, included one hundred pages or fewer, the shortest (except for broadsides) having five pages. Books (like Mayhew’s popular collection) made note in the advertisements for them of being bound and printed on fine paper. Most were not. Brief sermons and broadsides were intended to earn printers a quick and assured profit and impart the author’s message to their young male audience. Although young men were expected to discard the books, they held onto the ideas found in the pages themselves. Their purchase of and engagement with the advice drove the demand for more of the same. The readers, through the financing and purchasing of advice, sustained a print market dominated by prescriptive literature that perpetuated the idea of a white, Protestant man who would be able not only to identify his place in the social hierarchy but to raise it. Overall, the idea that remained with readers was the notion of a masculinity that reinforced a hierarchy of privilege in New England society, establishing the roots of privilege in colonial New England.