Religious and civic leaders recognized youth as a “chusing time,” and many young people chose rebellion over obedience. They gathered for frolicks in barns, mills and outbuildings, went night walking at taverns, coupled with sexual partners after training days or husking bees, or met in a variety of clandestine spaces to read titillating literature. Few young men and women managed to escape from this flourishing subculture. Their ranks included future clergyman such as Joseph Green of Salem Village, who lamented an adolescence spent in the pursuit of “fading vanitys and pleasures of this world”…Likewise, the aspiring but melancholic Maine minister Joseph Moody devoted much of his anguished devotional diary to lamenting a failed courtship and bewailing his inability to control his autoerotic impulses. Even Cotton Mather’s son, Creasy, fathered an illegitimate child. Adolescent rebellion was neither unusual, nor isolated, nor restricted to the unchurched or the ungodly.
Premarital intercourse ranked among the most pervasive forms of rebellious behavior among young people. Rising rates of bridal pregnancy suggest that sex among unmarried men and women was a common aspect of eighteenth-century courtship in an era that witnessed a gradual loosening of social surveillance and regulation. More than three dozen Haverhill residents appeared before the Essex County magistrates during [Rev.] Brown’s pastorate to answer charges of bearing children out of wedlock…
