A sea captain, home from a very long voyage, anchored in the harbor and raced toward town to find his family.
It just happened to be a Sunday in New Haven, and he found his wife on the way to church. Overcome with emotion, he kissed her, but paid the price. The captain was fined by the church fathers for expressing such emotion on the Lord’s day.
Sam Woodworth, poet, printer, hustling writer, and our peripatetic guide to New Haven in the early 19th century, with whom we’re spending time this week, relates that story — and that of our city’s former “blue laws” — in his fascinating notes on his poem “New-Haven.”
Click on the audio above to join me in the Local History Room of the New Haven Free Public Library for a reading of the section in question on today’s edition of “This Day In New Haven History.”
Sam surveyed the Green quiet on a Sunday in 1808 and wondered, “Is there not one being not at prayer besides myself?”
Then he spied a guy on the margin of the Green who seemed to be in defiance of the blue laws requiring all inhabitants to be in church. Woodworth, from more cosmopolitan, less religious Boston, had this amusing observation:
Onward he moves with majesty of pace,
Walks thro’ each street, and searches every place.
What would he do? — Ah, by his looks, I fear
He’ll rob a dwelling while the coast is clear.
Check out the episode for more of Woodworth’s amusing and castigating take on the early blue laws. He by the way informs us that “blue laws” get their name from the color of the paper on which they were printed.
He’s a printer by trade; Sam should know.