Isaac Chauncy (1670-1745) was born in Stratford, Connecticut, to the Reverend Israel and Mary (Nichols) Chauncy. Like his father before him, Isaac attended Harvard College. He graduated in 1693 and received an M.A. in 1694. He briefly taught school in Stratford before accepting the invitation from Hadley, Massachusetts, to serve as the town's minister where he spent the rest of his life. He married Sarah Blackleach of Stafford, Connecticut, in 1708. The couple had 11 children before Sarah's death in 1720; Isaac subsequently married Abiel Metcalf, a widow from Falmouth, Massachusetts. (Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley's Harvard Graduates (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1951), Vol. IV, pp. 160-162.)
As Isaac's healthy deteriorated in the last years of his life, the town ordained the Reverend Chester Williams in 1741 but continued to pay Chauncy's salary until his death in 1745. This decision and a gravestone inscription suggest that he was a beloved and popular minister. The epitaph describes Chauncey as "a truly peaceable and catholick spirit, a good scholar, an eloquent orator, an able divine, a lively, pathetick preacher, a burning and shining light in this candlestick, an exemplary christian, an Isralite indeed, in whom was no guile."
There is no mention in these glowing tributes that the large Chauncy household included nine enslaved people. In his History of Hadley published postuhumously in 1863, Sylvester Judd noted that the Reverend Chauncey "offended against right, by holding persons in bondage: enslaving Arthur Prutt and his wife Joan who had seven children." Chauncy likely bequeathed Arthur and Joan's son, Caesar, to his son Josiah Chauncey. (Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley (Springfield, MA: H.R. Hunting & Company, 1912 ediction) p. 328)
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