What Were Funerals Like In Colonial America?

On the surface, funerals seem timeless. When a person dies in a community, some number of people gather to manage the body, commemorate the deceased's life, and mourn together. The details may change from generation to generation, but the basic format remains familiar.

But those details can make a serious difference. If you were to attend a funeral in colonial America, for instance, you would likely encounter practices that would seem unfamiliar to you. We're not just talking about a minister standing in front of everyone wearing a wig (or denouncing the fashionable headgear), either. Puritan services from the early years of American colonialism could be nearly silent affairs, while other people in the community might find themselves subject to segregation, sumptuary laws, and a flood of commemorative gloves.

Taking a closer look at how funerals happened during this era gives us a surprising level of insight into colonial society in general, from its start in the early 17th century to the waning decades of the 18th century. Here's what it may have been like to witness a funeral in the American colonies.

Because so many early New England communities were downright frantic to avoid the barest whiff of Catholicism — they had, after all, traveled across an entire ocean to escape that sort of thing — Puritan funerals were largely silent. Early settlements in places like Ipswich, Massachusetts didn't brook remembrances like eulogies or sermons related to the deceased. After a procession to the graveyard, a few words may have been uttered at the burial, but that was about it. If someone was of sufficiently high standing, a sermon might be preached at some point after their death, but it would have been folded into a regular service lest anyone think the deceased was too special.

However, even the seemingly immovable Puritans changed as time went on. Perhaps the silences started to get awkward or mourners felt that a sober, close-lipped service wasn't good enough for their loved one. As the 17th century came to a close, people indulged more in remembrances, eulogies, special sermons, and even sometimes embalmed the dead to give everyone more time to mark the occasion of someone's passing.

Of course, Puritans weren't the only people who began to colonize North America, even if they might have wished that weren't the case. Over in what's now Albany, New York down to Delaware, the Dutch had put down roots beginning in the early years of the 17th century. Naturally, they brought many customs with them, including a funeral tradition that had a grim figure appearing occasionally on the doorstep.

The spectral personage was actually a messenger dressed all in black, known as an aanspreker. His job was to dress up, go from home to home, and formally invite members of a household to a funeral. Given that you simply did not attend a funeral without being asked first (at least unless you wanted to completely tank your social standing), the aanspreker was a vital component of funerals and mourning in New Amsterdam. Though they started off as general workers who also did most of the grave digging and burial ground maintenance, they eventually became local minor officials who could command a decent fee for hoofing it out to far-flung homes while wearing formal wear. And, of course, if one aanspreker was good, why not two or even more? For especially wealthy dead folks in later decades of the colonial period, a whole team of the inviters might parade through town, ostentatiously mourning and delivering the news.

Initially, the dead of colonial America were laid beneath simple wooden markers or, as some historians have guessed, their graves might be marked by nothing at all. It was in line with the unadorned Puritan aesthetic, but eventually, even many Puritans had enough of the hardline way of things. Gradually, grave markers in the colonies began to get more spendy, transforming from rough-hewn slabs of stone to intricate monuments crafted by master stone carvers. They also tended to include stark reminders of mortality, like the winged skull commonly known as a death's head (sometimes also shown with crossed bones). 

Soon, other imagery began to join the mix, including hourglasses, coffins, and inscriptions that went from a simple name and set of dates to reminders of the reader's looming death (including the ever-popular "memento mori"). As time went on, later monuments softened the message and got downright flowery, with poetic epitaphs and more comforting images of willows, urns, and baby-faced cherubs.

As the North American colonies became more prosperous, it was possible for skilled stone carvers to build a serious reputation. Many developed a unique style that researchers have been able to link to names and workshops throughout New England and beyond.

Though it may seem like the highly religious and conservative Puritans dominated the colonial period, not everyone was on board. There were the Pilgrims, who had arrived about a decade earlier than the Puritans and Quakers, another group of religious dissenters who butted heads with the Puritans. There was even a small population of Catholic settlers in the British colonies, as well as the indigenous people and enslaved Africans who had their own funeral customs. It's no wonder that colonial funerals soon began to move on from the unadorned ceremonies favored by Puritans.

By 1717, the death of Waitstill Winthrop, grandson of Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, was occasion for much pomp. His funeral procession included drummers, military personnel with shiny new weapons, and expensive gifts. Waitstill's funeral cost more than 600 pounds (one-fifth of his estate) and exceeded the annual tax revenue of pretty much anywhere in the colonies outside of Boston. As with other upper-class funerals, family members of Winthrop may have sported mourning clothes of black cloth, while the dead might be conveyed to the graveyard now by carriage, which could be outfitted with a team of horses specially dressed for the occasion in black.

Funerals were also getting louder. Besides drums, the occasions might also include trumpeting, the tolling of bells, and the firing of guns. Even John Winthrop's funeral was reportedly marked by rounds fired over his grave, to the tune of a full barrel and a half of gunpowder.

It's understandable that grieving family and friends might want a remembrance of their lost loved one. While today we might look fondly at photographs or even claim a keepsake or two, colonial funeral attendees might expect something more. By the 18th century, those attending an upper-class funeral simply had to have gloves. Meant as a memorial keepsake, the gloves might have been paid for out of the deceased's estate and were typically handed out in a hierarchical fashion — the most important people, like close family, would get their pairs first. Sometimes, other attendees wouldn't get gloves, while others who couldn't make it to the service would still receive their pair or some other remembrance in the mail. Yet others got their gloves ahead of time as an invitation to the funeral.

These gloves might be cherished and passed down amongst family for quite a long time. They could have been a bit of a money-making opportunity for people like Boston minister Andrew Eliot, who received nearly 3,000 pairs of funeral gloves over his 32-year career and sold some during the latter half of the 18th century.

This wasn't merely an occasion for callow gift-grabbing, either. In The William and Mary Quarterly, Steven C. Bullock and Sheila McIntyre argue that this practice also helped to build and reinforce social networks in the colonies. In a world where social standing and community support were vital, spending extra on funeral gloves could be a surprisingly big deal.

African people forcibly brought to the North American colonies to work as slaves first arrived in 1625 in New Amsterdam. By the time English settlers took over the colony and named it New York, a small community of free Black people had formed there, too.

The funerals of the enslaved were subject to tight regulations as the enslaver officials feared uprisings organized at social events such as these. Some communities limited the number of mourners who were allowed at funerals, while others required passes. In 1687 Virginia, the Northern Neck region even saw legislation that outlawed slave funerals entirely.

However, funeral traditions persisted well into the depths of 19th-century enslavement, indicating that earlier generations of enslaved people weren't about to let their traditions fall by the wayside. These included practices that can reasonably be linked back to African funeral traditions. According to David R. Roediger in The Massachusetts Review, this included the practice of allowing only a small subset of people to wash a body, while everyone else strictly avoided touching remains until after this step was completed. 

Some individuals buried in what's now called the African Burial Ground in New York City were also found with coins, beads, and shells in their coffins, perhaps speaking to funeral traditions carried over from their ancestral homelands. Back in 1602, Pieter de Marees wrote that Akan-speaking people in what's now largely Ghana buried the dead with goods meant to help them in the next world.

Even the bare-bones Puritans needed a way to mourn the loss of a loved one and mark a major event in their communities. But not everyone was accorded a memorial or even a proper burial as the colonists saw it. For people who were believed to have violated some of the most closely held rules of a community, a simple grave would have offered too much respect. Instead, they were subject to what's sometimes called a deviant burial, in which normal burial practices are almost entirely ignored. In other societies, this might include ritualized violence enacted on a corpse, as when someone drove a stake into the remains of a suspected vampire or a person who died by suicide was buried at a crossroads and not a church-sanctioned graveyard.

In colonial America, the most notorious examples of deviant burials belong to the victims of the Salem witch trials. Though there is no official record of what happened to the people who were falsely accused of witchcraft and then hanged, they almost certainly would have been left somewhere near the execution site on the outskirts of town. No one would have seriously proposed burial in a sanctioned cemetery like the town's Charter Street Cemetery. But local legend has it that family members of at least three of the victims went to the spot under cover of darkness to exhume the bodies of their loved ones and give them a secret, but somewhat more proper burial elsewhere.

While colonial mourners would go about procuring new sets of somber clothes — assuming they had the means to do so — they weren't the only ones getting dressed up for a funeral. Textiles would be just about everywhere, with black cloths sometimes draped over the pulpit where a minister would give his sermon and bits of black ribbon wrapped around all sorts of gear to give an appropriately gloomy aesthetic. A purpose-built bier meant to hold the coffin during a funeral was also draped in a dark fabric called a pall (or bier- or mort-cloth) that was sometimes owned by a large enough town.

Even homes could be wrapped in cloth to show that their occupants were in the depths of mourning. Around Hartford, Connecticut, mirrors, pictures, and various tchotchkes around presumably well-to-do homes were covered up in cloth on the occasion of a funeral. Some Philadelphians even reportedly went so far as to wrap their shutters in black cloth for up to a year. In 1759, the high-ranking family of military commander Sir William Pepperell was recorded as having wrapped just about everything in their house in dull, black fabric, including family portraits that were temporarily hidden from view.

In colonial America, just about everyone was buried. Alternative ways of dealing with the dead, like cremation, were still many decades away from being considered acceptable. But where, exactly, one might be buried was a subject that had much more room for variation. In the larger cities of the colonies, such as Boston, elites might be buried next to a major church or even beneath the floors of these sacred spaces. In St. Paul's Church in Eastchester, New York, minister Thomas Standard was buried directly beneath the church, a mark of honor that was hard-earned for an Anglican preacher who once butted heads with Puritan locals at the beginning of his career.

Smaller communities might have a common burial ground or churchyard associated with a house of worship. In Williamsburg, Virginia, free and enslaved Black people established the First Baptist Church in 1776. Besides worshiping there, parishioners also buried their dead nearby, as a modern excavation uncovered evidence of at least 63 burials next to the original church as of 2023. Meanwhile, some of the rural dead might be placed in small family plots located right on the farm, leaving the deceased resting fairly close to home in a quiet (and, eventually, sometimes forgotten) section of the property.

In contrast to earlier Puritan affairs that were all about getting listeners into a quivering state of anxiety over imminent hellfire, later colonial funerals were quite a bit cheerier, comparatively speaking. Funeral sermons gave ministers a chance to boost Christian doctrine by talking about the deceased's good example. As colony communities made it further into the 18th century, mourners were more likely to focus on comforting scenes of their loved ones in heaven. They, too, were more likely to expect to meet up again with their loved ones after death, as hellfire was less of a given and the Calvinist notion of predestination was less prevalent.

Graveyards soon reflected the change, too. Stark death's heads and bones carved into gravestones were steadily replaced by softer pictures like willows and classically-inspired urns. Meanwhile, the text carved on those stones began to more obviously reference souls, implying that something of the dead continued on in a happier afterlife, where they waited for their still-living family to join them one day.

Even Cotton Mather, the big-name Puritan minister who was entrenched in the old way of doing things, changed with the times. In his 1704 sermon for the funeral of Sarah Leveret of Boston, spoke of the deceased woman's "exemplary piety" and comforted mourners with a final image of her entering heaven where "God has there wiped all Tears from her Eyes. We must have them in Ours, till our Arrival thither after her."