Cotton Mather's diary records how 13 of his 15 children died. Just after his wife and two daughters had died of measles, 'My lovely Jerusha expired.
She was two years and about seven months old... I begg'd, I begg'd, that such a bitter Cup, and the Death of that lovely child might pass from me...
Just before she died, she asked me to pray with her (and) the Minute she died, she said, That she would go to Jesus Christ.'
Until around the mid- to late 1700s, dominant Puritan ideas that babies were born full of original sin led adults to punish children harshly, to beat out the devil and break the child's will in order to save their soul.
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