Charles Jeffery Smith papers

"Some Minits: or a Brief Narrative of the Motions & Strivings of Gods Spirit with my Soul" is a devotional account that Smith "Penned for my own private Benefit and Satisfaction" in August 1758 and "revised & enlarged" in 1760. It contains the history of his spiritual life: his education as a child, the loss of his father, and the "ashmatick disorder" which he often thought might prove fatal to him; the religious lectures he attended as a teenager; his years at Yale College; his eventual spiritual awakening and conviction of sin in the months following his graduation, culminating with his admission into the Church in the spring of 1758. "Jejunationes" is an intimate devotional journal, which Smith kept on his periodic days of "Solemn fasting & deep humiliation" during his travels in New Jersey's Newark Mountains. (September 1760-April 1761).

Smith's four-part diary for 1763-1765 records his daily business and activities, although some entries are devotional in character. "A Diary---No. 1" begins in February 1763 in Lebanon, Connecticut, with Smith's teaching and lecturing duties at Reverend Wheelock's Charity School for Indians, and concludes with his April 1763 journey to Long Island to solicit donations for the school and prepare for his summer mission to the Indians of the Six Nations. The second diary encompasses his travels along the Hudson in July, his itinerancy in Connecticut in August and September, his visit to Long Island in October and November, and the first four months of his preaching "in ye Vacant parts of christs Vineyard," to the "lost sheep...Scattered among the highways & hedges" of New Jersey. During a week-long stay in New York City in December 1763, Smith attended Rev. George Whitfield's sermons and conversed with him on several occasions. "A Diary---No. 3" opens in Egg Harbour, New Jersey, on March 2, 1764. According to Smith's calculations, by the end of March he had traveled 2,300 miles in a year's time. Making his way home to Long Island in the spring, Smith stopped briefly in both Philadelphia and Princeton. The third diary includes his summer visit to Brookhaven, his months in New Windsor, Connecticut, and his return to Brookhaven in September 1764. "A Diary---No. 4," starts on October 7 and details Smith's remaining weeks in Long Island; his hurried trip through New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; his travels along Maryland's Eastern Shore; and his itinerancy in Virginia and North Carolina. By the end of March 1765 he had logged another 2,000 to 3,000 miles. His bouts of sickness and depression had also become progressively more severe. On May 6, 1765, Smith began his journey homeward; his last diary entry dates from June 1, 1765, near Cumberland, Virginia.

An unidentified transcriber copied Smith's four-part diary in 1908 under the direction of an unknown editor, who had used a pencil to mark sections of the original manuscript for omission. The transcriber wrote the copy in brown ink, but noted in pencil where there were omissions. The editor later scratched out these notations with black ink or erased them, but they remain readable. As a result of the editing, many instances of Smith's self-doubt, self-humiliation, and self-defeat are not included in the transcripts, though this emotional history sheds much light on Smith's eventual suicide. The transcriber occasionally made marginal notes about place names, people mentioned, and the changing quality of Smith's handwriting during his times of depression.

For a contemporary account of Smith's suicide, see an August 17, 1770, letter from Charles Chauncey to his father, Elihu Chauncey, in the Chauncey Family Papers in Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.