by Noel Rae
Onesimus.
Like other Puritans, the Rev. Cotton Mather, for many years Boston’s leading clergyman, tried to base his life on the teachings of the Bible. One of his ways of doing so was to utter what he called “ejaculatory prayers.” Thus “upon the sight of a tall man,” his prayer was “Lord, give that man high attainments in Christianity.” If he saw a Negro it would be, “Lord, wash that poor soul white in the blood of thy Son.”
In December, 1706, Mather wrote in his diary, “This day a surprising thing befell me. Some gentlemen of our Church, understanding that I wanted a good servant at the expense of between forty and fifty pounds, purchased for me a very likely slave; a young man who is a Negro of a promising aspect and temper, and this day they presented him unto me. It seems to be a mighty smile of Heaven upon my family; and it arrives at an observable time unto me. I put upon him the name of Onesimus; and I resolved with the help of the Lord, that I would use the best endeavours to make him a servant of Christ.”
Onesimus no doubt already had a name of his own, but whatever it might have been the Rev. Mather would have felt that his choice was an improvement, for the original Onesimus was the subject of one of St. Paul’s Epistles in the New Testament. He had run away from his master, Philemon, and joined Paul, then at Ephesus. Paul converted him and then sent him back with a letter asking Philemon to pardon him for running away and receive him back kindly—“not as a servant, but above a servant, as a beloved brother.” Over the years this story was to be endlessly quoted by pro-slavery clergymen who claimed that since the Apostle sent Onesimus back to his owner, and did not ask Philemon to free him, therefore he, St. Paul—and by extension all the other founding Christians—did not disapprove of slavery.
For the next ten years Mather mentions his Onesimus only occasionally. In a letter to the Royal Society in London about preventing smallpox, he mentions that “my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty intelligent fellow,” had been inoculated in his native Africa, a common practice there but not in Europe. But in the meantime there had been problems, Mather noting in his diary that he had had to keep “a strict eye” on his servant, “especially with regard unto his company.” There had also been “some actions of a thievish aspect.” Nevertheless, Mather persevered in his attempts to make Onesimus “a Servant of Christ,” teaching him the catechism, and how to read and write. But all to no avail, and after ten years together Mather wrote in his diary, “my servant Onesimus proves wicked and grows useless, froward [disobedient] and immorigerous [rude and rebellious].” A separation was negotiated, with Onesimus obtaining his freedom but having to contribute toward the purchase of Obadiah, another slave; also, he still had to perform certain chores such as shoveling snow, fetching water and cutting firewood. And he had to pay back the £5 he had stolen.
Tituba.
Long before his unfortunate experience with Onesimus, the Rev. Cotton Mather had played a major part in promoting the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The trouble in Salem had begun when, in the words of the skeptical Robert Calef, author of More Wonders of the Invisible World, “divers young persons,” including nine year old Betty, daughter of the minister, the Rev. Samuel Parris, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, “began to act after a strange and unusual manner, viz. as by getting into holes, and creeping under chairs and stools, and to use sundry odd postures and antick gestures, uttering foolish, ridiculous speeches, which neither they themselves nor any others could make sense of. The physicians that were called could assign no reason for this; but it seems one of them, having recourse to the old shift, told them he was afraid they were bewitched.” In response, “Mr. Parris invited several neighbouring ministers to join with him in keeping a solemn day of prayer at his own house.”
“A few days before this solemn day of prayer, Mr. Parris’s Indian man and woman made a cake of rye meal, with the children’s water, and baked it in the ashes and, as is said, gave it to the dog; this was done as a means to discover witchcraft; soon after which those ill-affected or afflicted persons named several that they said they saw, when in their fits, afflicting them. The first complained of was the said Indian woman, Tituba,” a slave and maid-of-all-work that the Parris family had brought with them on their return from a sojourn in Barbados.
It then emerged that some time earlier, hoping to foretell the future, Tituba and the two girls had dropped the white of an egg into a glass of water, to see what shape it took. Alarmingly, the shape was that of a coffin, seeming to foretell a death. It was also established that when the cake made of rye meal mixed with the girls’ urine, and known as a “witchcake,” was fed to the Parris dog, in the hope that the dog would reveal who was tormenting the children, the dog refused to eat it. When he heard about the witchcake, the Rev. Mr. Parris punished Tituba with a beating, apparently not for the first time. Soon after, several other girls were afflicted—“bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back gain.”
The question facing the authorities was not whether witchcraft really existed—almost everybody knew that it did—but why it had broken out at this particular time and place. This was where the Rev. Cotton Mather came in. “The New-Englanders,” he wrote in The Wonders of the Invisible World, “are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed when he perceived such a people here.” To assist him in re-establishing his dominion over the American colonies, the Devil “has decoy’d a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures to list themselves in his horrid service, by entering their names in a book.” After meeting in “hellish randezvouses,” these witches “associated themselves to do no less a thing than to destroy the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ in these parts of the world; and in order thereunto, first they each of them have their spectres, or devils,” who “seize poor people about the country with various and bloudy torments.” The object of such persecution was to get the victims “to sign the Devil’s laws in a Spectral Book laid before them.” Once they had signed “they have immediately been released from all their miseries.”
When the court convened on March 1, 1692, Tituba was the first to be examined. Almost the first question put to her—“Why do you hurt these poor Children?”—set the tone for the rest of the proceedings: it was not an inquiry into whether she had done anything wrong, but why. To deny the accusation, which she at first did—“I no hurt them at all”—only made matters worse, for the judges construed denial as defiance. So Tituba, who had spent most of her life as a slave, first in Barbados and then in Salem, and along the way had surely learned how to placate her masters by telling them what they wanted to hear, when asked “Why have you done it?” replied “I can’t tell when the Devil works.” That was better, and soon she was explaining that “the Devil came to me and bid me serve him,” and naming others who also served him. Told to describe the devil, she replied that “sometimes it is like a hog, and sometimes it is like a great black dog.” “What did it say to you?” “The black dog said, Serve me. But I said, I am afraid. He said if I did not he would do worse to me.” Later the dog turned into a man who “had a yellow bird that kept with him.” She had also seen “two rats, a red rat and a black rat,” and they too had told her to serve them.
Tituba also described how she and other witches had traveled to their meetings—“we ride upon sticks and are there presently.” She told of seeing “a thing with a head like a woman, with two legs and wings,” and another “thing all over hairy, all the face hairy, and a long nose,” that “goeth upright and is about two or three foot high.” Also “a tall man with white hair” and wearing black clothes “tell me he god, and I must believe him and serve him six years and he would give me many fine things.” This man had a book and ordered her to “write and set my name to it.” “Did you write?” “Yes, once I made my mark in the book, and made it with red blood.”
Following her testimon
y the jurors resolved “That Tittapa an Indian woman servant to Mr. Samuel Parris of Salem Village … Wickedly & felloniously A Covenant with the Devill did make & Signed the Devills Booke with a marke like A: C by which Wicked Covenanting with the Devill she the said Tittapa is become A detestable Witch.”
More than a hundred others were charged with witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged; one man, who had defied the court by refusing to confess, was pressed to death by being pinioned to the ground and then having heavy stones laid on his chest; several others died in prison. Tituba herself spent over a year there, and according to Calef “lay there till sold for her fees [the cost of being kept in prison, payable even if all charges were dropped]. The account she since gives of it is that her master did beat her, to make her confess and accuse (such as he called) her sister-witches; and that whatsoever she said by way of confessing, or accusing others, was the effect of such usage.”
In the aftermath of the Salem trials there was an attempt to put the blame on Tituba and depict her as some kind of African voodoo witch; but though she may have been partly Negro, she was mostly Arawak, probably born in Guyana before moving to Barbados. As to voodoo, baking a witchcake of rye and urine, and trying to foretell the future by dropping the white of an egg into a glass of water, were traditional English folkloric practices that the colonists had brought over with them.
Samuel Sewall.
Tituba was not the only one to recant. Samuel Sewall, who had been one of the judges passing sentences of death, later came to realize that he had made a terrible mistake and—virtually unique in the history of the judiciary—acknowledged it publicly, once a year standing up in church while the minister read out his confession, taking upon himself “the shame and the blame.”
A few years later, in 1700, Sewall was once again troubled in his conscience, this time by the “numerousness of slaves at this day in the province, and the uneasiness of them under their slavery.” The result was a short pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph (the son of Jacob, who had been sold into Egyptian slavery by his brothers). Sewall based his main argument on the Scriptures: “Originally and naturally, there is no such thing as slavery. Joseph was rightfully no more a slave to his brethren than they were to him; and they had no more authority to sell him than to slay him.… God hath said, He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. (Exodus. 21. 16).”
There were also practical considerations: “All things considered, it would conduce more to the welfare of the province to have white servants for a term of years than to have slaves for life. Few can endure to hear of a Negro’s being made free, and indeed they can seldom use their freedom well; yet their continual aspiring after their forbidden liberty renders them unwilling servants. And there is such a disparity in their conditions, colour and hair, that they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly families, to the peopling of the land; but still remain in our body politic as a kind of extravasat [alien] blood.”
Finally: “Our blessed Saviour has altered the measures of the ancient love-song, and set it to a most excellent new tune, which all ought to be ambitious of learning. (Matt. 5.43. John 13.34.) [‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another.’] These Ethiopians, as black as they are, seeing they are the sons and daughters of the first Adam, the brethren and sisters of the last Adam [Christ], and the offspring of God, they ought to be treated with a respect agreeable.”
As he ruefully noted in his diary, Sewall’s tract was greeted with “frowns and hard words.” Soon a counter-blast appeared, The Negro Christianized, by the Rev. Cotton Mather, who in no way regretted his part in the Salem witch trials. Like Sewall, Mather also quoted the commandment to love thy neighbor, agreed that “thy Negro is thy neighbour,” but rather than concluding that he should be treated with respect, saw it as an obligation to convert him—“Canst thou love thy Negro and be willing to see him lie under the rage of sin, and the wrath of God? Canst thou love him and yet refuse to do anything that his miserable soul may be rescued from eternal miseries?”
Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Samuel Sewall was one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, a role he came to regret. Eight years later he produced a pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph, which criticized slavery on biblical grounds; it was soon rebutted by the Rev. Cotton Mather, Boston’s leading clergyman and an unrepentant supporter of the Salem Trials.
As usual with the Puritans, good deeds would have their rewards here on earth, as well as in heaven. “The pious masters that have instituted their servants in Christian piety will even in this life have sensible recompense … Your servants will be the better servants for being made Christian.” They would become “exceeding faithful in their business, and afraid of speaking or doing anything that may justly displease you.”
But from the owners’ point of view there was this risk: “If the Negroes are Christianized they will be baptized; and their baptism will presently entitle them to their freedom; so our money is thrown away.” Not so, said Mather. “What law is it that sets the baptized slave at liberty? Not the law of Christianity; that allows slavery … Will the canon law do it? No … Will the civil law do it? No. Tell, if you can, any part of Christendom wherein slaves are not frequently to be met withal.” In sum: “The baptized then are not thereby entitled unto their liberty.” (This view was later endorsed by the Bishop of London, who in 1727 addressed a public letter to The Masters and Mistresses of Families in the English Plantations Abroad: “Christianity, and the embracing of the Gospel, does not make the least Alteration in Civil Property, or in any of the Duties which belong to Civil Relations; but in all these Respects it continues Persons just in the same State as it found them. The Freedom which Christianity gives is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan, and from the Dominion of Men’s Lusts and Passions and inordinate Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptiz’d and becoming Christians makes no Manner of Change in it.”)
Phillis Wheatley.
Known in her time as the “Ethiopian poetess,” Phillis had been enslaved in Africa when aged about seven, and shipped directly to Boston where, dressed only “in a quantity of dirty carpet,” she was fortunate enough to be bought on arrival by a kindly and prosperous family called Wheatley. “I was a poor little outcast and a stranger when she [Mrs. Wheatley] took me in,” wrote Phillis in 1774, when she was not yet twenty, “not only into her house, but I presently became a sharer in her most tender affections. I was treated by her more like her child than her servant; no opportunity was left unimproved in giving me the best advice; but in terms how tender! how engaging! This I hope ever to keep in remembrance.” Phillis was very pious, and at the age of sixteen was admitted a member of the Old South Church, although, like all other slaves, she had to sit up in the gallery. She was also very bright, studied the Bible, Latin and Greek, and then began writing poetry. Though praised by many, her works were skillful rather than inspired. Her most famous was titled On Being Brought from Africa to America, and echoed the argument, often used by slave-traders, that to bring Africans to this country was to do them a great favor, since only here could they be exposed to the Word of God and given the chance to become Christians. (The poem begins: “‘Twas Mercy brought me from my Pagan land/ Taught my benighted Soul to understand/ That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too …” and concludes: “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain/ May be refined and join the angelic Strain.”)
Another poem, an ode on the death of the renowned evangelist George Whitfield, whom she had once heard preach to a vast crowd on Boston Common, was forwarded to the Countess of Huntingdon, the “patriarchess of the Methodists.” As a consequence, when the Wheatleys, thinking that a sea voyage would be good for her fragile health, sent Phillis to England, she was invited to meet that august personage, who also helped to get her poems published. As a phenomenon—a black bluestocking—she was taken up by
London society, was presented with a copy of Paradise Lost by the Lord Mayor, and was escorted by the abolitionist Granville Sharp to see the lions in the menagerie at the Tower of London. There were even plans for her to be presented to the king and queen, but then came news came that Mrs. Wheatley was sick, so Phillis hurried back to Boston. Meanwhile, although her volume of poems got only condescending reviews in England (“of no astonishing powers of genius,” said one), Boston booksellers loyally ordered three hundred copies, a huge number for that time. But then came the Tea Party, followed by the Coercive Acts which closed the port, and all imports, including Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral had to be sent back.
But that did not deter her from writing. Soon after taking command of the American army outside Boston in the fall of 1775, George Washington received an ode whose opening lines ran: “Celestial choir! Enthron’d in realms of light,/ Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write./ While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,/ She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms …” The general, or more probably one of his staff officers, sent a courteous note thanking the author for “the elegant lines,” complimenting her on “her great poetical talents,” extending the invitation that “if you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses,” and signing himself “with great respect, Your obedient humble servant.” Such a meeting seems never to have taken place, though if it had, what on earth would the literal-minded, fox-hunting, slave-owning Father of his Country have found to say to the Ethiopian poetess?
After that it was all downhill. The Wheatleys died and she became free, but the loss was greater than the gain. She married a grocer called John Peters, a handsome ne’er-do-well who later went bankrupt. Unlike Phillis, who “knew her place,” and when dining with white people insisted on eating at a side table, Peters had ideas “above his station” (he “wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out the gentleman”). No one wanted to publish her more recent poems. Two of her three children died early and she ended her days as a housemaid scrubbing the floors in a cheap boarding house. When she died, at the age of thirty-one, her third child was so sickly that it survived her by only a few hours. “It is painful to dwell upon the closing scene,” wrote the editor of a later edition of her works. “In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis, lay the dying mother and the wasting child. The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and the good, who had graced the ancient halls of Old England, and rolled about in the splendid equipages of the proud nobles of Britain, was now numbering the last hours of life in a state of most abject misery, surrounded by the emblems of squalid poverty.”