One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  That same day, the chief of the local Patawomeck tribe, drawn by the sight of the ship, came to the colony to inquire about future possibilities of commerce. The English worried that the “heathen… would surprise us” by bringing violence to their transactions, yet they were oblivious of the fact that the day’s earlier trade had already ensured violence for generations to come. This was not the beginning of slavery in America—as Mustafa Zemmouri and the thousands of other Africans and Indians forced into lives of servitude by the Spanish attest. Yet that day in 1619 marked the onset in the English colonies of a cancerous economic system built upon the labor of those who would not at all benefit from it. And from that first cell, the system metastasized.

  The earliest Africans in Massachusetts are thought to have arrived not long after those in Virginia. The colonist Samuel Maverick, who arrived in 1624, is often cited as the first slave owner in New England, and he was certainly the first on record who attempted to breed the human beings he held in bondage like livestock. On one known occasion he even commanded the rape of one of his servants by another. By the end of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first decade, Boston had built slaving ships of its own, gathering its supply from the usual ports in West Africa, and then from as far off as Madagascar when the local traders ran afoul of the English and Dutch monopolies on the trade. We know of the city’s first recorded slave transaction from the pen of none other than Governor John Winthrop, who wrote of a ship called the Desire arriving in the colony with a shipment of “some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes, etc.,” just eight years after he had proclaimed his settlement a city upon a hill.

  This event marks the origin of the slave trade in the city that would be its northern hub for a century, but it obscures the fact that forced labor in the early colonies was not wholly based on race. Three-quarters of those who came to North America in the colonial period did so as servants laboring under some measure of coercion. Many were pressed into labor for a period of years, while others faced life sentences. Caught between these two conditions, a servant might begin his indenture with an understanding that it would one day come to an end, only to discover that he had permanently lost his freedom. As for the Africans on the Desire, they had been acquired through a direct trade demonstrating, as Tituba’s enslavement later would affirm, that slavery was not yet entirely a matter of black and white: Indians captured in New England in the aftermath of the 1636 Pequot War were transported to Barbados, where Africans were shipped back in return.

  When Massachusetts became the first colony to formally legalize slavery, it ironically did so within a document that otherwise was remarkably liberal for the time. The “Body of Liberties” adopted by the Massachusetts General Court in 1641 amounted to a bill of rights for settlers, enumerating the freedoms of the male residents (“Every man of or within this Jurisdiction shall have free libertie”) while outlining protections for women (“Every marryed woeman shall be free from bodilie correction or stripes by her husband”) and indentured servants (“Servants that have served deligentlie and faithfully to the benefitt of their maisters seaven yeares, shall not be sent away emptie”). Even domestic animals were offered relief (“No man shall exercise any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use”). Yet this same document vouchsafed the business of enslavement with a concern for justice that is difficult to find sincere: “There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.”

  With this separation of the notions of servitude and bondage, slavery took a significant step toward becoming the racially defined condition it is generally thought of as today. Thereafter, with few exceptions, Europeans would be servants able to work off their indenture; Indians and Africans would be slaves. Combined with the perceived threat of keeping captured Indians in Puritan homes during a time of intermittent war, the Body of Liberties set in motion a transition to a largely African labor force in the colonies.

  At the height of slavery in colonial America, those of African descent amounted to 20 percent of the total population. In the south it was far greater—by the time the “surprising Thing befel” Mather, Africans were the majority in the Carolinas. In Mather’s city, the enslaved population increased exponentially during the minister’s own life: dozens at the time of his birth in 1663, around 500 when he acquired his own in 1706, more than 2,000 in 1720, when Boston was home to just 12,000 men and women.

  Eventually we can see the religious influence of this population in the ritual patterns of African American churches. The call-and-response, to cite an iconic example, was noted in gatherings of the enslaved, who still spoke the languages they had spoken when they arrived. Before the practice was Christianized and took on the form most familiar today, it was part of a religious culture that endured far longer than usually supposed. Even a century later, the British-born architect of the United States Capitol, Benjamin Latrobe, made note of it while traveling in the south. Following sounds he thought must be horses galloping, he entered a public square in New Orleans and was astonished to see several hundred people gathered and performing what seemed to him a strange ceremony, moving in circles to a slow, steady rhythm.

  The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument.… The women squalled out a burden to the playing at intervals, consisting of two notes, as the negroes, working in our cities, respond to the song of their leader. A man sang an uncouth song to the dancing which I suppose was in some African language…

  Around this same time, the African-born and their descendants began to convert in large numbers, but only a small fraction of the enslaved population arrived in the colonies as Christians. Even by the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of Africans in America were neither born into nor converted to any denomination of Christianity. Indeed, in many colonies, prohibitions limiting the education of the enslaved, and the supposed scruples of Christian slave owners who did not think it right to hold a fellow Christian in bondage became de facto restrictions on the spread of Christianity as well. Likewise, laws proscribing the gathering of Africans—often passed in response to scenes like that recorded by Latrobe—determined that any kind of slave meeting, religious or otherwise, must be done in secret.

  What, then, were the faiths practiced by the earliest Africans in the colonies? It is perhaps the greatest of forgotten influences on American life and culture that 20 percent or more were Muslims, about whom there is more to be said in a later chapter. Most others were followers of traditional West African belief systems, perhaps the largest number of which were followers of Yoruba, with its pantheon to rival any list of deities in Greek or Roman mythology, or indeed the thirty-seven gods Roger Williams counted among the Narragansett Indians. Other traditions included Obeah and Akan, both of which underwent hybridization in America, where formerly vital distinctions between tribal identities became far less important than fostering a shared community of the enslaved that might contribute to their survival.

  This powerless population is not usually seen as having had a religious impact on those around them. But, truly, given the numbers, how can that not have been the case? While these men and women would live apart and create cultures all their own in the larger plantations in the south, in the north—in Boston, for instance—enslaved Africans lived in close quarters with white families, as was the case with Mather and his “gift.”

  Though most of the voices of the enslaved are lost to history, we still can find evidence of the influence exerted by their beliefs and practices. This was certainly true in that city upon a hill, where the most famous clergyman of his day had a world-expanding interaction with a religious tradition very different from his own.

  The young man purchased for Mather was African-born, “a Negro of a promising Aspect and Temper.”

  This perk from his congregation had come to Mather “without any Application of mine to them for su
ch a Thing,” but he had certainly been in the market. It was well known, he wrote, “that I wanted a good Servant at the expence of between forty and fifty Pounds.” Mather was apparently quite pleased both by the show of respect from his followers and by the addition of another set of working hands to his household. “It seems to be a mighty Smile of Heaven upon my Family,” he reflected. “I putt 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.”

  The name he chose says a great deal about how he saw both this young man and himself. In the writings of Saint Paul, “Onesimus” was the name of an escaped slave who sought out the Apostle for protection from his master. Paul at the time was imprisoned for his preaching, and so he took the efforts of the runaway to be a sign of great devotion. After converting him to Christianity, Paul wrote a letter to Philemon, the aggrieved slave master: “I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.” The Greek root of the name Onesimus (onesis) means useful, and so Paul puns when he says, “Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.”

  Elsewhere in Mather’s writings we can see that the story of Saint Paul and Onesimus made an impression on him. When he visited the colony prison to give solace to convicts, he preached to them from the Book of Psalms and reduced them to “floods of tears.” He was himself no less moved. “Who can tell, but that I have this day found an Onesimus?” he enthused. “Who can tell, but some Wretches, by running into Prison, may run into the Arms of Christ, and His victorious Grace!”

  Mather imagined himself another Paul of Tarsus, whose exploits as a preacher, he wrote, had “more true glory in them, than all the acts of those execrable plunderers and murderers, and irresistible banditti of the world, which have been dignified by the name of ‘conquerors.’ ” For years he had been in search of an Onesimus of his own whom he might turn toward the faith.

  Whether or not the man he renamed Onesimus became a Christian remains unknown. Mather was a proponent of the conversion of Africans, so it is likely an effort was made, but no mention of his baptism occurs in Mather’s diary. He does mention the conversion of later African-born servants, so it seems likely that Onesimus held fast to whatever beliefs he had brought with him to Boston. Subsequent events would show him to be a man proud to share ideas of his own.

  Once installed in the Mather home, Onesimus mainly performed daily tasks and lived in a room within the house. He thus had a front-row seat the next time tragedy visited the minister’s life. Mather had remarried by then, and in 1713 his wife had twins. A measles outbreak in the city took all three.

  It was likely in the aftermath of this loss that Mather spoke with Onesimus about the servant’s experience with illness. Any student of New England history—or an author of it, as Mather himself was—could have done the math and guessed that smallpox might soon return to Boston. Mather asked the African-born man, who by then had lived in his home for seven years, if he had ever had the disease.

  “Yes and no,” Onesimus cryptically replied.

  Momentarily confusing Mather, he went on to explain that there was a practice in the place of his birth by which healthy young people were exposed to fluids from the bodies of the ill in order to protect them from the disease. So treated, they became sick for a time themselves, but with a far lower rate of full-blown affliction. What he was describing, whether he used the word or not, was an early form of inoculation—more technically, variolation.

  When Onesimus displayed on his arm a flash of scarred skin where the operation had been performed, it was as revelatory as those words of God on a printed page Mather had stumbled upon more than ten years before. How could he not have recalled them? Was he not a nobleman of a sort? Was he not—as Saint Paul had been—a father of sorts to this Onesimus? And here he was hearing the impossible news that a son infected with the dreaded disease had lived, that there was life to be found even in the shadow of a pestilence. This late-coming miracle would not bring any of his loved ones back to life—some signs and wonders belonged to God alone—but it did promise, as Christ had to that other nobleman, a reprieve from certain death.

  Onesimus’s report so excited Mather that he sought out further accounts of the novel procedure. Though it was unheard of in practice among the physicians of New England, he discovered it was not entirely unknown elsewhere in Christendom and was, in fact, widely practiced throughout what Puritans knew as the heathen world. From Turkey to West Africa to the Levant, accounts of inoculation’s success reached European medical journals, where Mather himself later read of them. After studying reports printed in London about the practice, he wrote to the publisher and claimed a small portion of the glory of this discovery for himself.

  Many months before I mett with any Intimations of treating ye Small-Pox with the method of inoculation any where in Europe, I had from a servant of my own an account of its being practised in Africa. Enquiring of my Negro man, Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow, Whether he had ever had the Small-Pox, he answered, both Yes and No; and then told me that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of ye Small-Pox and would forever preserve him from it; adding that it was often used among ye Guramantese and whoever had ye Courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion. He described ye Operation to me, and shew’d me in his Arm ye Scar which it had left upon him.

  From his letter we learn a number of things—some intended, some not. Mather regarded Onesimus as intelligent, and trusted his account of the events of his youth enough to relay it to medical professionals whom he wished to impress with his own comprehension of this surgical innovation. We also learn something about Mather’s opinion of himself as not merely a preacher from the hinterlands but an intellect worthy of being heard by the better minds of London. More importantly, we learn where in Africa Onesimus came into contact with this practice. By “Guramantese,” it is possible Mather was using an archaic name to refer to the Sahara tribe occupying present-day Libya and Sudan. Given the trends in the enslaved population at the time, however, it is more likely Onesimus was a member of the Coramantee, residents of the West African region known as the Gold Coast. In either case, we know that Mather, scourge of witches and heretics, had become enamored with a practice his fellow Puritans would undoubtedly consider a heathen custom.

  In fact, he did not know the half of its non-Christian roots. A letter written in Arabic in 1728 refers to the practice as “ancient in the Kingdoms of Tripoli, Tunis and Algier.” Historians of science also note that there is some evidence of the invention of inoculation in China seven hundred years before, as a mixture of medicine and magic performed by Taoist healers and Buddhist monks. Carried over trade routes throughout Asia into Africa, the practice found its way into the medical and religious tradition wherever it proved effective. It was not merely the custom of one set of heathens—it was the custom of nearly all of them.

  In a time and place when even earthquakes were treated as unalterable divine judgment, the suggestion that one could counteract the obvious will of God was blasphemy at best, demonic at worst. Manipulation of the physical world went far beyond the sin of telling the future. The latter simply hoped to know what Providence had in store for humanity; the former presumed to control it.

  It is no surprise, then, that Mather did not immediately shout from the rooftops of Boston his opinions concerning inoculation. It was one thing to write a letter to a medical society in London, quite another to announce to his fellow ministers that he had been taking lessons in the healing arts from an unbaptized African. It would take another five years, and another outbreak of the disease, before Mather would share what he had learned from the man from the Coramantee. And when he did, smallpox would prove to be a sickness with theological implications that threatened to put him on the wrong side of the first capital law listed in the Body of Liberties: “If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, bu
t the lord god, he shall be put to death.”

  In the Gold Coast of Onesimus’s youth, smallpox was treated as both a religious problem and a matter of public health. The spiritual traditions of the area included paying homage to (while guarding against) a divine manifestation of the disease known as Sopona. So ubiquitous was the threat of sickness that this was also the god of the earth, who became known among Africans in America as Babalu Aye. A version of this god exists in all the West African religions, suggesting that the need to make spiritual sense of the tragedy transcended tribal and linguistic differences. In none of these traditions, moreover, was the god of smallpox thought to be so powerful that he could not be influenced through human effort. In fact, he was the god equally of sickness and healing, a dual nature that provided a framework for understanding how gathering fluids from the afflicted might also provide a cure.

  Sure enough, the procedure Onesimus described to Mather seems to have been not just medical but religious. It was not only a rudimentary surgical procedure but a ritual. Another enslaved African in Boston reported that a young man would go through the ordeal of having infected blood inserted by a blade into his own flesh on the eve of making a long journey. This was undertaken at times of transition—a rite of passage. Elsewhere in Africa, a French doctor in Ethiopia later observed that “mass inoculations took on the character of a religious festival.”