“Upon the approach of the disorder,” another traveler noted, “the people of the country and villages collect their children and those who have not had it into one gang, for the purpose of having them inoculated… they then march together to the neighbouring town, or wherever the disorder may have made its appearance.” Following this procession, they would find a priest and bid him to drain fluid from the person in town covered with the most sores. The priest collected this infected material into an eggshell and used it to anoint an X-shaped wound freshly cut into all those who wished to have protection. “After this operation,” this observer goes on to say, “they all return home, singing and shouting praises.”
According to other accounts, there were many approaches to inoculation: the direct sharing of blood, the sprinkling of infected material with powder (scabs ground together with roots) on skin or cloths, the use of a “magic stick” to apply pus from pox vesicles mixed with honey or butter. What these methods have in common seems to be the clearly defined religious role of those who performed the procedure. In later ethnographic accounts of inoculation in West Africa, European chroniclers have referred to those who oversee the rite in Ghana as “fetish women,” the standard description of a priestess of traditional religious rites. In accounts of the same practice performed in Nigeria, it was said that the people who performed it were called mallams—men schooled in the Quran and other sacred texts. Among the Yoruba people, this work has been associated with blacksmiths, but even in that case inoculation involved someone with a clear religious role in the culture. Like those behiques who made the zemies among the Taino, West African blacksmiths were not merely craftsmen. As shapers of the material world, they were also conduits to divinity—specifically to Ogun, the god of removing difficulties and smoothing paths to reach a desired result. In the Obeah tradition, to which most Coramantee like Onesimus seemed to have ascribed, those who combined traditional magic and healing arts were called obayas. Like the priest in the Ethiopian traveler’s account, obayas mixed human materials and natural elements into powders and potions they considered sacred, and these homegrown remedies sometimes actually worked.
Of course, no matter how effective any of these methods might have been, Puritans would have called such people witches and worse. Yet while practitioners of Yoruba or Obeah certainly indulged in a measure of magical thinking we would today call superstition, they also, at the same time, held a more flexible understanding of ways in which acts of God might be counteracted than did rigid believers in divine omnipotence and predestination. “Heathen custom” though inoculation may have been, there was an assumption of human agency in the practice that was tremendously appealing to a man like Cotton Mather—though not immediately to many who shared his faith.
Smallpox returned to Boston the same way earlier catalysts of religious change had: by ship. While Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Tituba had walked off their various vessels on their own, however, the pox came ashore along with a human carrier long since forgotten. Within days of the arrival of the HMS Seahorse from the West Indies, Bostonians began to report cases of the familiar illness, causing much “consternation and disorder.” The disease had ravaged the city nineteen years before. Everyone over the age of thirty remembered it, and those too young to remember were not immune to the terror that spread as if by contagion.
Mather had seen three outbreaks in his lifetime and had watched the losses mount every time. By then his was a life full of this kind of ordeal. Of his fifteen children, nine died before adulthood. His father, too, was nearing death. After a long career, with the peak of his influence seemingly long behind him, Mather felt he had little to lose and much to gain by advocating a practice he knew his countrymen would dismiss as a product of “strange opinions.”
In June of 1721, when he announced that he would deliver a plan to local physicians and ministers concerning what might be done about the return of the disease, his colleagues likely believed they knew what to expect. The correct view of orthodox Puritan clergy, which Mather had always upheld in the past, regarded the epidemic simply as divine will. The only explanation for it—like that long-ago earthquake in Jamaica; like each and every great fire in the city’s history—was the wrath of God. Thus the only recourse they had was to determine which set of sins had unleashed it and find a way to atone. This was the default religious position on all manner of hardships at the time. Mather himself saw a direct connection between the number of miscarriages in Boston and the “great and visible decay of piety in the country.” The physicians and clergymen who gathered to hear his thoughts on addressing the problem of smallpox no doubt assumed he would offer a similar diagnosis.
They did not like what they heard. The report Mather prepared unambiguously supported inoculation, even as it traced the practice to the Levant and Turkey, areas at the time firmly under Islamic Ottoman rule. Not only did the assembled ministers scoff at the notion of following such ignoble precedents, the doctors were no more interested. As far as Mather could tell, only one of the local physicians gave the least bit of respect to his suggestion. “The Rest of the Practitioners,” he wrote, “treated the Proposal with an Incivility and an Inhumanity not well to be accounted for.”
The lone medical man in Boston intrigued by what he heard was Zabdiel Boylston, a surgeon who had achieved some renown a decade before when he removed a stone from the bladder of a young boy; “with the blessing of God,” the boy recovered in a month. Boylston seems to have been the first doctor in Boston to undertake this and similar internal surgeries on a regular basis. He was a good man for Mather to have in his corner, even if his record of success made him a touch fearless (contemporaries might have said reckless) in his approach. So taken was he by Mather’s presentation on inoculation that he went to work right away, experimenting first with members of the Boylston household: two servants and his own son. When news of this spread, the doctor came under direct attack. Against his new collaborator, Mather noted, “the vilest Arts were used, and with such an Efficacy, that not only the Physician, but also the Patients under the Small-Pox inoculated were in Hazard of their very Lives from an infuriated People.”
When several surrounding towns declared the practice illegal and immoral, Mather and Bolyston set about interviewing the Africans of Boston and found that most of them had received inoculation. “I have since mett with a considerable Number of these Africans,” Mather later wrote, “who all agree in One story, That in their Country grandy-many dye of the Small-Pox.” Trying to capture the voices of those he interviewed, he continued in what he apparently considered a folksy dialect. “But now they learn This Way: People take Juice of Small-Pox; and Cutty-skin, and Putt in a Drop; then by’nd by a little Sicky, sicky: then very few little things like Small-Pox: and no body dy of it; and no body have Small-Pox any more.”
Armed with this evidence, Mather and Bolyston prepared a tract reporting their findings. In it, they issued a challenge to this last gasp of Puritan society to recognize the benefits that could be derived from paying attention to the varied knowledge cultural difference can provide. “I don’t know why ’tis more unlawful to learn of Africans, how to help against the Poison of the Small Pox,” they wrote, “than it is to learn of our Indians, how to help against the Poison of a Rattle-Snake.”
What Mather did not report in his tract or in his frequent sermons and presentations on the subject was that those things that might be learned from either Indians or Africans were part of a larger body of knowledge that made no distinction between the scientific and the spiritual. Obviously, such information would not have helped his cause. But no matter the source of this innovation, the effect it had on the Puritan worldview could not have been more earthshaking.
Mather himself, after a lifetime of expecting to be treated as a pillar of the community, discovered the sting of ridicule. The man who emerged as his chief critic, a physician by the name of William Douglass, charged that Mather was “the hero in this farce of calumny.” When the
attacks went further, first questioning the inoculation advocate’s faith and then his morality, Mather took to the pages of the Boston Gazette: “Can they not give into the method or practice without having their devotion and subjection to the All wise Providence of God Almighty called into question?”
Counterarguments did nothing to still the pens of his critics, however. Mather would have been annoyed to find in his New England Courant one day a long satirical piece at his expense, “A Dialogue between a Clergyman and a Layman concerning Inoculation. By an unknown Hand.” The unknown hand here was likely that of the newspaper’s publisher, James Franklin, younger brother of Benjamin. Founded just half a year before, Franklin’s Courant had already made a name for itself as the first American periodical to use literary writing and scathing humor in its assessments of the news of the day. More out of a muckraker’s love of controversy than personal conviction, Franklin gleefully stoked the fires of public outrage. The clergyman in this short “Dialogue” is clearly designed to be Mather. The layman—like Everyman from the morality plays of old—is a stand-in for the reader, who may yet be undecided on the question of inoculation. Quick with his tongue, the Layman befuddles the Clergyman with his wit and common sense, making the case that ministers who advocate for medical innovation are less knowledgeable than they hope to appear.
Clergyman: The last Time I discoursed with you, you seemed to discover a bitter Aversion to the new and safe Way of Inoculation; are you yet reconciled to that successful Practice?
Layman: I have but little reason to entertain a more favourable opinion.… I confess, I am not yet convinced that it is either a lawful or successful Practice.
Clergyman: The Ministers of the Gospel, who are our Spiritual Guides, approve and recommend this Practice; and they are great and good Men, who would not impose on the World; and surely, you ought to fall in with their Opinion.
Layman: I have abundant Reason to think, that they and I are equally ignorant of Inoculation, especially as to the Success of it; and if the Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the Ditch.
Clergyman: But why don’t you believe the Ministers? They can explain the dark Passages of Scripture, and answer Cases of Conscience, better than illiterate Men.
Layman: I will believe no Man (tho he be a Minister) because he is great and good; for such may err, and have sometimes deceived themselves and others…
Clergyman: But I find, all the Rakes in Town are against Inoculation, and that induces me to believe it is a right Way.
Layman: Most of the Ministers are for it, and that induces me to think it is from the D____l, for he often makes use of good Men as instruments to obtrude his Delusions on the World.
Clergyman: You must not say it is from the D____l because of the success of it, for the D____l was never the Author of any thing for the Good of Mankind.
Layman: I think the Scripture forbids us to learn the Customs of the Heathen.
Clergyman: Inoculation is not the worse because the Heathens first practiced it; They make use of Food and Cloaths; and shall we reject those Gifts of Heaven, because they receive them? God forbid.
Layman: The Use of Food and Cloaths, which you bring for an Influence, is no ways parellel, for the Sixth Commandment requries us to use such Things for the Support of our Lives. Are you willing to imitate the Heathen in other Things besides Inoculation? The King of Calecus in the East-Indies lies not with his Queen the first Night, but one of the Priests doth, who hath a Gratuity bestowed on him for that Service. I suppose it is not a worse Sin to break the Seventh Commandment than the Sixth.
Clergyman: I should be loath to conform to the East-India Practice because it is a moral Evil, which I think Inoculation is not.
Layman: You do but think it is not a moral Evil, for you cannot prove that it is not.
This question of the supposed moral evil of inoculation rested mainly on two understandings: First, that epidemics were acts of God; and second, that inoculation itself was a form of self-harm, a kind of suicide, really—for who but those with an unholy wish to die would voluntarily subject their bodies to infection?
There was also a third, mostly unspoken, moral objection, and it had to do with the immediate means through which Mather had learned of the practice. When Mather had Onesimus in his home and slavery was taking root in Boston, reports of practices that seemed similar to inoculation had contributed to a fear of slave rebellion. Why would the fact that inoculation had been practiced among Africans be particularly distressing in Massachusetts? Along with the general theological objection to heathen customs, there may have been particular suspicion of Onesimus and his origins. The Coramantee or its variants were—in legend and actual fact—among the enslaved Africans most prone to insurrection. Indeed, all through the eighteenth century, whenever the word “Coramantee” turns up in newspapers, it is inevitably tied to slave revolt. When Mather was becoming interested in inoculation, there were reports of slave uprisings involving Coramantee as close by as New York. Such reports would have chilled New Englanders to the bone. It is in this sense that inoculation came to be tied to slave revolt.
It was not merely the occurrence of uprisings that was so disconcerting, however, but the manner in which they sometimes took place—and the fact that they often began as inoculation seemed to, at the intersection of medicine and magic. In April of 1712, for example, when slaves revolted in New York City, they had been led by a “conjureman” known as Peter the Doctor, who initiated the uprising by anointing each of his countrymen with a special powder. As a contemporary report put it: “Some Negro Slaves here of ye Nations of Caramantee & Pappa plotted to destroy all the White in order to obtain their freedom.” They “kept their Conspiracy Secret that there was not the least Suspicion of it… till it come to the Execution.” To the colonists, the place of the devil in this uprising would have been found in the details:
It was agreed to on New Years Day the Conspirators tying themselves to Secrecy by Sucking ye blood of each Others hands, and to make them invulnerable as they believed a free negroe who pretends Sorcery gave them a powder to rub on their Cloths which made them so confident that on Sunday night Apr. 7 ab’ 2 a Clock about the going down of the Moon they Set fire to a house which allarming the town they stood in the street and shot down as many as they could.
This “free negroe who pretends Sorcery,” Peter the Doctor, was likely a priest or shaman of his people, and the rituals he performed to make the slaves feel “invulnerable” employed a kind of magic called aduru. The scholar William Rucker defines aduru as “medicine in the form of liquid or powder” which could take the form of “plants, herbs, human blood, graveyard dirt, and other substances that… contain a certain amount of spiritual power.” While the sharing of blood described here could only have been proof of demonic influence to the colonists, to those involved it had positive religious significance.
There is no mention of the traditional, religiously influenced healing arts of West Africa in the discussions of inoculation, but in the spiritual context of the Akan tradition from which Onesimus likely had come, healing with blood was also aduru. Inoculation itself would have been seen as a kind of aduru, and aduru was elsewhere being used to give Africans the courage to fight, and kill, their masters.
One difference between these two instances of aduru, of course, is that inoculation actually worked. The magic of Peter the Doctor had a much lower success rate. Of the two dozen Coramantee slaves who took part in the revolt, six killed themselves upon being captured. The remaining men were executed—some in the Old World style reserved in Europe for witches, as befitting those who posed not just a physical but a spiritual threat.
With the news of such uprisings spreading through the colonies and becoming legend, inoculation itself carried with it a reminder of the religious risks the English colonists lived with every day: that their way of being in the world, their understanding of God’s role in human lives, might prove inadequate to their surroundings; that some other way—Quake
rism, witchcraft, popery, Obeah—might prove better suited to an America that was turning out to be more heterogeneous than their faith could bear.
Inoculation, in other words, called into question the basic assumptions of the society the Puritans had built. How else to explain the violent reaction to Mather’s support of the practice? This violence, it must be noted, was not merely a war of words. In November of that plague-ridden year—five months after he had first proposed inoculation—an opponent of Mather’s views threw a bomb with a lit fuse through his window. Had it gone off, Mather notes, it would “have killed them that were near it, and would have certainly fired the Chamber and speedily have laid the House in Ashes.”
Fortunately, the “grenado,” as he calls it, seems to have hit a metal casement as it came through the glass, dislodging the lit fuse, which burned out on the floor. This assault is said to have included a written message—“Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’l inoculate you with this; with a pox to you”—but truly one must question the reliability of a story in which anyone finds it useful to attach a note to a bomb.
Nevertheless, apparently the possibility of such attacks was a risk Mather was willing to take. Despite his long insistence on doctrinal purity, he had found a better way outside the bounds of his own tradition, and he was prepared to stake his reputation on arguing for the truth of it. In this sense, Boston in 1722 marks the birth of the kind of practical pluralism that would later define the American experiment.
When the tide of opinion turned and inoculation seemed to be working, it was not a universal cause for celebration. In fact, it created an existential quandary. As one pious observer worried concerning the sickness and inoculation, “Though we don’t pray that it may not spread, yet by praying for a blessing on this practice, we pray against the Judgment.”
One Nation, Under Gods Page 16