Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Historical, #United States, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Christian Books & Bibles, #History, #Americas, #State & Local, #Christianity, #Religion & Spirituality, #test

The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (60 page)

 
Page 351
he would support the projects of others, but quietly and anonymously.
1
The ministers listening to his explosive "I have done, I have done, I have done," contained men who knew their man, better than he knew himself (as least so far as impulses to do good were concerned), and one of them, William Cooper, responded to this outburst with "
I hope the Devil don't hear you Syr!
"
2
The reminder that leaving the field of battle was conceding victory to Satan was enough to send Cotton Mather back into the fray, and soon projects for good works were coming from him as fast as ever.
Even in his outrage he probably had not intended to give up his quiet efforts to relieve the poor; and he continued to try to find money and in some cases food and firewood for widows and their children. Books and instruction were almost as precious as food and Mather tried to spread both as widely as possible. He somehow found the money to maintain a small school for Negroes. There these black slaves were taught the essentials of Christianity and how to read the Scriptures for themselves. The flow of tracts and sermons which would profit ministers and their flocks maintained its force from Mather's church. He asked the well-off among his church to pay for some; he himself put up the cash for others and distributed many copies on pastoral visits and at ministerial associations.
3
And, of course, there was preaching to be donebesides the regular services and lectures on Thursday and the Sabbath, Cotton Mather attended as many private meetings as possible. During these last years of his life he occasionally complained that two groups had deserted his church, the young and the sailors. He must have known what he was talking about, but it is clear that he remained in demand at the meetings of religious adolescents. The religious societies of the young may have outlasted those of their parentsin any case Mather seems not to have passed up opportunities to preach to them. Sailors who had never formed themselves into religious societies, as far as his private writings reveal, now abandoned his church as well.
4
Mather more than made up for this disappointment at home by sending his proposals abroad. The correspondence with German and English Pietists never flagged as Mather reported his feelings about the Prophetical Spirit and received news of its outpour-
 
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ing in Europe. He had long wanted to do something for France which, as the tenth kingdom under the Antichrist, faced baleful prospects. In 1721, he finished
Une Grande Voix du Ciel A La France
, which he hoped would awaken the French and persuade them to reform before they were struck by the "tremendous Judgments of GOD." He managed to get it published four years later, after a period that saw him not only consult his friends on the best way to pay for the printing, but also seek the counsel of the Governor on how it might be distributed.
5
Important though publishing the truth in Europe was, it had to be subordinate to Mather's efforts in America. His production of his last years made the familiar connection of PIETY and the Kingdom of God, but made it more strenuously and, as Mather might have said, more "affectuously," with a concentration on the emotional apprehension of the Holy Spirit. These works included a relatively matter-of-fact proposal for an "Evangelical Treasury," a small fund collected from particular churches, managed by deacons, and carefully audited, which would be used in the propagation of religion in frontier villages, in missions to the Indians, and in support of the poor. Not so quiet was Mather's version of Psalms, an immense rendering in blank verse designed as an "engine of the most spiritual sort of piety." Mather's account of New England's Church discipline appeared in these years toothe
Ratio Disciplinae Fratrum
. He had worked on this history off and on for twenty-five years. The last revisions of the manuscript reflect the heat of his piety and contain an admission that New England had now run most of its errand into the wilderness. What was important now, he said in a familiar plea, was that good men everywhere should now put aside their denominational differences and unite in the faith in Christ in preparation for His coming. The same hope filled Mather's
Manuductio ad Ministerium
, which like the
Ratio
, was issued in 1726. This book, Mather's instructions to candidates for the pulpit, reaffirmed the traditional view that the clergy must be learned. Richard and Increase Mather would have approved Cotton's urgings that young ministers get the learned languages under control and they would have seconded his endorsement of theological and scientific study. But Cotton Mather, characteristically going one step farther than his ancestors, infused these recommendations with his own conviction that whatever the intellec-
 
Page 353
tual form, the power of the minister remained in his spirit. Mather had told a convention of ministers the same thing four years before when he urged them not to come to their pulpits with a sermon that they had not already profited from on their knees in their studies. "Set the Truths on Fire" was Mather's meaning then, and he repeated it in the
Manductio
.
6
Mather did all this good while engaged in several public disputes and while suffering disappointment and even defeat. The last decade of his life had openly inauspiciously with his taking the losing side in the fight between Ebenezer Pierpont (A.B., 1715; then Master of Roxbury Latin) and Harvard College. In 1718, the Harvard Corporation denied Pierpont his M.A., usually awarded automatically three years after the Bachelor's degree. The exact reasons for this action are not completely clear, but they lie somewhere in the history of a nasty struggle that developed when Pierpont challenged the College decision denying admission to two of his students because, as Tutor Nicholas Sever declared, they were badly prepared. Shortly after their rejection, and Pierpont's complaints, the Harvard Corporation decided that the sad state of these boys' knowledge proved the incompetence of their schoolmasterand Pierpont need not apply for the Master's degree. The Corporation's judgment of Pierpont's quality may have been affected by his calling the Harvard fellows "'Rogues, Dogs, & Tygars.'"
7
From that point on, all parties lost their balance and Cotton Mather's entrance into the affair did not restore it. Mather's motives were undoubtedly complicated and, like other aspects of this case, elusive, but one thing is clearhe did not like President Leverett and he had not forgiven the Corporation for having forced out his father over fifteen years before. As time was to reveal, he also wanted to be President himself.
8
Understandably, Pierpont got his support in the attempt to secure the Master of Arts. Mather rallied Governor Shute to Pierpont's side, but even though Pierpont got a hearing before the Governor, nothing came of it. Pierpont then took his case to the Middlesex County Court where it was tossed out and he went through life with only an A.B. Mather did not cease sniping at the College but he had lost and he knew it, and may also have realized that his chances for the Presidency of Harvard were slim indeed.
9
 
Page 354
The defeat in Pierpont's case could not have been pleasant for Mather, but it was a minor irritant compared to the "victory" he achieved three years afterwards, in 1721, in the inoculation controversy. Inoculation for smallpox was not new in the eighteenth century, having been tried in Europe, Asia, and Africa before. Published accounts of the practice appeared in Leipzig in the 1670's, and others indicate that it was tried in the eighteenth century in Turkey and Greece. In 1714, the
Transactions
of the Royal Society carried an account from Emanuel Timonius, a physician in Constantinople, of successful inoculations in Turkey. Two years later the Society issued a similar report from Jacobus Pylarinus.
10
Cotton Mather, Fellow of the Royal Society, read its
Transactions
as eagerly as any member and contributed more to them than most. But he did not see the Society's publications regularly and had to borrow the issues describing inoculation from William Douglass, a Scottish physician who had recently arrived from Edinburgh. The news from Constantinople fascinated him especially since it seemed to confirm what he had already learnedor soon would learnfrom Onesimus, his black slave. Onesimus and other blacks in Boston, telling the story of inoculations in Africa that successfully suppressed the disease, described a technique of cutting the skin, and infecting the body that closely resembled the Turkish practice.
11
Mather might never have made anything out of his new knowledge had a smallpox epidemic not begun in Boston in the Spring of 1721. A significant number of cases were identified in May and by late June their number was so great as to persuade Governor Shute to call for a day of fasting and humiliation. Shute's proclamation repeating the language of sixty years of jeremiads, appealed for a "thorough Reformation of this whole Land." This call indicated that public authority considered the situation dangerous; Mather had already reached that conclusion and had sent a summary of the Timonius and Pylarinus' reports to all the medical practitioners in Boston.
12
Only one of these men, William Douglass, had much formal medical training, and he was skeptical of the value of inoculation and was soon to explain that he feared that it would spread the disease. All of Boston's medical practitioners shared this fear to some degree, but Dr. Zabdiel Boylston (the Dr. was a
 
Page 355
courtesy title) indicated a willingness to try the new method. With Mather urging him on, Boylston inoculated his six-year-old son and two black slaves on June 26. They took a mild infection and soon recovered. Encouraged by this success, Boylston continued, and by July 19 had inoculated ten people.
13
As the news of Boylston's experiment got aroundBoston was a town of 11,000 peoplepublic clamor against inoculation began. And it continued despite Boylston's attempts to ease popular fears by explaining the practice in the
Boston Gazette
. The Selectmen, the officials who carried out the wishes of the Town Meeting and who provided day-to-day government, responded to the opposition on July 21, by telling Boylston to stop. Three days later William Douglass, in the
Boston News-Letter
, questioned Boylston's qualifications, calling him "illiterate" and accusing him of lacking the ability to read the communications of Timonius and Pylarimus. This produced an answer from the Mathers and other Boston ministers, including Benjamin Colman, within a week. The following week William Douglass took to the pages of the
New England Courant
, James Franklin's paper, to lash Boylston for the inoculations, "the Practice of Greek old Women." Douglass knew that to stop Boylston for good he would have to discourage his chief supporters who were, of course, Cotton and Increase Mather. Therefore, Douglass hit them too, pointing out their medical incapacities by asserting that they recommended inoculation on the basis of their characters-not their knowledge. Cotton Mather, of course, could not ignore this attackand the battle for public support was on. While the controversy kept the local printers busy, Boylston added to the public's anger by resuming inoculationsin violation of the Selectmen's order. In August he inoculated seventeen persons; in September, thirty-one; in October, eighteen; in November, one hundred and four. And other practitioners in the town were trying their hand at it too.
14
When, early in June, Mather had proposed to the practitioners that they consider inoculation, he had urged caution upon them. To Douglass and evidently to much of the town, caution had been thrown to the winds when Boylston deliberate infected his son and slaves. The success of vaccination in our own day should not make us regard the opposition unsympathetically. Although no one in Boston died from inoculation, as Douglass pointed out,
 
Page 356
there was little evidence that the practice was not dangerous to the persons inoculated. The reports in the
Transactions
of the Royal Society hardly constituted an unimpeachable source. For years the
Transactions
had carried reports of folk remedies that at times resembled collections of remarkable providencesso full were they of fantastic stories. Furthermore, Boylston did little to ease public fears that his practice contributed to the spread of the disease. He failed to isolate his patients, who received visitors while they were still sick; and several of the inoculated even went out-of-doors while their sores were still running.
15
Mather, and probably Boylston, recognized the danger of contagion. Mather's June letter which Boylston had found so instructive had repeated Timonius' warnings that the person collecting the pus should not carry it to those who were to be inoculated lest he also spread the disease in the natural way. But the chief medical defense was that inoculation worked. Boylston and Mather admitted that the fever of the inoculated sometimes rose higher than expected before the eruption of the pustules and that the number of their pustules exceeded expectations. Still the inoculated did not die and did not contract the disease afterwards in the natural way.
16
None of this made Cotton Mather the ''first significant figure in American medicine," a statement made in 1954; nor did his insistence that all inoculation really amounted to was another technique in preventive medicine, comparable to spring and fall tonics or to purges given to forestall the bloody flux. (Douglass called this comparison of "the taking of preventing physics to the Procuring a Contagious Disease" "Wild"). We do not in fact need to take the claim for Mather's medical wisdom seriously. His actions in this affair, from its onset in his prudent letter to its conclusion in shrill wrangling, were prompted by non-medical considerationsand his decisions in it were taken primarily on non-medical grounds. He was lucky in his discovery, as Perry Miller argues, and lucky, we might add, not to have blundered into a disaster.
17
The opponents raised but did not make much of the argument that inoculation attempted to forestall one of the most dreadful judgments of God. Traditional theory held, of course, that men should attempt to prevent afflictions only by repenting their sins and reforming their lives. Inoculation clearly involved a different

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