Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (10 page)

Smaller than a sixth-grade pupil, when Cotton Mather walked onto the tiny campus he was like a self-righteous politician entering a corrupted Congress. The dozen or so fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds schemed to break the eleven-year-old’s moral backbone until Increase Mather complained about the hazing. The teenagers stopped prodding him to sin, but sin still bedeviled him. Sin was like the shadow he could never shake. The most trivial incident could explode into anxiety. One day, his tooth ached. “Have I not sinned with my Teeth?” his mind raced. “How? By sinful, graceless excessive Eating. And by evil Speeches.” Cotton Mather had started stuttering, and the incessant self-searching and the burden of trying to live up to his two famous names may have worsened his condition. For the young minister-in-training, the soul-searching setback caused him to turn to his ink and quill.
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Insecure in speech, Cotton Mather seemed to be a different person as a writer—confident, brilliant, and artistic. His father allowed him to write up many important church and government documents. Cotton ended up writing 7,000 pages of sermons in his notebooks
between the ages of thirteen and thirty-two, far and away more sermonic pages than any other American Puritan. And his diary from 1681 to 1725 is the lengthiest available of any American Puritan.
¹²

Cotton Mather had been encouraged by his anxious but reassuring father. Sooner or later, Cotton steeled his determination to find a way around the mighty rock. The youngster incessantly practiced away his stammer by singing psalms and speaking slowly, and by the end of his Harvard days he had learned to control it. He was delivered.

Cotton Mather cruised to the annual Boston Commencement Day in 1678. Harvard president Urian Oakes called him to receive his degree. “What a name!” Oakes smiled. “I made a mistake, I confess; I should have said, what names!”
¹³

THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD COTTON MATHER
graduated into a British world that was developing more and more sophisticated racist ideas to rationalize African slavery. English scientists and colonizers seemed to be trading theories. Around 1677, Royal Society economist William Petty drafted a hierarchical “Scale” of humanity, locating the “Guinea Negroes” at the bottom. Middle Europeans, he wrote, differed from Africans “in their natural manners, and in the internal qualities of their minds.” In 1679, the British Board of Trade approved Barbados’s brutally racist slave codes, which were securing the investments of traders and planters, and then produced a racist idea to justify the approval: Africans were “a brutish sort of People.”
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In 1683, Increase and Cotton Mather founded colonial America’s first formal intellectual group, the Boston Philosophical Society. Modeled after London’s Royal Society, the Boston Society lasted only four years. The Mathers never published a journal, but if they had, they might have modeled it after the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions
, or the
Journal des Sçavans
in Paris. These were the organs of Western Europe’s scientific revolution, and new ideas on race were a part of that revolution. French physician and travel writer François Bernier, a friend of John Locke’s, anonymously crafted a “new division of the earth” in the French journal in 1684.
¹⁵

Through this essay, Bernier became the first popular classifier of all humans into races, which he differentiated fundamentally by their phenotypic characteristics. To Bernier, there existed “four or five Species or Races of men so notably differing from each other that this may serve as the just foundation of a new division of the world.” As a monogenesist, he held that “all men are descended from one individual.” He distinguished four races: the “first” race, which included Europeans, were the original humans; then there were the Africans, the East Asians, and the “quite frightful” people of northern Finland, “the Lapps.” Bernier gave future taxonomists some revisionist work to do when he lumped with Europeans in the “first” race the people of North Africa, the Middle East, India, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.

The notion of Europeans—save the Lapps—as being in the “first” race was part of Western thought almost from the beginning of racist ideas. It sat in the conceptual core of climate theory: Africans darkened by the sun could return to their original White complexion by living in cooler Europe. In advancing White originality and normality, Bernier positioned the “first” race as the “yardstick against which the others are measured,” as historian Siep Stuurman later explained. Bernier simultaneously veiled and normalized, screened and standardized White people—and he eroticized African women. “Those cherry-red lips, those ivory teeth, those large lively eyes . . . that bosom and the rest,” Bernier marveled. “I dare say there is no more delightful spectacle in the world.”

It was a subtle contradiction—the diminution of Black people’s total (as racial) humanity in the midst of the elevation of their sexual humanity, a contradiction inherent in much of anti-Black racism. Bernier valued rationality, using it as a yardstick of superiority, irrespective of physicality. Superior physicality related Africans to those creatures containing the utmost physical prowess—animals. François Bernier posed the notion of two human souls: one hereditary, sensitive, nonrational, and animal-like; the other God-given, spiritual, and rational. “Those who excel in the powers of the mind . . . [should] command those who only excel in brute force,” Bernier concluded, “just as the soul governs the body, and man rules animals.”
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IT IS UNCLEAR
whether Cotton Mather read Bernier’s “new division of the earth.” Next to his father, he was more likely than any other English-speaking New Englander to know a little French and read the
Journal des Sçavans
. In the years after his graduation, he amassed one of the largest libraries in New England. But the late 1670s and 1680s were a tense time for New England elites. It was difficult to maintain the peace of mind for leisurely reading.

In 1676, English colonial administrator Edward Randolph had journeyed to New England, and he had seen the devastation wrought by King Philip’s War. Randolph, an advocate of stern royal control, informed King Charles II of New England’s vulnerability and suggested that the time had come to snatch the royally appointed chair of autonomy for Massachusetts—the precious charter of 1629—out of colonial hands. In the coming years, while Cotton Mather finished college and prepared for the pulpit, Randolph journeyed back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean. Every trip stirred new rumors of the charter being pulled and a new round of debates on whether to submit, compromise, or defy the king. Some New Englanders were furious at the prospect of losing local rule. “God forbid, that I should give away the Inheritance of my Fathers,” stormed Increase Mather at a town meeting in January 1684.

A year after Cotton Mather became co-pastor with his father of Boston’s North Church, Randolph returned holding the royal revocation of the charter and the installation of a royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros. Much of New England despondently submitted on May 14, 1686. Not Increase Mather, the newly installed head of Harvard. By May 1688, he was in England lobbying the successor to Charles II, James II, who offered religious liberty to Catholics and nonconformists. But during the “Glorious Revolution” later in the year, James II was overthrown by William, the Dutch prince, and James’s daughter, Mary. New Englanders did not sit by idly. In 1689, they raised the baton of revolt.

CHAPTER 5

Black Hunts

ON THE EVENING
of April 17, 1689, the twenty-six-year-old Cotton Mather probably held a meeting at his house. These elite merchants and ministers plotted to seize the captain of the royal warship guarding Boston Harbor, arrest royalists, and compel the surrender of the royalist contingent on Fort Hill. They hoped to control and contain the revolt, avoid the bloodshed, and await instructions from England, where Increase Mather held his lobbying post before William and Mary. They did not want a revolution. They merely wanted their royally backed local power reestablished. But “if the Country people, by any unrestrainable Violences,” pushed toward revolution, Cotton Mather explained, then to pacify the “ungoverned Mobile” they would present a
Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants
.

The next morning, conspirators seized the warship captain as planned. News of the seizure initiated rebellious seizures all over Boston, as the elite plotters feared would occur. A convulsed working-class crowd gathered at the Town House in the center of town, “driving and furious,” avid for royal blood and independence. Mather rushed to the Town House. At noon, he probably read from the gallery a
Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants
to the revolutionaries. Mather’s calm, assuring, ministerial voice “reasoned down the Passions of the Populace,” according to family lore. By nightfall, Sir Edmund Andros, Edward Randolph, and other known royalists had been arrested, and Puritan merchants and preachers once again ruled New England.
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The populace remained unruly, however, over the next few weeks. Cotton Mather was tapped to preach at a May convention called to settle the various demands for independence, military rule, or the old charter. He did not see democracy in the different demands; he saw pandemonium. “I am old enough to cry
Peace!
And in the Name of God I do it,” he preached at the convention. The next day, town representatives voted to return to the old charter and reappoint the old governor, Simon Bradstreet. Peace, or the old social order of the populace submitting to the ministers and merchants, did not reappear, as Mather had wished. Nearly everyone knew the Bradstreet government was unofficial, as it had not received royal backing. When the king recalled Andros, Randolph, and other royalists in July 1689, it did not calm the masses. “All confusion is here,” one New Englander reported. “Every man is a Governor,” another testified.
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THE
DECLARATION OF GENTLEMAN AND MERCHANTS
—most likely written by Mather—resembled another declaration by another prominent intellectual down in Virginia a century later. In the sixth article (of twelve), the writer declared, “The people of
New England
were all
slaves
and the only difference between them and slaves is their not being bought and sold.” In unifying New Englanders, Mather tried to redirect the resistance of commoners from local elites to British masters. And in actuality, Mather saw more differences between Puritans and slaves, if his other published words in 1689 were any indication, than between local New Englanders and their British masters. In the collection of sermons
Small Offers Toward the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness
, Mather first shared his racial views, calling the Puritan colonists “the English Israel”—a chosen people. Puritans must religiously instruct all slaves and children, the “inferiors,” Mather pleaded. But masters were not doing their job of looking after African souls, “which are as white and good as those of other Nations, but are Destroyed for lack of Knowledge.” Cotton Mather had built on Richard Baxter’s theological race concept. The souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were
White
and good.
³

Mather wrote of all humans having a
White soul
the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White. Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. And for all these White men, Whiteness symbolized beauty, a trope taken up by one of the first popular novels by an English woman.

Published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s
Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave
, was the first English novel to repeatedly use terms like “White Men,” “White People,” and “Negro.” Set in the Dutch South American colony of Surinam,
Oroonoko
is the story of the enslavement and resistance of a young English woman and her husband, Oroonoko, an African prince. Oroonoko’s “beautiful, agreeable and handsome” physical features looked more European than African (“His nose was rising and
Roman
, instead of
African
and flat”), and his behavior was “more civilized, according to the European Mode, than any other had been.” Behn framed Oroonoko as a heroic “noble savage,” superior to Europeans in his ignorance, in his innocence, in his harmlessness, and in his capacity for learning from Europeans. And in true assimilationist fashion, one of the characters insists, “A Negro
can change colour
; for I have seen ’em as frequently blush and look pale, and that as visibly as I ever saw in the most beautiful White.”
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RICHARD BAXTER ENDORSED
the London edition of Cotton Mather’s other 1689 publication, his first book-length work, which became a best seller:
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
. Baxter rejoiced, having influenced the young Mather, as someone “likely to prove so great a Master Building in the Lords Work.” Mather’s treatise, outlining the symptoms of witchcraft, reflected his crusade against the enemies of White souls. He could not stop preaching about the existence of the Devil and witches. Or perhaps the restlessness of the commoners in the aftermath of the 1689 revolt triggered the real obsession in Cotton Mather. The revolt, indeed, had fueled public strife against not only the faraway British king
but also Puritan rulers of Mather’s stature. Maybe Mather was consciously attempting to redirect the public’s anger away from elites and toward invisible demons. He did regularly preach that anyone and anything that criticized his English Israel must be led by the Devil. Long before egalitarian rebels in America started to be cast off as extremists, criminals, radicals, outsiders, communists, or terrorists, Mather’s community of ministers ostracized egalitarian rebels as devils and witches.
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