Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (12 page)

Meanwhile, the enslaved population continued to rise noticeably, which led to fears of revolts and then, in 1705, new racist codes to prevent revolts and secure human property up and down the Atlantic Coast. Massachusetts authorities forbade interracial relationships, began taxing imported captives, and, over Samuel Sewall’s objections, rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs during a revision
of the tax code. Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites; these groups of White citizens were charged with policing slaves, enforcing discipline, and guarding routes of escape. The Virginia legislature also denied Blacks the ability to hold office. Evoking repeatedly the term “christian white servant” and defining their rights, Virginia lawmakers fully married Whiteness and Christianity, uniting rich White enslavers and the non-slaveholding White poor. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority.
⁵

ON MARCH 1
, 1706, Cotton Mather asked God whether, if he “[wrote] an Essay, about the Christianity of our
Negro
and other
Slaves
”, God would bless him with “Good Servants.” Mather hoped a pamphlet focusing exclusively on this topic would help to shift the minds of enslavers who refused to baptize their captives. By now, he was unquestionably America’s foremost minister and intellectual, having just published his New England history, a toast of American exceptionalism,
Magnalia Christi Americana
, regarded as the greatest literary achievement of New England’s first century.
⁶

Mather released
The Negro Christianized
in June 1706. The “Providence of God” sent Africans into slavery and over to Christian America to have the capacity to learn from their masters the “Glorious Gospel.” They “are
Men
, and not
Beasts
”, Mather stressed, opposing segregationists. “Indeed their Stupidity is a Discouragement. It may seem, unto as little purpose, to Teach, as to wash” Africans. “But the greater their Stupidity, the greater must be our Application,” he proclaimed. Don’t worry about baptism leading to freedom. The “Law of
Christianity . . . allows Slavery,” he resolved. He cited the writings of other Puritan theologians as well as St. Paul.
⁷

On December 13, 1706, Mather believed wholeheartedly that God had rewarded him for writing
The Negro Christianized
. Members of Mather’s church—“without any Application of mine to them for such a Thing”—spent forty or fifty pounds on “a very likely Slave,” he happily noted in his diary. New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers. Mather named “it” Onesimus, after St. Paul’s adopted son, a converted runaway. Mather kept a close racist eye on Onesimus, constantly suspecting him of thievery.
⁸

Mather’s Christian slavery views were more representative in New England than Samuel Sewall’s or John Saffin’s ideas. But Samuel Sewall’s views continued to echo in the writings of others. In 1706, John Campbell’s first full-fledged essay in his
Boston News-Letter
, the second newspaper in colonial America, urged the importation of more White servants to reduce the colony’s dependence on enslaved Africans, who were “much addicted to Stealing, Lying and Purloning.” Americans reading early colonial newspapers learned two recurring lessons about Black people: they could be bought like cattle, and they were dangerous criminals like those witches.

From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.
⁹

As the sun fired up the sky on April 7, 1712, about thirty enslaved Africans and two Native Americans set fire to a New York building, ambushing the “Christians” who came to put it out, as the story was told. Nine “Christians” were slayed, five or six seriously wounded. The freedom fighters ran off into the nearby woods. Fear and revenge smoldered through the city. Within twenty-four hours, six of the rebels had committed suicide (believing they would return to Africa in death); the rest were “hunted out” by soldiers and publicly executed, mostly
burned alive. New York colonial governor Robert Hunter, who supervised the hunt, the trials, and the executions, was a member of Thomas Bray’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Royal Society. He framed the slave revolt a “barbarous attempt of some of their slaves.” No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers.

Their “barbarism” occasioned a “severe” slave code, resembling the laws passed by the Virginians and Puritans in 1705. New York lawmakers stripped free Blacks of the right to own property, and then they denigrated “the free negroes of the colony” as an “idle, slothful people” who weighed on the “public charge.”
¹⁰

IN THE MIDST
of relentless African resistance and increasingly vocal antislavery Quakers, British slave-traders were still doing quite well, and they were primed for growth. In 1713, England won the
Assiento
, the privilege of supplying captives to all those Spanish American colonies, allowing it to soon become the eighteenth century’s greatest slave-trader, following in the footsteps of France, Holland, and the pioneers in Portugal. New England had become the main entryway into the colonies for European and Caribbean goods. Ships setting out from the colonies, mostly from Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, carried the food that fed the British Caribbean’s planters, overseers, and laborers. Ships returned hauling sugar, rum, captives, and molasses, all supplying New England’s largest manufacturing industry before the American Revolution—liquor.
¹¹

Boston’s status as one of the key ports in the colonies left the city vulnerable to disease. On April 21, 1721, the HMS
Seahorse
sailed into Boston Harbor from Barbados. A month later, Cotton Mather logged in his journal, “The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town.” One thousand Bostonians, nearly 10 percent of the town, fled to the countryside to escape the judgment of the Almighty.
¹²

Fifteen years prior, Mather had asked Onesimus one of the standard questions that Boston slaveholders asked new house slaves—Have you had smallpox? “Yes and no,” Onesimus answered. He explained how in Africa before his enslavement, a tiny amount of pus from a smallpox victim had been scraped into his skin with a thorn, following a practice hundreds of years old that resulted in building up healthy recipients’ immunities to the disease. This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.

Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society’s
Philosophical Transactions
in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how “brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story.”
¹³

On June 6, 1721, Mather calmly composed an “Address to the Physicians of Boston,” respectfully requesting that they consider inoculation. If anyone had the credibility to suggest something so new in a time of peril it was Cotton Mather, the first American-born fellow in London’s Royal Society, which was still headed by Isaac Newton. Mather had released fifteen to twenty books and pamphlets a year since the 1690s, and he was nearing his mammoth career total of 388—probably more than the rest of his entire generation of New England ministers combined.
¹⁴

The only doctor who responded to Mather was Zabadiel Boylston, President John Adams’s great-uncle. When Boylston announced his successful inoculation of his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans on July 15, 1721, area doctors and councilmen were horrified. It made no sense that people should inject themselves with a disease
to save themselves from the disease. Boston’s only holder of a medical degree, a physician pressing to maintain his professional legitimacy, fanned the city’s flames of fear. Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. “There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Liars” than Africans, Douglass barked.
¹⁵

Anti-inoculators like Dr. Douglass found a friendly medium in one of the colonies’ first independent newspapers, the
New England Courant
, launched by twenty-four-year-old James Franklin in 1721. James Franklin’s fifteen-year-old indentured servant and younger brother, Ben, worked as the typesetter for the newspaper. Feeling disrespected by the
Courant
, Cotton Mather demanded intellectual obedience like a tired college professor. The general public ignored him and withdrew. Bostonians’ distaste for Mather and Boylston improved only when the epidemic that killed 842 people finally ended in early 1722.
¹⁶

As April 1722 approached, Ben Franklin decided he wanted to do more than setting type for his brother’s newspaper. He started anonymously penning letters with fascinating social advice, slipping them under the print shop door for his brother to print in the
Courant
. Signing the letters Silence Dogood, Ben was inspired by Mather’s 1710
Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good
, on maintaining social order through benevolence. The book “gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life,” Benjamin Franklin later explained to Mather’s son. After publishing sixteen popular letters, Ben revealed the true identity of Silence Dogood to his jealous and overbearing brother. James promptly censured Ben. By 1723, all the ambitious Ben could think about was running away.
¹⁷

Before fleeing to Philadelphia, Ben was summoned to a home on Ship Street. He nervously knocked. A servant appeared and led him to the study. Ben entered and beheld probably the largest library in North America. Cotton Mather forgave Ben for the war of words, as a father would a misbehaving child. No one knows what else the sixty-year-old and seventeen-year-old discussed.

Ben Franklin may have noticed Cotton Mather’s melancholy. Mather’s beloved father, then eighty-four, was ill. When Increase Mather died in his oldest son’s arms on August 23, 1723, the tragedy topped off some weary years for Cotton Mather, who had weathered marital disputes, financial problems, disagreements with Anglican ministers, being passed over twice for the Harvard presidency, and the news that Isaac Newton’s Royal Society would no longer publish his work. Despite all his successes, Mather had begun to worry about his intellectual legacy.

If Mather stayed abreast of current events in the colonies in the 1720s, then he had no reason to worry about his missionary legacy. More fervently than any American voice since the 1680s, Mather had urged slaveholders to baptize enslaved Africans, and enslaved Africans to leave the religions of their ancestors. Moving slowly and carefully uphill, he had made strides over the years. Like-minded Anglican missionaries, such as James Blair, Thomas Bray, and the agents of his Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, had taken this idea further. Whether he realized it or not, and whether he despised the Anglican missionaries or not, Mather’s prayers finally began to be answered during his final years.

Edmund Gibson, the distinguished Anglican bishop of London, decided to eliminate any lingering doubt in planters as to whether they could hold Christian captives. In two letters to Virginians in 1727, he praised and authenticated the innovative statute of 1667 that denied freedom to baptized captives. Gibson talked about how conversion obligated captives to “the greatest Diligences and Fidelity,” an idea that Mather had been stressing for years. The British crown and the aides of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Great Britain, echoed the bishop. All of Britain’s religious, political, and economic power now united to free missionaries and planters from having to free the converted, thus reinvigorating proselytizing movements and dooming calls for manumission.
¹⁸

More and more enslavers began to listen to the arguments of missionaries that Christian submission could supplement their violence in
subduing African people. Actually, the ministers focused on the submission and were mum on the violence. Minister Hugh Jones, a William & Mary professor, published his highly influential
Present State of Virginia
in 1724. “Christianity,” Jones wrote, “encourages and orders” African people “to become more humble and better servants.” They should not learn to read and write, though. They were “by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue.” In his stunningly popular 1722 collection of sermons, James Blair proclaimed that the Golden Rule did not suggest equality between “superiors and inferiors.” Order required hierarchy. Hierarchy required responsibility. Masters, Blair preached, were to baptize and treat their slaves kindly.
¹⁹