Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute, Fabric of History weaves together US history, founding principles, and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what’s inside.

Haley (00:21)
For our first ever Fabric of History interview, Mary sits down with Tony Williams, BRI staff member, and author, to discuss his fascinating book on the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721, The Pox and the Covenant. What role did Puritan Minister Cotton Mather have in using new scientific methods to mitigate the epidemic? And what unlikely role did a young Benjamin Franklin have in response to them?

Mary (00:52)
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Fabric of History. I’m Mary Patterson here with you again. And I’m really excited for today’s conversation because we are going to be diving into a story that I think is fair to say isn’t as familiar in American history, but it is very complex and dramatic and introduces these sort of bigger questions and themes that we can still sink our teeth into in the present day. And that is the sort of story that we really love here at the Bill of Rights Institute. And I’m especially excited because as we are exploring this story, we are going to be talking with arguably my favorite coworker. He’s in my top five, at least here at BRI. And that is Senior Fellow Tony Williams. So, Tony, thank you so much for being with us.

Tony (01:47)
Thank you, Mary. I’m more honored by that introduction than any interview I’ve ever done.

Mary (01:52)
Well, that means a lot. Tony, thank you. So as I mentioned, you’re a senior fellow here at BRI. So can you tell us a little bit about your role and what you do?

Tony (02:02)
Sure. So as a senior fellow, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and a lot of research for our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and several other curricula in my years here at BRI. And I’ve really enjoyed working with teachers, doing professional development seminars and weekend colloquia, and all sorts of other opportunities to see our teachers.

Mary (02:30)
So you mentioned Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Tony (02:33)
Sure. Yeah. That’s our massive US history textbook. I think it’s going to be really useful for students. We had over 100 scholars contribute some really fantastic narrative essays and other components to it. And it’s really driven by primary sources and useful lessons for teachers. It’s going to be available online for teachers and students in the fall of 2020. So we are super excited about that.

Mary (03:02)
We are really excited. It’s a huge labor of love. And Tony, as our senior fellow, was a big part in making that resource available. So in addition to being a senior fellow, Tony, you are also a published author. So you published six books, and not that anyone’s counting, but I haven’t published any books. So Tony’s winning everyone. And one of these books, The Pox and the Covenant, is the centerpiece of our discussion today. So this is about the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston. So I think the smallpox is something we’re familiar with, but Covenant is a term that maybe isn’t so clear. Can you explain what a covenant is or why that’s part of the title?

Tony (03:49)
Sure. And maybe we will just define that. There was actually a smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721, and that will be the subject of our discussion, and that’ll be very dramatic. But yeah, the Covenant is, in Puritan thought, a Covenant or an agreement, a compact. And it starts off as a religious covenant between God and his people. And the Puritans really had an idea that they were chosen people, not unlike ancient Israel, and that led to certain responsibilities as well as blessings on each side. The Covenant also then became a marital Covenant between husband and wife, and it was again part of the religious Covenant with God as well. And it was a familial Covenant, and there was a social Covenant in economic and political. It was somewhat hierarchical in this nature, but it’s basically an agreement that all of the social, economic, familial, personal relationships, or people were rooted upon this religious Covenant with God, and it sort of gave each person their duties within this hierarchy.

Mary (05:23)
Okay, so we’re in Boston, plus the Puritans settle in Massachusetts, and they are deeply steeped in this religious worldview. They have this Covenant, this agreement with God, and it affects their entire life, right. Their family, their society, everything like that. Okay, so it’s 1721, and smallpox is going to break out in Boston. So can you set the scene for us a little bit? What is Boston like in 1721?

Tony (05:51)
Well, Boston is a city of around 11,000 people or so. It’s a bustling seaport. It’s a port city with very close connections to the British Empire and to that thriving Atlantic trade. Ships are coming in around from all over the Empire during this time on a daily basis. And it’s quite a large city, actually. It’s the third-largest city in the British Empire. And so even though there’s about 11,000 people, it’s really quite large. It’s very cosmopolitan in many ways. Even though a lot of people have a vision of the Puritans as being sort of rigid and maybe kind of retrograde and backward, they’re really quite the opposite that they were really quite worldly, very cosmopolitan, really involved in trade of all kinds. And so it would be very much like going to an exciting and thriving metropolis today.

Mary (07:06)
It is interesting to note because I think a lot of times when we think of the Puritans or the early days of the colonies, you sort of think of frontier and wilderness and this deep religion guiding everything. But from what you’re saying, Boston, that’s not necessarily a fair description of Boston. There’s lots of comings and goings and connections with the British Empire, which is all over the place at this time.

Tony (07:29)
Right. That trade, but also would lead not only to an exchange of economic goods but also ideas as well. Ideas are flowing in from not only the British Empire but from Europe. Don’t forget, the enlightenment and the scientific revolution are going on at this time, and journals and ideas are traveling. Boston has two newspapers. It’s a highly literate society. Yeah. And the trade is not only going on in ideas and in goods with the British Empire, but also along the North American coastline. It’s being conducted with the hinterland, the interior. And so agricultural goods are moving, and there’s a thriving shipbuilding industry in Boston and the port cities around New England. And there’s a thriving trade with the other colonies. And so ideas are spreading among the colonies as well, which will obviously become important for the American revolution. It’s really, in many ways, it’s an extremely dynamic place that we don’t normally think about.

Mary (08:50)
Okay, so Boston in 1721, it’s dynamic. There’s goods and ideas traveling through, and there’s people traveling through as well. And I think with people sometimes comes the little germs that people can carry. So walk us through. How does smallpox actually start in 1721?

Tony (09:12)
A great question. Yeah, it’s really dramatic, and it was really a regular process, too. About every generation, smallpox and other diseases would come through Port cities like Boston or Charleston or Norfolk or New York and would ravage the place because enough of a population had not had it since they were born and they were susceptible. And once enough of a host population was available, then smallpox would come. I mean, you could almost set your clock by it was about every 19 or 20 years. And in 1721, a convoy of ships came up from Barbados, and some of the sailors unwittingly had smallpox. They were asymptomatic for roughly 10 to 14 days, as was usually the case with smallpox. It was highly contagious. The virus was a large one that could live outside the body for a very long time. So we had contact as well as respiratory transmission. And so once these sailors, as they usually did, went ashore and they were having some drinks or doing some shopping, grabbing some meals, maybe say hello to some other sailors. They knew that kind of thing. They were spreading around smallpox to the city of Boston.

Mary (10:48)
Okay, so you mentioned you could set your clock by these outbreaks of diseases. So in 1721, we have smallpox coming in again. So it’s not new. It’s happened before. So we have a new outbreak happening. But this outbreak, there’s something a little bit different about that. So maybe that’s something that we can get into after a quick break.

Mary (11:16)
Hello, Fabric of History listeners. Join the Bill of Rights Institute and fellow educators this fall as we explore topics such as women’s suffrage, the executive branch, and how to use Socratic discussion with your students. See link in Show Notes and we hope you’ll join us. And now back to the show.

Mary (11:39)
Okay. So before we took our break, Tony, you mentioned that these sailors from Barbados, they’re carrying the virus. They have smallpox, but they’re asymptomatic. So they’re moving throughout the town. I’m sure they’re eager to get off the boat. I suffer from terrible seasickness, by the way, so I can very much imagine they’re happy to be on dry land. They’re spreading the disease unwittingly. So after the symptoms start showing, it’s been two weeks or so, what happens next?

Tony (12:07)
Right. It happened to actually be one or two sailors noticed that they had smallpox and horrible disease with smallpox eruptions all over the body, basically. But the town responded immediately. As we said, they had been through this before. And they quarantined the sailor, I think he was saying, at a boarding house. And so they immediately quarantined him. They put red flags outside his door that said, God, have mercy on this house. And they actually sent a nurse in and posted some cards at the door. And they also immediately quarantined the ship that he had been on. And there were indeed more cases of smallpox on the ship. And so there are Islands around Boston Harbor. So they quarantine the ship to one of the Islands. And they thought they had contained it or maybe hoped they had. And there’s actually a map called the Bonner map from 1722 that I discovered in the course of my research. And so I was able to basically see all the streets in Boston. And within about a week or so, the newspaper announced that there were eight more cases. And as I plotted them on this map, tragically, I saw right away that they were in every corner of Boston. And so the smallpox had spread. At least these eight people were sick, but probably dozens more, if not already hundreds more were asymptomatically sick. And we’re spreading smallpox all around.

Mary (13:54)
So two things I think are really interesting about that. One is that, as you said, these diseases, these are not new in this society. So they have processes in place to deal with them, to quarantine them. They’re announcing it in the press. I don’t think a lot of people think about that in 1721. That’s pretty far back in time. But they’re alerting the citizens are trying to address this problem. I think that’s pretty impressive, frankly.

Tony (14:23)
Exactly right.

Mary (14:25)
And then also interesting. So it’s just like the historian as a detective. So using that map and using the newspaper from the time to plot out where the disease is going is kind of like detective work. So you’re like Perry Mason? Yeah.

Tony (14:40)
There was a lot of fun detective work in all this. And just reading through not only Cotton Mather’s diaries. And we’ll talk about all these figures and the newspapers of the time, the pamphlets and really trying the town records, really trying to get into reading every primary source and really try to get into their heads and not only understand them really as public figures who are involved in this debate, as we’ll see, but also as human beings. What would your reaction be if you knew that there were cases of smallpox all over Boston? Trying to think about how you react, it’s really a frightening prospect. And to think about if you have kids or loved ones or maybe some elderly relations that might be really susceptible to this kind of thing. So it puts it in perspective, I think.

Mary (15:42)
Yeah, absolutely. There’s processes in place, and they have seen the smallpox disease before, but it’s still very scary. And as you said, it can be pretty horrible and disfiguring if you survive it. So you mentioned Cotton Mather. So that is a term that’s a name that we’ve actually discussed before on this podcast when we were talking about the Salem witch trials. And I believe I introduced him as one of the Puritan heavyweights. So perhaps you could give us a more scholarly introduction or background on who he is and situate him in Boston in 1721 during this outbreak.

Tony (16:25)
It sounds like you already did a good scholarly introduction because he was he was indeed a Puritan Minister who was a heavyweight in Boston. And I actually really liked that term because he and his father increased, Mather. I love these great names.

Mary (16:43)
Yes.

Tony (16:46)
I would say that they were heavyweights. And so what that implies is that they carried an awful lot of weight, not only in their respective parishes, their congregations, as a Minister, but they had before this actual outbreak, they had a tremendous amount of sort of social and political sway. They were indeed really important figures in the town and had a lot of respect. But Mather is not only a Minister, he had a family and several kids, but he’s surprisingly and a lot of people may not know this, but he really is not only a man of the cloth, a man of God, but he’s a man of the Enlightenment. He’s a man of the scientific revolution. Just as a couple of pieces of evidence. He went to Boston, where he not only studied theology, but he studied medicine as well. He had a collection of some 3,000 books, which was an incredible number back when most people just owned a few volumes. And so he was a very well-read, very intellectual person. But curiously, he was also a member of the British Royal Society, which was the most scientific society in the world at the time, at the time of the scientific revolution. So he’s a member, and he actually makes contributions to their Journal, the Transactions, as it was called. He preaches about Heliocentrism, which is Copernicus’s Sun-centered universe from the pulpit and discusses these ideas and letters and so forth. As we’ll see, he has a very modern understanding of medicine. And I don’t want to give too much away, but almost a germ theory of disease. He believed that disease was spread outside the body through what he called little particles or living creatures called anemiculae, which is interesting because most people held the idea going all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, that there were these humors in the body, these four humors, and when they were out of balance, that’s what caused disease. So disease really was caused internally rather than externally, through anemiculae or what we would call my call, viruses, and bacteria and so forth. He had a germ theory disease about 170 years before is really formally discovered and introduced. It matters, I think, a three-dimensional view of him, rather than just a view of him as a witch hunter or so forth, really gives us a complex understanding, and it really makes very complex our understanding of the Enlightenment, of the scientific revolution, that many of its leading figures believed in God, or were men who were priests and clergy who are devout Protestants as well. This really complicates our understanding of an idea between a warfare, if you will, between science and religion. The reality is many people at the time, many of the leading scientists and religious figures, easily walked in both worlds. You might say they reconciled their faith and reason.

Mary (20:32)
Right. It’s very complex. It’s not just hunting witches and diseases coming from some humor balance off in your body. So there was a lot to unpack, I think, in what you said here.

Tony (20:46)
He’s a very modern figure.

Mary (20:47)
Yeah, so I was introduced to Cotton Mather in US history, just in the context of Puritan society. But I never knew that he was also so interested in science. And I think that also kind of goes back to the idea of Boston as this cosmopolitan place. Right. The Atlantic is sort of a highway of information. So he’s exposed to these ideas in Europe about science and the Enlightenment, of this idea, about using reason and observation. And he’s reading and contributing to that as a member of the Royal Society, but at the same time, religion is obviously very important to him. So he has his foot in both worlds, as you said. So he’s there, he’s witnessing this outbreak and he is writing a diary, or he has left behind a diary that you’re able to pull evidence from about what’s going on in Boston in 1721. Okay. And then he had this really amazing precursor to the idea of germ theory. So what is his response? Or what does he think is going on when he sees this outbreak happening?

Tony (21:59)
Right. So as a person who’s very interested in science and medicine, he had read about five or six years before, he had read an article in the Transactions Journal from the Royal Society about smallpox inoculation being practiced over in Greece and Turkey. And really, I think, struck him this new medical procedure, but he also then talked to one of his slaves, and he asked the slave if he had ever had smallpox before. And the slave answered, well, yes and no. And Matt ever curiously said, well, what do you mean? And the slave responded, Well, Yes, I had smallpox, but no, not in the way you normally get it. And so Mather asked him to explain himself, and the slave explained that he had shown him the scars of the inoculation process, which he had obviously survived. And inoculation, if you don’t know what it is, is a little disgusting. But we have to understand in the context of the epidemic here is that you would make a small incision in a patient who’s willing to get inoculated, and you would take live smallpox virus pus, basically, and you’d mix it in with the blood of the patient, and they would get smallpox. Right. But the death rate was much lower than if you got it normally, and you would normally get it through your respiratory system. And the death rate for that was anywhere between 15 and 30%, whereas for inoculation, it was usually down around one to 3%. And for Native Americans getting smallpox because they had never had any exposure to it at all, the death rates were above 90% in some cases. So it is a very contagious disease. But inoculation had proven itself efficacious, and Mather learned about it. Now bring it forward. The story forward to 1721. And Mather had previously resolved. When you write about all this and learned about inoculation from a slave, he resolved, next time there was an epidemic in Boston, he resolved to call what he called a consort or a meeting of physicians to practice inoculation. Now, that’s probably in Mather, as we’ll see it, plays a pretty heroic role in all of this. But what we’ll see is this is probably his biggest mistake that he didn’t try to introduce inoculation during a time where there’s no outbreak of smallpox or people are not afraid, where people can maybe be a little more deliberate or a little bit more calm in assessing whether they want to do this. He wants to launch inoculation right in the middle of this outbreak as people are dying. The smallpox came in April, and in May, he solicits the doctors, writes letters to them about inoculation, and no one responds. And then finally, he does, in fact, find one lone doctor to practice the inoculation and to try it out.

Mary (25:43)
I want to backtrack for just a second. He’s learned of this idea from his slave. So this, I think, in and of itself introduces another complexity to the story. So this is a Minister, and he has a slave in his household, but I’m speculating, but he’s taking the information from this man seriously. So it’s not the subject of this particular podcast, but it’s definitely, again, that’s fascinating to me.

Tony (26:20)
The best part of the story is that Mather is not only open-minded, as you’re saying. Right. He’s willing to learn from a slave. Right. And most people at the time were not open to that. They thought they were ignorant and that they didn’t know anything and that they were untrustworthy and so forth. So you have a lot of these stereotypes which shape relationships with these African-American slaves. But Mathers, not only is he very open-minded to it and willing to learn from them, which he does, this enlightened man. Right. This man of science and of God is willing to learn from a slave. But as he introduces inoculation into Boston, to his credit, Mather never hides the fact that he got the information from his slave. And he defends it, too. He’s really quite Liberal minded about this. And he credits the slave for having this information that he and other Englishmen living in North America, other Europeans really broadly in the west, information that they don’t have. And the term for this there was actually a term for this that it was called special providences, that they were these special events and occurrences and knowledge that were occurring that really can’t be explained, that they had knowledge that the Europeans didn’t. And this was seen as divinely ordained in many ways. And so Mather said God gave them knowledge that we in the west don’t have. And I’m paraphrasing him, but he did say that, and he thought it was wonderful and that the cultures could learn from each other. It’s remarkably modern in a town.

Mary (28:27)
Yeah. No, it really is. And the former teacher in me loves that Mather is crediting his sources that he’s doing. That is always a good thing to do, but just willing to acknowledge that.

Tony (28:41)
And actually, we will get into even more complexities once we get the doctor testing smallpox on his slaves.

Mary (28:51)
Okay.

Tony (28:52)
Yeah. So we can get into that right now if you want. So Mather finds one doctor, Doctor Zabdiel Boylston, who’s willing to do this. Okay. And Boylston had had smallpox, and so he wanted to test it on himself. And Mather was willing to but he had already had smallpox, too. And once you get it, you’re immune for life. And so Boylston actually tests the inoculation first on not only his six-year-old son, which is incredible to me because actually, my son, who is 16 now, was six years old when the book came out. And I just couldn’t imagine testing this untested medical procedure on him that might kill him. That was incredible to me when I was writing the book. But Boylston also tests inoculation on his slave, and I think the slave had a son, too, if I remember correctly. So on his slaves. Now, the really fascinating thing about that is I don’t know. I never found out if those particular slaves gave their consent to Dr. Boylston or not getting to know Boylston in the course of writing this. I’d like to think so. But that might just be wishful thinking. I don’t know. They might not have given their consent. He might have forced it upon them. But I just can’t say either way. And so it raises all sorts of complex issues about the nature of slavery in the midst of this great medical discovery.

Mary (30:34)
Well, I think. Yeah, that’s certainly an interesting question. I want to say it’s a historical dead end because we just don’t know. I think sometimes that happens in history. We just can’t say either way. So maybe we should pause here and then come back to how inoculation this testing of inoculation, how it affects society in Boston.

Mary (31:24)
Okay. Before we took a quick break there, we were talking about Dr. Boylston. So he has been convinced by Cotton Mather to try out inoculation. So he’s trying this out on his own young son and two enslaved members of his household. So what is the result of his experiment?

Tony (31:42)
Right. The outcome is that they take a turn for the worst, but they do, in fact, survive using the scientific methods which Boylston and Mather are doing. They’re going to test it and then retest it and then retest and retest it and see if it works. And so since it did initially, there are people who hear about this and they come to Boylston to get inoculated. So he gets about, I don’t know, about a dozen more patients. And once word really spreads, it just sets off this massive firestorm of debate over inoculation.

Mary (32:25)
So you mentioned before that Boston is a very literate place. It’s very cosmopolitan, and they have newspapers. So word is spreading about this doctor, his trials with inoculation. And it sounds like there’s a debate going on between those who are for and against it. Walk us through that a little bit.

Tony (32:48)
Yeah. There’s a fierce debate. And this debate not only takes place, as you say, in the two newspapers, but there’s also pamphlets being written back and forth that there are dozens of pamphlets for enhanced inoculation being written and published in Boston. And there’s also literally fights in the streets about it. People are outraged, people are angry. And the opponents really raise three major objections to this. One is they say, why are you giving people smallpox? There is a smallpox epidemic going on, and they just couldn’t wrap their heads around spreading the contagion to other people. Why would you purposefully give someone a deadly disease? Right. They just didn’t understand that. Right. Because there aren’t really other medical procedures like that. Secondly, they say that this is God’s will, that people are getting sick. And they say you cannot interfere with God’s will because God is punishing us for some collective sin. We have the Puritan worldview coming down through the doctors, actually, which is pretty interesting. And they say this is God’s will. You can’t intervene in that. Otherwise God will send even more punishments. Thirdly, they say you got your information apart from the slave and they’re untrustworthy, they’re ignorant. Why would you get information from a slave? This could go horribly wrong because of where you got your information. Mather is the one who really takes up this debate in public, along with actually the other ministers, which is really ironic. And there are arguments to respond to the criticisms of this. One is they say, well, we’re going to try this. We’ve tested it already. We’re using the scientific method is what they imply, and we’re willing to test it. And they say that the doctors look, if you’re worried about the spreading the contagion, let’s go to one of the Islands in Boston Harbor and we’ll quarantine the patients and you can watch the entire process and we’ll show you that it works. The doctors actually wanted nothing to do with that. As far as the religious arguments, Mather and the other Ministers say, oh, it’s God’s will. We can’t intervene in that when people get sick. He said, well, why have doctors at all? Because every time someone gets sick, you won’t be able to intervene in it. Right. Because it’s God’s will. So that’s kind of a funny rejoinder. But they also take a natural law approach, right. And they say, look, God gave us a reason and knowledge to discover these medical truths and the means to transmit this information all over the world. Right. With the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, they’re really taking that natural law approach of those intellectual currents with the scientific revolution. And Thirdly, Mather again credits the slave and says, no, we can learn from them. In fact, they have special knowledge that we don’t have in the West, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. So these accusations and the rejoinders were going on, it sets off a very furious debate. People are assaulting Cotton Mather in the street, actually, but more and more people are getting inoculated now. Consider also the background fear. Right? 1000 people had fled Boston early on in the spring when the outbreak occurred. They fled for their lives. Now, they could have if they were asymptomatic they could have been spreading all over New England, and we could have had a major pandemic erupt across the North American colonies. Fortunately, we don’t have any evidence that that actually happened. So they probably went off into the countryside and lived with relatives and got out of the urban area. So those people fled. But people are getting sick and the sick roles are increasing. The number of people on Cotton Mather’s prayer roles for his congregation, for example, go into the dozens, and then they go into the scores and then the hundreds during the summer. Hundreds. And then thousands of people are sick of smallpox in the summer and then into the fall of 1721, and increasing numbers of people start dying. I think the numbers are something like one in June and then about a dozen in July, and then the numbers get higher and higher and higher, and by the fall into the hundreds per month. And so we need to understand that this debate, this very furious, angry debate takes place within a crisis environment, right. Where there’s fear, there’s anger. Loved ones are dying, people. You know, businesses are closing their doors. Basically, the Port is shut down, and the city is basically quarantined. And so you basically have a lockdown environment, and people are afraid and they’re alone and they’re caring for loved ones. And in the middle of all this is this really angry debate over inoculation erupts.

Mary (38:40)
It’s interesting that you describe the way you describe the arguments for and against inoculation. These are sort of heavy arguments. We’re talking about natural law and God’s will. But the longer things go on, the more I want to say grittier. It sounds like things are getting like you’re physically assaulting someone, so it just becomes more visceral, if that’s the right word. And the longer people are kind of cooped up and see people getting sick and people dying, their reaction is going to change. Well, it’s a human thing.

Tony (39:12)
Yeah. I mean, civil society starts to break down. Right. And that civility. And those civic virtues that we talk about here at BRI, a lot of them break down. And all that fear, all that anger helps lead to actually a lot of vices being practiced, a lot of distrust, a lot of anger. And let’s go back to the original discussion on that idea of the Covenant. The Covenant is breaking down. Previously, it had bound people together in Puritan, Massachusetts, throughout New England, bound these societies together religiously, politically, economically, personally. And that starts to break down. The smallpox epidemic wreaks havoc with this Covenant. And that’s really an important part of the story in the book.

Mary (40:08)
So we’ve painted a pretty grim picture by this point. So the disease is spreading. There’s a furious debate raging. People are coming to blows in the street with poor Cotton Mather. So I’m curious, how does this all end? So maybe we take a break right here and see if we can try to tie a bow on the smallpox epidemic of 1721.

Mary (40:56)
Okay. So we are knee-deep in this epidemic. Tensions are high, many people are sick, and there’s a debate going on in the press. So we have pamphlets, we have a very literate society in Boston. And again, this is part of the story that I found fascinating. We are introducing a new character now that’s someone we all know, I think it’s fair to say, but sort of has an unexpected role in the story.

Tony (41:22)
Yeah, exactly. The story was juicy already. But if you can imagine, Ben Franklin and his brother. Franklin is all of about 15 years old, and he and his brother decided to start a newspaper, a third newspaper in Boston. And they want to sell a lot of newspapers. So what do they do? They start an anti-inoculation newspaper. Let me say that again. Ben Franklin, as a young man, starts an anti-inoculation newspaper. He serves as a mouthpiece for the opposition, publishing every angry, scandalous, libelous, satirical piece against inoculation. I mean, they’re publishing dog roll or these nasty poems against it, and it reaches such nastiness that the Franklin brothers actually publish a story which says it’s satirical, but it says, if inoculation is so safe, why don’t we inoculate a Native American and send them out into the other tribes? And he’ll walk around and if he spreads smallpox and kills everyone, we’ll know that it doesn’t work. But if everyone survives, we’ll know that it’s okay. I mean, it’s just nasty satirical attacks. And Franklin will later come out for inoculation. In fact, he lost a four year old son back in 1736 because he didn’t get them inoculated, and he really obviously regretted that tremendously. But he was against an inoculation. At least the newspaper was. Now, we don’t have any actual evidence that Franklin was personally against inoculation, but he and his brother certainly did participate on the side of the anti-inoculators in 1721. But I think they mostly wanted to sell newspapers. But obviously, this helps feed the frenzy of a very nasty debate. In fact, in October, I believe it was someone sneaked through the night and actually through what was called a Granado or grenade or a bomb into Cotton Mathers’s home. They tried to kill him and assassinate him because of the inoculation. Now, Interestingly and very curiously, I don’t know why they would do this, but they tied a note to the bomb, which would presumably go up in flames if the bomb exploded. So I don’t know why it was on there, but it said, Cotton Mather, you dog, I’ll inoculate you with this with a pox on you. Fortunately, the bomb just split in half and it’s contents to the powder just spilled on the floor and didn’t kill anyone. But there were several people in the home. And I think that’s just a perfect illustration of how angry people were about inoculation. But the epidemic did eventually die down, mostly because just about everyone who was susceptible to smallpox did, in fact, get it. So I think we have a recorded somewhere around 6000 cases of smallpox. And that would make sense because about the other four, 5000 people who had remained in Boston and not fled, they had probably already had it. I think that it’s almost assured that everyone who was susceptible to smallpox, in fact, got it. It was that contagious tragically. About 850 people, almost 1000 people died in all this. So the death rate, one out of 1000 out of about 6000. So it was around 16%. So that’s exactly what we would normally think. But the inoculation itself. So Dr. Boylston eventually inoculates about 250 people, and he kept very careful case studies of each one. It was really remarkable. I looked at this case studies, we have them in print. And he kept very careful, detailed records, and he admitted that as many as a conservative number, as many as six people died of inoculation. Now, it’s possible, actually, that no one died of inoculation. It’s possible that those six people or some of them got smallpox a week before it or ten minutes as they were walking to Boylston’s home to get inoculated. And so it’s very possible that they had already had it, but they just couldn’t tell if it was from the inoculation or through the respiratory system. And therefore, they died because they had the more vigilant strain of it. However, he admits that it’s possible six people died, and that’s, again, what we would expect about 2% or 3% died of the inoculation. Well, they proved it was successful. And eventually, although not without controversy, in other places, too, this great medical discovery would spread throughout the other colonies and would actually be used by George Washington during the Revolutionary War to inoculate his troops after there was a large outbreak during the siege of Boston in the Continental Army. And this great medical procedural spread. And eventually, of course, a doctor, Jenner over in England will discover a vaccine for it where they actually take a dead virus and inject it, and that will save millions of lives. Don’t forget, I guess I didn’t mention this, but smallpox is the greatest killer in human history. It’s the disease that has killed the most people because it had been around for so long and erupted in so many places, it was endemic, meaning it never went away in huge cities like London with large population concentrations, and it had killed the most people. Unfortunately, it was finally eradicated in about 1978 or 9 or so from all human population. In part, this great medical discovery was introduced into the colonies by a very unlikely figure, Reverend Cotton Mather.

Mary (48:25)
Again, we have the benefit of hindsight, and we know that inoculation and later vaccination will save lives. And it is Cotton Mather played a big role in this epidemic in 1721. So I guess in the long term, I want to say he was on the winning side. But what becomes of Mather in his own time and what becomes of this idea of the Covenant?

Tony (48:49)
That’s a great question. Mather himself. He’s older, and so he dies only about five years later, I believe it is. But he, I think, is personally wounded by this. And I don’t mean literally, although almost when he was almost assassinated, but I think he’s wounded psychologically by this. It was a terrible thing to go through a terrible ordeal, not only the epidemic but all the anger about inoculation. And what I argue in the book and I think it’s true, is that the respect for the Ministry, when you have people assaulting them, when you have people trying to kill them, when you have all these antiministerial diatribes being published in pamphlets in the newspapers. And don’t forget, Franklin writes The Silence Dogood essays the next year in 1722. And they knock the Ministry down a couple of notches as well. And so I think that there’s a long-term decrease in the authority of the Ministry in Pearson, New England. And I think the smallpox epidemic really, in many ways contributed to it. And so we have this sort of increasing secularization of society. That’s really a long-term trend. But like I said, I think that the smallpox epidemic really contributed significantly in a lot of ways to those trends.

Mary (50:33)
There are so many interesting nuggets in this story. So I think one of the big takeaways for me is that this idea is sort of people’s reactions to new ideas. And how do you respond to that? And how do you argue against something you think is false? Do you go for the vitriol? Or do you try to have some sort of civil discourse? Which is something we love here at BRI with the opposing side. And figure out what’s the best way to move forward. But again, so, Cotton Mather, I bet perhaps my next cat will be named Cotton Mather. Because it’s such a fascinating, as you said, like giving him another dimension of his role in not only in the Salem witch trials or Puritan religion. But just in Boston and his ideas as a man of science as well. So I would be thank you so much, Tony, for being with us today and for discussing the Pox and the Covenant. If you have any thoughts, reactions, questions for Tony. He also takes questions on the Yankees. I think they’re a baseball team or some sort of sports team and he likes them. You can write to us at comments@fabricofhistory.org, so thanks for joining us guys, and we’ll see you next time.

Tony (51:54)
Thanks, Mary. I appreciate it.

Intro/Outro (51:58)
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