There are n’t a lot of write account of African - American people living in the early American colonies between the class 1500 and the Revolutionary War . It ’s not that they were n’t there , but the paper track for people of African parentage from this clock time largely consists of petitions for freedom from slavery , accounts of outflow ( or undertake flight ) from enslavement and records of slaying . But accounts of one enslaved man bring up Onesimus , exist in Boston in the other 18th one C , tell the floor of a individual very likely responsible for for saving hundreds of lives in the Bostonsmallpoxepidemic of the former 1720s , as well as countless others involve by future outbreaks all over the colonies .
Cotton Mather
consider that , by the mid-19th century , striver labor and the slave trade itself were powerful economical engines in the American South , it ’s surprising that , 200 years before , Massachusetts was actually the first dependency to give human slavery the moral and legal thumbs up , codifying the right to own human chattel in 1641 . By the prison term Onesimus was purchased for the illustrious Puritan ministerCotton Matherin 1706 , there were about 1,000 enslave people be in Massachusetts — about a third of them living in Boston . Some of these citizenry wereindentured servant , and not all were of African descent — some were from Europe and some were indigenous native Americans . However , the turn of the 18th century saw the colony putting more restrictions on the great unwashed of color , and disproportionately binding them to slavery for life .
Nobody knows Onesimus ’s original name — Cotton Mather name him for a scriptural hard worker who escaped his master , but who later converted to Christianity . He was belike born in West Africa and bring to the colonies on a ship in his early days , as Matherdescribedhim as " a unseasoned Man who is aNegroof a promising expression of surliness " in his diary the workweek his congregation presented Onesimus to him as a gift .
Cotton Mather was an important Bostonian — his forefather , Increase Mather , was the chairperson of Harvard , a task that Cotton Mather later change by reversal down because what he really want to do with his time was read and write . Mather was considered among the most educated multitude in the colonies , and he published up of 400 books in his life , on everything from piracy to constitute hybridization . Mather was also a religious partisan — in the 1690s , he figured prominently in theSalem witch trial , earning himself the report of being exceedingly anti - hag .
Because Mather lived in the city and spent most of his time meter reading and writing , he was apparently not much in need of a laborer in his home — Onesimus ’s independent jobs in the Mather menage seem to have been clearing snowfall , stack firewood , carry water and doing fiddling chores around the menage . However , Mather was extremely concerned in converting Onesimus to Christianity , and he write in his diary about instruct his slave to read and write so that he could better understand the Christian catechism .
Perhaps because Mather was so adamant about convert Onesimus to Christianity , the two seem to have visit a caboodle .
" It was a kinship between an proprietor and someone who was owned , but we know a lot more about Onesimus than we do about other African Americans of the time because Cotton Mather ’s diary is very detailed , " allege Steven Niven , executive editor of the African American National Biography at Harvard’sHutchins Center for African and African American Research . " We know , for example that he had a Word who died . We know , too , that Onesimus wanted to buy his exemption from Mather , which we can take up he eventually did . "
A Conversation About Inoculation
Mather ’s diary also details how sometime in the early 1700s , he and Onesimus had a conversation about the extremely deadly variola epidemics that swept through New England in the 40 year prior . At the fourth dimension , smallpox was one of the deadly diseases in the North American dependency , and Boston had been pip hard several times . harmonize to Mather ’s diary , during one of these conversations , Onesimus made a remark that he would n’t be getting smallpox if it hail back through Boston because he had been inoculated before he left Africa . Of course he did n’t use the terminal figure " inoculation , " but heexplainedto Mather that he had ,
The outgrowth Onesimus underwent back in Africa is now know asvariolation , which was the deliberate infection with the disease to produce resistance from it , and he explain to Mather that you could narrate from the cicatrix on someone ’s arm that they had been treated . Even people who are selling or purchase hard worker knew to bet for the scar because that person was more likely to survive a smallpox epidemic , and therefore more valuable .
Mather did n’t move straightaway on this information , but in 1720 , when Boston experienced another smallpox outbreak , he think the conversations he had had with Onesimus . Mather teamed up with a doctor named Zabdiel Boylston and take the field to inoculate the multitude of Boston against the disease in the same way Onesimus had been inoculated back in Africa .
" Although Cotton Mather was a very important figure in Boston at the sentence , and people listened to him , most of the community was opposed to this idea for a couplet of reasons , " aver Niven . " One is because this was a practice the Africans used — it was n’t used in Western Europe at the time , and mass were very wary of that . Secondly , there was a newsprint in Boston called " The New England Courant " run by Benjamin Franklin ’s older comrade , James . It go up a slander safari against Cotton Mather , sound out it was ridiculous to call up you could protect somebody from a disease by giving them the disease . "
Edward Jenner and a Smallpox Vaccination
In the end,242 peoplevolunteered for Mather ’s vaccination crusade , and only 2 percent of those citizenry died in that variola epidemic , compared to 14 percent of the uninoculated universe who died of variola major in Boston between 1721 and 1723 . When the word spread that those who were inoculate had a seven time heavy chance of surviving variola major , it became a common drill in Boston and the eternal rest of the Americas until 1796 whenEdward Jennerdeveloped the first variola major vaccination .
What Onesimus suppose of the part he play in salvage the life of countless colonists is unknown because , harmonise to Mather ’s journal and other documentation , he deliver the goods in conditionally buying his freedom around 1716 . He bought Mather a replacement striver , and hold to do little jobs around the sign of the zodiac , when necessary .
As far as anyone knows , though , Mather never succeeded in converting Onesimus to Christianity .
