Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lorn Boglebam here. There aren't a lot of written accounts
Speaker 1: of the black people who lived in the early American
Speaker 1: colonies up through the Revolutionary War. It's not that they
Speaker 1: weren't here, but the paper trail for people of African
Speaker 1: descent from this time largely consists of petitions for freedom
Speaker 1: from slavery, accounts of escape or attention escape from enslavement,
Speaker 1: and records of execution. But accounts of one enslaved man
Speaker 1: named Onesimus living in Boston in the early eighteenth century
Speaker 1: tell the story of the person very likely responsible for
Speaker 1: saving hundreds of lives in the Boston smallpox epidemic of
Speaker 1: the early seventeen twenties, as well as accountants others affected
Speaker 1: by future outbreaks all over the colonies. Massachusetts was actually
Speaker 1: the first colony to give human slavery the moral and
Speaker 1: legal thumbs up, codifying the right to own human chattel
Speaker 1: in sixteen forty one. By the time Anesmus was purchased
Speaker 1: for the famous Hrton minister Cotton Mather in seventeen o six,
Speaker 1: there were about a thousand enslaved people living in Massachusetts
Speaker 1: and about a third of them living in Boston. Some
Speaker 1: of these people were indentured servants, and not all were
Speaker 1: of African descent. Some were European and some Native American. However,
Speaker 1: the beginning of the seventeen hundreds saw the colonies putting
Speaker 1: more restrictions on black people and disproportionately binding them to
Speaker 1: slavery for life. No one knows Niecemus's original name. Cotton
Speaker 1: Mother named him for a biblical slave who escaped his
Speaker 1: master and later converted to Christianity. Anismus was probably born
Speaker 1: in West Africa and brought to the colonies on a ship.
Speaker 1: In his youth. Cotton Mother was an important Bostonian his
Speaker 1: father increased. Mother was the president of Harvard, a job
Speaker 1: that Cotton later turned down because what he really wanted
Speaker 1: to do with this time was read and write. Mother
Speaker 1: was considered among the most educated people in the colonies,
Speaker 1: and he published upwards of four hundred books in his lifetime,
Speaker 1: on everything from piracy to planned hybridization. Mother was also
Speaker 1: a religious zealot. In the sixteen nineties, he figured prominently
Speaker 1: in the Salem witch trials, earning himself the reputation of
Speaker 1: being extremely anti witch. Mother lived in the city and
Speaker 1: did indeed spend most of his time reading and writing,
Speaker 1: so Anisimus's main jobs in the mother household seemed to
Speaker 1: have been clearing snow, stacking firewood, carrying water, and doing
Speaker 1: chores around the house. However, mother was extremely interested in
Speaker 1: converting Anismus to Christianity, and he wrote in his diary
Speaker 1: about teaching him to read and write so that he
Speaker 1: could better understand the Christian Catechism. Perhaps because mother was
Speaker 1: so adamant about converting Anisamis to Christianity, the two seem
Speaker 1: to have talked a lot. We spoke with Stephen Niven,
Speaker 1: executive editor of the African American National Biography at Harvard's
Speaker 1: Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He said
Speaker 1: it was a relationship between an owner and someone who
Speaker 1: was owned. But we know a lot more about Anisamus
Speaker 1: than we do about other African Americans of the time
Speaker 1: because Cotton Mather's diary is very detailed. We know, for instance,
Speaker 1: that he had a son who died. We know too
Speaker 1: that Anisimus wanted to buy his freedom from Mather, which
Speaker 1: we can assume he eventually did. Mother's diary also details
Speaker 1: how some time in the early seventeen hundreds, he and
Speaker 1: Anesimus had a conversation about the extremely deadly smallpox epidemics
Speaker 1: that swept through New England in the forty years prior.
Speaker 1: At the time, smallpox is one of the deadliest diseases
Speaker 1: in the North American colonies, and Boston had been hit
Speaker 1: hard several times, according to Mather's diary. During one of
Speaker 1: these conversations, Ansimus made a remark that he wouldn't be
Speaker 1: getting smallpox if it came through Boston because he had
Speaker 1: been inoculated before he left Africa. The term inoculate didn't
Speaker 1: exist as such yet, but he explained to Mather that
Speaker 1: he had, to quote Mather's diary, undergone an operation which
Speaker 1: had given him something of ye smallpox and would forever
Speaker 1: preserve him from it, adding that it was often used
Speaker 1: among Africans, and whoever had ye courage to use it
Speaker 1: was forever free from the fear of ye contagion. He
Speaker 1: just scribe the operation to me and showed me in
Speaker 1: his arm the scar. The process of nisamis underwent back
Speaker 1: in Africa is now known as vry relation, which was
Speaker 1: the deliberate infection with the disease in order to create
Speaker 1: immunity from it, and he explained to mother that you
Speaker 1: could tell from the scar on someone's arm that they
Speaker 1: had been treated. Even people who were selling were purchasing
Speaker 1: people for slavery. Knew to look for the scar because
Speaker 1: that person was more likely to survive a small pox
Speaker 1: epidemic and was therefore more valuable. Mother didn't act immediately
Speaker 1: on this information, but in seventeen twenty, when Boston experienced
Speaker 1: another smallpox outbreak, he remembered the conversation he had had
Speaker 1: with Anismus. Mother teamed up with a physician and campaigned
Speaker 1: to inoculate the people of Boston against the disease in
Speaker 1: the same way Anissemus had been inoculated back in Africa.
Speaker 1: Nivin said, although Cotton Mather was a very important figure
Speaker 1: in Boston at the time and people listened to him,
Speaker 1: most of the community was opposed to this idea for
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons. One is because this was a
Speaker 1: practice the Perkins used, it wasn't used in Western Europe
Speaker 1: at the time, and people were very wary of that. Secondly,
Speaker 1: there was a newspaper in Boston called The New England Current,
Speaker 1: run by Benjamin Franklin's older brother James It mounted a
Speaker 1: slander campaign against Cotton Mather, saying it was ridiculous to
Speaker 1: think you could protect somebody from a disease by giving
Speaker 1: them the disease. In the end, two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: two people volunteered from Mather's inoculation crusade, and only two
Speaker 1: percent of those people died in that smallpox epidemic, compared
Speaker 1: to fourteen percent of the uninoculated population who died a
Speaker 1: smallpox in Boston between seventy one and seventeen twenty three,
Speaker 1: when the words spread that those who were inoculated had
Speaker 1: a seven times greater chance of surviving, it became a
Speaker 1: common practice in Boston and the rest of the America's
Speaker 1: until seventeen ninety six, when Edward Jenner developed the first
Speaker 1: smallpox vaccination. What a niece of his thought of the
Speaker 1: part he played in saving the lives of countless colonists
Speaker 1: is unknown, because, according to Mather's diary and other documentation,
Speaker 1: he succeeded in conditionally buying his freedom. Around seventeen sixteen,
Speaker 1: he bought mother a replacement slave and agreed to do
Speaker 1: small jobs around the house when necessary, Though as far
Speaker 1: as anyone knows, Mather never succeeded in converting an Easimist
Speaker 1: to Christianity. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields and
Speaker 1: produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots
Speaker 1: of other historical topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain
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