WEBVTT - How Did an Enslaved Man Help Save Colonial Boston from Smallpox? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:07.000 Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, 0:00:07.040 --> 0:00:11.039 Lorn Boglebam here. There aren't a lot of written accounts 0:00:11.080 --> 0:00:13.120 of the black people who lived in the early American 0:00:13.160 --> 0:00:16.480 colonies up through the Revolutionary War. It's not that they 0:00:16.520 --> 0:00:19.320 weren't here, but the paper trail for people of African 0:00:19.320 --> 0:00:22.560 descent from this time largely consists of petitions for freedom 0:00:22.600 --> 0:00:25.959 from slavery, accounts of escape or attention escape from enslavement, 0:00:26.160 --> 0:00:29.800 and records of execution. But accounts of one enslaved man 0:00:30.000 --> 0:00:33.320 named Onesimus living in Boston in the early eighteenth century 0:00:33.680 --> 0:00:36.639 tell the story of the person very likely responsible for 0:00:36.800 --> 0:00:39.839 saving hundreds of lives in the Boston smallpox epidemic of 0:00:39.840 --> 0:00:43.080 the early seventeen twenties, as well as accountants others affected 0:00:43.120 --> 0:00:48.360 by future outbreaks all over the colonies. Massachusetts was actually 0:00:48.400 --> 0:00:51.640 the first colony to give human slavery the moral and 0:00:51.800 --> 0:00:55.040 legal thumbs up, codifying the right to own human chattel 0:00:55.160 --> 0:00:59.280 in sixteen forty one. By the time Anesmus was purchased 0:00:59.280 --> 0:01:02.720 for the famous Hrton minister Cotton Mather in seventeen o six, 0:01:03.040 --> 0:01:06.320 there were about a thousand enslaved people living in Massachusetts 0:01:06.400 --> 0:01:09.280 and about a third of them living in Boston. Some 0:01:09.360 --> 0:01:11.880 of these people were indentured servants, and not all were 0:01:11.880 --> 0:01:16.280 of African descent. Some were European and some Native American. However, 0:01:16.520 --> 0:01:19.280 the beginning of the seventeen hundreds saw the colonies putting 0:01:19.319 --> 0:01:23.200 more restrictions on black people and disproportionately binding them to 0:01:23.280 --> 0:01:28.400 slavery for life. No one knows Niecemus's original name. Cotton 0:01:28.400 --> 0:01:31.040 Mother named him for a biblical slave who escaped his 0:01:31.160 --> 0:01:35.720 master and later converted to Christianity. Anismus was probably born 0:01:35.720 --> 0:01:37.959 in West Africa and brought to the colonies on a ship. 0:01:38.000 --> 0:01:42.440 In his youth. Cotton Mother was an important Bostonian his 0:01:42.560 --> 0:01:45.959 father increased. Mother was the president of Harvard, a job 0:01:46.000 --> 0:01:48.559 that Cotton later turned down because what he really wanted 0:01:48.600 --> 0:01:51.480 to do with this time was read and write. Mother 0:01:51.680 --> 0:01:54.440 was considered among the most educated people in the colonies, 0:01:54.640 --> 0:01:57.200 and he published upwards of four hundred books in his lifetime, 0:01:57.280 --> 0:02:02.080 on everything from piracy to planned hybridization. Mother was also 0:02:02.160 --> 0:02:05.800 a religious zealot. In the sixteen nineties, he figured prominently 0:02:05.800 --> 0:02:08.480 in the Salem witch trials, earning himself the reputation of 0:02:08.520 --> 0:02:13.200 being extremely anti witch. Mother lived in the city and 0:02:13.280 --> 0:02:15.680 did indeed spend most of his time reading and writing, 0:02:16.040 --> 0:02:19.360 so Anisimus's main jobs in the mother household seemed to 0:02:19.360 --> 0:02:23.120 have been clearing snow, stacking firewood, carrying water, and doing 0:02:23.200 --> 0:02:27.360 chores around the house. However, mother was extremely interested in 0:02:27.400 --> 0:02:30.560 converting Anismus to Christianity, and he wrote in his diary 0:02:30.600 --> 0:02:32.440 about teaching him to read and write so that he 0:02:32.480 --> 0:02:36.680 could better understand the Christian Catechism. Perhaps because mother was 0:02:36.680 --> 0:02:40.120 so adamant about converting Anisamis to Christianity, the two seem 0:02:40.200 --> 0:02:43.760 to have talked a lot. We spoke with Stephen Niven, 0:02:43.840 --> 0:02:47.240 executive editor of the African American National Biography at Harvard's 0:02:47.280 --> 0:02:51.120 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He said 0:02:51.560 --> 0:02:53.880 it was a relationship between an owner and someone who 0:02:53.919 --> 0:02:56.520 was owned. But we know a lot more about Anisamus 0:02:56.560 --> 0:02:58.800 than we do about other African Americans of the time 0:02:59.120 --> 0:03:03.320 because Cotton Mather's diary is very detailed. We know, for instance, 0:03:03.360 --> 0:03:06.040 that he had a son who died. We know too 0:03:06.080 --> 0:03:08.720 that Anisimus wanted to buy his freedom from Mather, which 0:03:08.720 --> 0:03:13.679 we can assume he eventually did. Mother's diary also details 0:03:13.720 --> 0:03:16.320 how some time in the early seventeen hundreds, he and 0:03:16.400 --> 0:03:20.120 Anesimus had a conversation about the extremely deadly smallpox epidemics 0:03:20.160 --> 0:03:22.520 that swept through New England in the forty years prior. 0:03:23.480 --> 0:03:25.840 At the time, smallpox is one of the deadliest diseases 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:28.400 in the North American colonies, and Boston had been hit 0:03:28.520 --> 0:03:32.040 hard several times, according to Mather's diary. During one of 0:03:32.080 --> 0:03:35.400 these conversations, Ansimus made a remark that he wouldn't be 0:03:35.400 --> 0:03:37.880 getting smallpox if it came through Boston because he had 0:03:37.880 --> 0:03:41.840 been inoculated before he left Africa. The term inoculate didn't 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:44.600 exist as such yet, but he explained to Mather that 0:03:44.640 --> 0:03:48.560 he had, to quote Mather's diary, undergone an operation which 0:03:48.560 --> 0:03:51.280 had given him something of ye smallpox and would forever 0:03:51.360 --> 0:03:53.800 preserve him from it, adding that it was often used 0:03:53.840 --> 0:03:56.960 among Africans, and whoever had ye courage to use it 0:03:57.000 --> 0:03:59.720 was forever free from the fear of ye contagion. He 0:03:59.840 --> 0:04:01.880 just scribe the operation to me and showed me in 0:04:01.960 --> 0:04:06.920 his arm the scar. The process of nisamis underwent back 0:04:06.920 --> 0:04:09.560 in Africa is now known as vry relation, which was 0:04:09.600 --> 0:04:12.160 the deliberate infection with the disease in order to create 0:04:12.160 --> 0:04:14.880 immunity from it, and he explained to mother that you 0:04:14.880 --> 0:04:16.840 could tell from the scar on someone's arm that they 0:04:16.839 --> 0:04:20.120 had been treated. Even people who were selling were purchasing 0:04:20.160 --> 0:04:22.640 people for slavery. Knew to look for the scar because 0:04:22.640 --> 0:04:24.680 that person was more likely to survive a small pox 0:04:24.680 --> 0:04:29.760 epidemic and was therefore more valuable. Mother didn't act immediately 0:04:29.800 --> 0:04:33.680 on this information, but in seventeen twenty, when Boston experienced 0:04:33.680 --> 0:04:36.800 another smallpox outbreak, he remembered the conversation he had had 0:04:36.800 --> 0:04:40.240 with Anismus. Mother teamed up with a physician and campaigned 0:04:40.279 --> 0:04:42.839 to inoculate the people of Boston against the disease in 0:04:42.880 --> 0:04:46.560 the same way Anissemus had been inoculated back in Africa. 0:04:47.279 --> 0:04:50.880 Nivin said, although Cotton Mather was a very important figure 0:04:50.960 --> 0:04:53.839 in Boston at the time and people listened to him, 0:04:53.960 --> 0:04:56.280 most of the community was opposed to this idea for 0:04:56.320 --> 0:04:59.120 a couple of reasons. One is because this was a 0:04:59.200 --> 0:05:02.120 practice the Perkins used, it wasn't used in Western Europe 0:05:02.160 --> 0:05:05.839 at the time, and people were very wary of that. Secondly, 0:05:05.920 --> 0:05:08.800 there was a newspaper in Boston called The New England Current, 0:05:09.160 --> 0:05:12.320 run by Benjamin Franklin's older brother James It mounted a 0:05:12.360 --> 0:05:15.719 slander campaign against Cotton Mather, saying it was ridiculous to 0:05:15.800 --> 0:05:18.279 think you could protect somebody from a disease by giving 0:05:18.320 --> 0:05:22.200 them the disease. In the end, two hundred and forty 0:05:22.200 --> 0:05:25.839 two people volunteered from Mather's inoculation crusade, and only two 0:05:25.880 --> 0:05:29.120 percent of those people died in that smallpox epidemic, compared 0:05:29.160 --> 0:05:32.160 to fourteen percent of the uninoculated population who died a 0:05:32.200 --> 0:05:35.680 smallpox in Boston between seventy one and seventeen twenty three, 0:05:36.600 --> 0:05:38.960 when the words spread that those who were inoculated had 0:05:38.960 --> 0:05:41.839 a seven times greater chance of surviving, it became a 0:05:41.839 --> 0:05:44.520 common practice in Boston and the rest of the America's 0:05:44.760 --> 0:05:47.799 until seventeen ninety six, when Edward Jenner developed the first 0:05:47.880 --> 0:05:51.839 smallpox vaccination. What a niece of his thought of the 0:05:51.880 --> 0:05:54.520 part he played in saving the lives of countless colonists 0:05:54.560 --> 0:05:58.560 is unknown, because, according to Mather's diary and other documentation, 0:05:59.040 --> 0:06:02.760 he succeeded in conditionally buying his freedom. Around seventeen sixteen, 0:06:03.400 --> 0:06:05.839 he bought mother a replacement slave and agreed to do 0:06:05.880 --> 0:06:09.320 small jobs around the house when necessary, Though as far 0:06:09.360 --> 0:06:12.320 as anyone knows, Mather never succeeded in converting an Easimist 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:20.360 to Christianity. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields and 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:22.720 produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots 0:06:22.760 --> 0:06:25.800 of other historical topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:28.400 Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts 0:06:28.400 --> 0:06:31.279 in My heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 0:06:31.360 --> 0:06:33.000 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.