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