“Argumentive dialogue concerning inoculation”

The Telltale essays by Harvard College students in Ebenezer Turell’s notebook come to a stop on 1 Nov 1721.

In the preceding month, 411 people in Boston had died of smallpox. The epidemic had been spreading and killing since April.

People at Harvard were contracting the disease, including the maid of undergraduate Samuel Mather (1706–1785).

Samuel’s father, the Rev. Cotton Mather, had heard about inoculation against smallpox from his enslaved servant Onesimus and then from reading accounts of the procedure in Turkey. He urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to try this approach infecting people with a mild case of the disease in hopes of immunizing them for life.

In June 1721, Boylston inoculated his young son, an enslaved man, and that man’s son. When they didn’t die, he and Mather went public. Boston’s selectmen told him to stop. Boylston didn’t, inoculating young Samuel Mather among others.

Dr. William Douglass opposed inoculation with his pen and his authority as a Scottish-educated physician. The Rev. Benjamin Colman (shown above) supported Boylston and Mather with his Narrative of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-pox in New England. Other doctors and ministers divided on the question.

In that atmosphere, around the start of November Ebenezer Turell opened his Telltale notebook from the other end and wrote out a fourteen-page “Argumentive dialogue concerning inoculation between Dr. Hurry and Mr. Waitfort.” Dr. Hurry was, of course, eager for the new procedure, and Mr. Waitfort was still hanging back.

The dialogue consisted of exchanges like this one:

W[aitfort:…] He that bring sickness upon himself Voluntarily Breaks one of the divine Commandment (the 6th)…

H[urry:] I never heard yt the Bringing Sickness upon our selves was a Breach of ye Divine Law Absolutly for by vomitting Purging letting of Blood &c We make our selves sick and that voluntarily too

In the end Dr. Hurry prevailed. The essay concluded with this verse:

Theres none but Cowards fear ye Launce,
Heroes receive ye Wound
With rapturous joy they Skip & Dance,
While others hugg ye Ground.

According to Dr. Boylston’s published account, on 23 November he “inoculated Mr. Ebenezer Pemberton, and Mr. John Lowel, each about 18.” Both those young men were in Turell’s college class and in his circle. (Indeed, I suspect this John Lowell was the student he started the Telltale with.)

The next day, he administered the procedure to a Harvard professor, a tutor, and seven students, including “Mr. Ebenezer Turil.”

Turell went back into his notebook and added that his “Argumentive dialogue” was “Compos’d about three weeks before I was inoculated.”

TOMORROW: Ebenezer Turell’s Society.

Hunter on Dighton Rock in Middleboro, 19 May

On Saturday, 19 May, the Massachusetts Archaeological Society will host a special lecture by Douglas Hunter on “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past.”

Drawing on his book of the same name, Dr. Hunter will discuss the legacy and mythology behind a petroglyph-covered boulder found in the area that became Berkley:

First noticed by colonists in 1680, Dighton Rock in Massachusetts by the nineteenth century was one of the most famous and contested artifacts of American antiquity. This forty-ton boulder covered in petroglyphs has been the subject of endless speculation that defies its Native American origins. Hunter dissects almost four centuries of Dighton Rock’s misinterpretation, to reveal its larger role in colonization and the conceptualization of Indigenous peoples.

Among the many New England scholars who studied the rock was the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. In 1766, while living in Newport, Rhode Island, he saw a copy of a broadside about the boulder written by the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather. (Other men who had written about the rock included Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard and Dr. William Douglass, best known for opposing smallpox inoculation and Mather’s other ideas.)

In June 1767 Stiles went to visit a man who lived half a mile from the rock. He used chalk to make the markings more distinct and then drew them in his journal, stating on 6 June: “Spent the forenoon in Decyphering about Two Thirds the Inscription, which I take to be in phoenician Letters & 3000 years old.”

Stiles returned in July for more investigation. He “washed & skrubbed the Rock with a Broom,” fighting the water level, before drawing more surfaces. The next month, two local men did the minister the favor of going out and collecting more drawings, measurements, and even what seems to be a casting of the scrapes in “the Phœnitian rock.”

Here’s one of Stiles’s drawings, courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

In 1768 the Swiss artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière visited Stiles on his way to settle in Philadelphia. He studied the material that the minister had collected. He looked at the characters on Mather’s broadside and and observed, “They are also totally different from the copy taken by Dr. Stiles.” Indeed, most or all of those researchers were seeing what they wanted to see.

Hunter’s talk about this history and what it shows about colonial New Englanders’ attitude toward the Natives around them will take place at the Robbins Museum of Archaeology, 17 Jackson Street in Middleboro, starting at 1:00 P.M. The program is free, but the society suggests a donation of $5 per person.

“At distance, thou, Columbia! view thy Prince”

Here at last is the poem whose authorship I’ve been considering, the one numbered XXIX in the Boston publication Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis apud Novanglus.

As you recall, the two goals of that book were to:

• praise King George III and his bride, Queen Charlotte (shown here), and
• demonstrate how Harvard College graduates could create poetry in Latin, Greek, and English at the same level as scholars from Oxford or Cambridge.

Unfortunately, the result was still pre-Romantic, non-satirical eighteenth-century poetry.

Tho’ from thy happy shores, Britannia! far
Remov’d, where Phoebus slopes his golden orb
Down western sky, to Europe; while high Noon,
From midst his radiant path, on us he pours:
Yet, sharing in the noble British vein,
We feel, and, feeling, sing the common bliss;
Bliss wide diffus’d thro’ Britain’s wide domain,
And swelling in each breast to ecstasy.

Hence, jarring discord, tumults, carnage, wars;
Embattled nations! cease a while to deal
Destruction; Peace! on balmy wings, descend;
Let Hymen and the Paphian Goddess hold
Imperial sway, soft’ning each heart to love.

Behold, Britannia! in thy favour’d Isle;
At distance, thou, Columbia! view thy Prince,
For ancestors renown’d, for virtues more;
At whose sole nod, grim tyranny aghast,
With grudging strides, hies swift from British climes;
While liberty undaunted rears her head:
Whose mind superior bears, as Atlas Heav’n,
The weight of kingdoms; and with equal ease,
As some Intelligence, of order high,
Directs yon circling orbs, by laws exact,
Th’ unweildy empire guides thro’ mazy paths:---
Made happy.--How? By nuptial tie.--With whom?
Thy Pride, Germania! whom to form combine
The Graces all, and all fair virtue’s train.
Whate’er ennobles or adorns the Fair,
Of line, of form, of wit, of sense, unite
Their lovliest charms, and centre all in Her.
For such a Prince the only Princess meet;
Of such a Princess worthy only He!
Can heart conceive, imagination paint,
Or fancy frame more finish’d happiness
Below?—Ye Powers above! your blessings shed,
And genial influence, on the royal Pair.
From such embrace, a progeny of kings
Shall rise, to rule the world, and bless mankind.

Long let Britannia’s Prince, in wisdom's lore
Deep read, with sapient hand her sceptre wield;
Long may his other self, with converse mild,
With looks with air, with port, that whisper love,
Speak sweetness to his heart ineffable,
Sooth all his cares, and foretaste give of Heav’n.

A number of literary scholars say this poem was the earliest English use of “Columbia” as a term for America.

I’ve found a couple of earlier examples of “Columbia” in the Archive of Americana database, but they’re not so straightforward as this one. On 30 Nov 1741 the Boston Evening-Post reprinted an item from the Gentleman’s Magazine:

The SPEECH of his Grace the Duke of A[rgy]le, on the Motion made in the H[ou]se of L[or]ds, for addressing his Majesty to dismiss the Rt. Hon. Sir R. W[alpol]e; for as it relates to the Management of the War. Note, Columbia must be taken for America, Lilliput for Eng[lan]d, Iberians for Spani[ar]ds, and Grablitra for Gibr[alta]r.

Publishing Parlimentary addresses, especially any that contained critical remarks, was still legally iffy then. The word “Columbia” offered pseudonymous protection for the printers and/or the duke, much like the letters replaced with hyphens. And that term was still unfamiliar enough to readers that the article required a key for understanding.

The term’s next American appearance came in 1749 when Dr. William Douglass (best known for opposing Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and the Rev. Cotton Mather’s effort to introduce smallpox inoculation to Boston) published A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America. That book suggested that “Columbia” would be a better name for the continent than “America” since Columbus had discovered it for Europe. Again, the term came with an explanation, not just appearing as a parallel to “Britannia” and “Germania.”

So whoever wrote Pietas et Gratulatio’s poem XXIX indeed introduced a term into the American language.

Reviewing the Review

The Massachusetts Historical Review is the Massachusetts Historical Society’s annual journal. It usually contains about four scholarly papers and some book reviews. Copies go to members and subscribers, and people with access to J-STOR can see the articles individually.

Volume 14, published at the end of last year, has three articles on eighteenth-century New England history, which made it particularly interesting for me. (Some issues focus on the U.S. Civil War, industrialization, and other minor topics.) There’s also a review by Chernoh M. Sesay of both Vincent Carretta’s biography Phillis Wheatley (discussed back here) and the essay collection Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom.

The issue’s first paper is “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” by Amalie M. Kass. It recounts the dispute over the new smallpox inoculation in 1721-22. The Rev. Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston favored the new technique. Dr. William Douglass and the young printer James Franklin were the loudest voices against it. In the end, the numbers showed its value—one of the earliest uses of epidemiological statistics to settle a scientific question.

There have been many studies of that event over the years because the principal figures helpfully wrote a lot about it. This webpage from Harvard offers links to their original back-and-forth pamphlets and a bibliography of later studies. Here’s a PDF download of one more article from John Hopkins, another from Illinois Wesleyan, and a recent undergraduate thesis at William & Mary.

I found Kass’s article to be a solid and thorough narration of events without many surprises. One thing that did intrigue me was that Mather had stumbled onto the germ theory of disease:

The Animals that are much more than Thousands of times Less than the finest Grain of Sand, have their Motions; and so, their Muscles, their Tendons, their Fibres, their Blood, and the Eggs wherein their Propagation is carried on. The Eggs of these Insects (and why not the living Insects too!) may insinuate themselves by the Air, and with our Ailments, yea, thro’ the Pores of our skin; and soon gett into the Juices of our Bodies.

The minister’s microscopes weren’t good enough to really see germs, much less the smallpox virus, and this passage from his book The Angel of Bethesda wasn’t published until the 20th century. So he was very lucky to hit on the right idea without strong evidence and quite unlucky not to be able to publish his work and get credit for it.

The next paper is Douglas L. Winiarski’s “The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England’s Era of Great Awakenings.” Winiarski is writing a study of changing New England Congregationalism in the 1700s, to be titled Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. As I reconstruct events, that research included cataloguing “prayer bills,” or short handwritten notes seeking prayer that congregants handed to ministers or left at meetinghouses to be read during services. And that led Winiarski to one such prayer bill, preserved at the Historical Society of Old Newbury and published in Joshua Coffin’s 1845 local history (with modernized spelling and capitalization).

That handwritten document purports to be a prayer by the Rev. Christopher Toppan of Newbury himself, worried about the devil causing his horse to throw him. Winiarski examines it against scores of other prayer bills, finding it unusually long and detailed, as well as oddly spelled and not from Toppan’s own hand. (It’s also inconsistent in its use of the long S, a detail not noted in the paper.)

Winiarski describes the furor of what was later called the “First Great Awakening,” in which Toppan first welcomed and then opposed the preaching of the Rev. George Whitefield. The paper concludes that this document was written and posted to lampoon Toppan and not, as first published, a sincere (if “deranged”) prayer by him. There’s no clue pointing to the real culprit, however. The great value of Winiarski’s paper is its look at New England religious practices in the 1740s. That one curious document can be a peephole into the New Light/Old Light debate.

TOMORROW: A study of one runaway slave, or many.