“Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper Wars” in Jamaica Plain, 4 Dec.

On Tuesday, 4 December, I’ll speak at the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain on the topic of “Boston’s Pre-Revolutionary Newspaper Wars (and What They May Tell Us About Today’s News Media).”

This is part of the site’s “Tuesday in the Parlor” lecture series. Here’s the description we came up with:

In the period leading up to the Revolution, colonial journalists produced a lively array of print publications aimed at keeping the populace informed about—or inflamed by—the political news of the day.

On the left were The Boston Gazette and The Massachusetts Spy while The Boston News-Letter, The Boston Chronicle, and Boston Weekly Post-Boy espoused viewpoints from the right. The Boston Evening-Post tried to maintain a centrist voice. The newspaper business could be a nasty and dangerous one, prompting rivalries between printers and occasional violence.

Join us for J. L. Bell’s enlightening talk about the how America’s early news medium operated in the volatile pre-Revolutionary environment and the significance of this history for today’s information media.

We’re scheduled to start promptly at 7:00 P.M. After the talk, there will be a book signing and light refreshments.

Tickets for this event are $5 for members of the Loring-Greenhough House and $10 for the public, plus a small processing fee to Eventbrite. Folks who join now will of course enjoy discounted tickets for events all the coming year.

“Made by Hand” at Old South

The Old South Meeting House is hosting a series of midday events on the theme of “Made by Hand in Boston: The Crafts of Everyday Life,” cosponsored by Artists Crossing Gallery. These sessions explore the cross between artistry and commerce in the pre-industrial economy.

This Friday, 23 January, the historian of science and technology Robert Martello will speak about “Benjamin Franklin, Tradesman.” The event announcement says:

Follow Franklin’s footsteps from the time he ran his brother’s press as a young apprentice, through the many life adventures that shaped his life as a wordsmith, statesman, and printer. Printing was a tricky business in the 18th century, and Franklin’s combination of business acumen and intellectual prowess contributed to his success and versatility in the trade. Don’t miss this chance to learn how Franklin changed printing, and how printing changed Franklin.

On Friday, 6 February, Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley will speak on “From Pewter to Pottery: The Archaeology of Boston's Colonial Craftspeople”:

[Bagley] will offer an overview of the city’s archaeological collections as a rich source of data, then explore in depth what archaeological research has revealed about two mid-18th-century Boston professional craftspeople—Grace Parker, who had a redware ceramic business, and John Carnes, who ran a pewter workshop.

That was the father of the Rev. John Carnes who spied during the siege.

On Friday, 13 February, historical tailor Henry M. Cooke (shown above) will speak about “William Waine: Tailor to the Common Man”:

With a shop in Boston's South End, Waine tailored to working-class Bostonians—including longshoremen, and perhaps some participants in the Boston Tea Party! This illustrated talk will open your eyes to the tailor’s craft as a window into economy, social stratification, and everyday life in 1770s Boston.

These sessions will all take place from 12:15 to 1:00 P.M., with guests welcome at noon. They are free to Old South members, $6 for others. To make reservations, use this webpage.

Benjamin Franklin Leaves Boston in Style

Among the first generation of leading American statesmen, Benjamin Franklin is often said to be the only one who was ever in bondage to another person. Sure, he was an apprentice with a limited time until he became free, and his master was his older brother James, but he still chafed at that status.

Paradoxically, Benjamin was formally identified as the publisher of the New England Courant, a ruse to get around the authorities’ ban on James issuing a newspaper. But James was master of the shop.

Benjamin started to talk about working somewhere else. James reportedly went to the other printers in Boston and warned them not to hire his brother. Benjamin then started to talk about going to New York instead.

In Franklin’s autobiography, he described how he made it out of Boston this way:

I determin’d on the Point, but my Father now siding with my Brother, I was sensible that, if I attempted to go openly, Means would be used to prevent me. My Friend [John] Collins, therefore, undertook to manage a little for me. He agreed with the Captain of a New York Sloop for my Passage, under the Notion of my being a young Acquaintance of his that had got a naughty Girl with Child, whose Friends would compel me to marry her, and therefore I could not appear or come away publicly.

So I sold some of my Books to raise a little Money, Was taken on board privately, and as we had a fair Wind, in three Days I found myself in New York, near three hundred Miles from Home, a Boy of but seventeen, without the least Recommendation to or Knowledge of any Person in the Place, and with very little Money in my Pocket.

Such a classy start for the future Founder.

William Temple Franklin published the autobiography after his grandfather’s death, he substituted “had an intrigue with a girl of bad character” for “got a naughty Girl with Child.” That doesn’t really address the fact that it takes two to be naughty in that fashion. Furthermore, once he settled in Philadelphia, Benjamin proved himself fully capable of doing just what his friend Collins had described him doing back in Boston.

(Collins eventually followed Franklin to Philadelphia, but their friendship didn’t last.)

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.

“Several of the founding fathers were champions of inoculation”

In The Nation, Lindsay Beyerstein took on Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent incendiary comments about vaccinations from a historical perspective:

As a Tea Party conservative, Bachmann styles herself as defender of original vision of the founding fathers for America. Ironically, several of the founding fathers were champions of inoculation against infectious disease. Some even played key roles in ushering in the vaccine age.

If it hadn’t been for mandatory smallpox inoculation, the Republic might never have survived. General George Washington ordered the Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777, the first large scale inoculation of an army in history. Washington was supported in this effort by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and the chair of the Continental Congress’ Medical Department.

Inoculation was a precursor to vaccination which induced a milder case of smallpox by scratching the skin and rubbing in pus from a smallpox lesion. Cleric and amateur scientist Cotton Mather provided a dramatic proof of concept for inoculation when he inoculated 287 people during a smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721. Only six of the inoculated individuals died, a much lower death rate than for natural smallpox. Mather gets credit for introducing smallpox inoculation to North America, but he learned about it from Onesimus, a slave who had undergone inoculation in Africa.

Despite the success of his experiment, Mather was widely vilified for mocking the will of God. At the time, many believed that smallpox was a divine punishment for sins and that trying to evade the consequences of sinning by getting inoculated was a sin in itself. That argument sounds ridiculous to modern ears, but that same logic still prevails in some quarters when discussing sexually transmitted diseases.

Someone threw a small bomb through Mather’s window with a note that said, roughly, “Inoculate this, Mather.”

The article goes on to name-check Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Harvard professor Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse.

Not mentioned in the article is how in 1721 James Franklin published essays criticizing Mather (shown above) and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston for their inoculation campaign in his New England Courant newspaper and in pamphlets. Among the apprentices who helped to create those publications was the printer’s little brother Benjamin.

Eventually, however, Benjamin Franklin accepted the scientific evidence for the value of smallpox inoculation, particularly after his young son died of the disease in 1736. Two decades later, Franklin and Dr. William Heberden of London published a pamphlet on inoculation in England and America. Franklin had a very important quality for a political leader, or anyone else: the willingness to change one’s mind after seeing solid evidence that undermines one’s initial beliefs.