Letter to Cotton Mather

My Dearest Cotton,

Since your graduation from Harvard at age 16, I have become increasingly vexed that English masters are not doing their job of looking after African slaves and children, whose souls are as white and good as those of other Nations... yet destroyed for lack of knowledge.

An opportunity is in our hands for all who have any Negroes in our houses - whether we may not be the happy instruments of converting the blackest cases of blindness and baseness into admirable candidates of eternal blessedness.

This opportunity must not be lost - if we have any concern for souls (our own or others). 

I have heard that the Religious Society of Negroes there in Boston has agreed to be counseled by someone wise and of English descent, and not to afford shelter to anyone who has run away from their masters. 

The Africans' gross bestiality and rudeness of manner, the variety and strangeness of their languages, and the weakness and shallowness of their minds render it almost impossible to make any progress in their conversion.

They are better fed, better clothed and better managed by far than they would be if they were their own men. They must not be allowed to partake in evil and make themselves infinitely blacker than they are already. But by obeying, their souls will be washed white in the blood of the lamb.

Furthermore, it cannot be disputed that the Christianized servant will always be more profitable to his master.  My dear son, then, let us make a trial, whether they that have been scorched and blackened by the sun of Africa, may not come to have their minds healed by the more benign beams of the sun of righteousness.

God will be with you, I am persuaded he will. And with that persuasion I subscribe myself, 

Your faithful mother and devoted servant,
Maria Mather

The Back Story

A major intellectual, religious leader and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped to shape public views on treatment of enslaved Africans, indigenous peoples and the Salem witch trials.

Cotton was from a tight knit family with a line of Puritan ministers, including his grandfathers Richard Mather and John Cotton. His father, Increase, was also a noted preacher and intellectual who served as president of Harvard College. Cotton coveted that position, but never achieved it. He was personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England and thus often a defender of the status quo.

Mather’s promotion of inoculation against smallpox, which he had learned about from an African named Onesimus whom Mather held as a slave, caused violent controversy in Boston during the outbreak of 1721. 

Cotton called the Puritan colonists “the English Israel” – a chose people. Puritans must religiously instruct all slaves and children, the “inferiors”, although the souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good.

Mather wrote of all humans having an unblemished White soul the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White. Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. And for all these White men, Whiteness symbolized beauty, a trope taken up by one of the first popular novels by an English woman [Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave].

(Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi, Published 2016)

The Whiteness Factor

How did defending the religious, class, slaveholding, gender and racial hierarchies benefit the Mathers family? How did all of these hierarchies and the Salem witch trials serve to benefit Whiteness?

The conservative religious community has a long history of supporting the status quo. Slavery was the accepted social order, reinforced by the rule of law. Protestant and Catholic religious dogma often stress the importance of “rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s” as a way of avoiding action demanded by social justice.