Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather was a Puritan clergyman and author in colonial New England, who wrote extensively on theological, historical, and scientific subjects. After being educated at Harvard College, he joined his father Increase as minister of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House in Boston, then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he preached for the rest of his life. He has been referred to as the "first American Evangelical".
A major intellectual and public figure in English-speaking colonial America, Cotton Mather helped lead the successful revolt of 1689 against Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of New England appointed by King James II. Mather's subsequent involvement in the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693, which he defended in the book Wonders of the Invisible World, attracted intense controversy in his own day and has negatively affected his historical reputation. As a historian of colonial New England, Mather is noted for his Magnalia Christi Americana.
Personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England, Cotton Mather unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Harvard College. After 1702, Cotton Mather clashed with Joseph Dudley, the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whom Mather attempted unsuccessfully to drive out of power. Mather championed the new Yale College as an intellectual bulwark of Puritanism in New England. He corresponded extensively with European intellectuals and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1710.
A promoter of the new experimental science in America, Cotton Mather carried out original research on plant hybridization. He also researched the variolation method of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox contagion, which he learned about from an African-American slave whom he owned, Onesimus. He dispatched multiple reports on scientific matters to the Royal Society of London, which elected him as a fellow in 1713. Mather's promotion of inoculation against smallpox caused violent controversy in Boston during the outbreak of 1721. Scientist and United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who as a young Bostonian had opposed the old Puritan order represented by Mather and participated in the anti-inoculation campaign, later described Mather's book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good as a major influence on his life.
Early life and education
Cotton Mather was born in 1663 in the city of Boston, the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the Rev. Increase Mather and his wife Maria née Cotton. His grandfathers were Richard Mather and John Cotton, both of them prominent Puritan ministers who had played major roles in the establishment and growth of the Massachusetts colony. Richard Mather was a graduate of the University of Oxford and John Cotton a graduate of the University of Cambridge. Increase Mather was a graduate of Harvard College and the Trinity College Dublin, and served as the minister of Boston's original North Church. This was one of the two principal Congregationalist churches in the city, the other being the First Church established by John Winthrop. Cotton Mather was therefore born into one of the most influential and intellectually distinguished families in colonial New England and seemed destined to follow his father and grandfathers into the Puritan clergy.Cotton entered Harvard College, in the neighboring town of Cambridge, in 1674. Aged only eleven and a half, he is the youngest student ever admitted to that institution. At around this time, Cotton began to be afflicted by stuttering, a speech disorder that he would struggle to overcome throughout the rest of his life. Bullied by the older students and fearing that his stutter would make him unsuitable as a preacher, Cotton withdrew temporarily from the college, continuing his education at home. He also took an interest in medicine and considered the possibility of pursuing a career as a physician rather than as a religious minister. Cotton eventually returned to Harvard and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1678, followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1681, the same year his father became Harvard President. At Harvard, Cotton studied Hebrew and the sciences.
After completing his education, Cotton joined his father's church as assistant pastor. In 1685, Cotton was ordained and assumed full responsibilities as co-pastor of the church. Father and son continued to share responsibility for the care of the congregation until the death of Increase in 1723. Cotton would die less than five years after his father, and was therefore throughout most of his career in the shadow of the respected and formidable Increase.
When Increase Mather became president of Harvard in 1692, he exercised considerable influence on the politics of the Massachusetts colony. Despite Cotton's efforts, he never became quite as influential as his father. One of the most public displays of their strained relationship emerged during the Salem witch trials, which Increase Mather reportedly did not support. Cotton did surpass his father's output as a writer, producing nearly 400 works.
Personal life
Cotton Mather married Abigail Phillips, daughter of Colonel John Phillips of Charlestown, on May 4, 1686, when Cotton was twenty-three and Abigail was fifteen years old. They had eight children.Abigail died of smallpox in 1702, having previously suffered a miscarriage. He married widow Elizabeth Hubbard in 1703. Like his first marriage, he was happily married to a very religious and emotionally stable woman. They had six children. Elizabeth, the couple's newborn twins, and a two-year-old daughter, Jerusha, all succumbed to a measles epidemic in 1713.
On July 5, 1715, Mather married widow Lydia Lee George. Her daughter Katherine, wife of Nathan Howell, became a widow shortly after Lydia married Mather and she came to live with the newly married couple. Also living in the Mather household at that time were Mather's children Abigal, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Samuel. Initially, Mather wrote in his journal how lovely he found his wife and how much he enjoyed their discussions about scripture. Within a few years of their marriage, Lydia was subject to rages which left Mather humiliated and depressed. They clashed over Mather's piety and his mishandling of Nathan Howell's estate. He began to call her deranged. She left him for ten days, returning when she learned that Mather's son Increase was lost at sea. Lydia nursed him through illnesses, the last of which lasted five weeks and ended with his death on February 15, 1728. Of the children that Mather had with Abigail and Elizabeth, the only children to survive him were Hannah and Samuel. He did not have any children with Lydia.
Revolt of 1689
On May 14, 1686, ten days after Cotton Mather's marriage to Abigail Phillips, Edward Randolph disembarked in Boston bearing letters patent from King James II of England that revoked the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company and commissioned Randolph to reorganize the colonial government. James's intention was to curb Massachusetts's religious separatism by incorporating the colony into a larger Dominion of New England, without an elected legislature and under a governor who would serve at the pleasure of the Crown. Later that year, the King appointed Sir Edmund Andros as governor of that new Dominion. This was a direct attack upon the Puritan religious and social orders that the Mathers represented, as well as upon the local autonomy of Massachusetts. The colonists were particularly outraged when Andros declared that all grants of land made in the name of the old Massachusetts Bay Company were invalid, forcing them to apply and pay for new royal patents on land that they already occupied or face eviction. In April 1687, Increase Mather sailed to London, where he remained for the next four years, pleading with the Court for what he regarded as the interests of the Massachusetts colony.The birth of a male heir to King James in June 1688, which could have cemented a Roman Catholic dynasty in the English throne, triggered the so-called Glorious Revolution in which Parliament deposed James and gave the Crown jointly to his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, the Dutch Prince William of Orange. News of the events in London greatly emboldened the opposition in Boston to Governor Andros, finally precipitating the 1689 Boston revolt. Cotton Mather, then aged twenty-six, was one of the Puritan ministers who guided resistance in Boston to Andros's regime. Early in 1689, Randolph had a warrant issued for Cotton Mather's arrest on a charge of "scandalous libel", but the warrant was overruled by Wait Winthrop.
According to some sources, Cotton Mather escaped a second attempted arrest on April 18, 1689, the same day that the people of Boston took up arms against Andros. The young Mather may have authored, in whole or in part, the "Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston and the Country Adjacent", which justified that uprising by a list of grievances that the declaration attributed to the deposed officials. The authorship of that document is uncertain: it was not signed by Mather or any other clergymen, and Puritans frowned upon the clergy being seen to play too direct and personal a hand in political affairs. That day, Mather probably read the Declaration to a crowd gathered in front of the Boston Town House.
In July, Andros, Randolph, Joseph Dudley, and other officials who had been deposed and arrested in the Boston revolt were summoned to London to answer the complaints against them. The administration of Massachusetts was temporarily assumed by Simon Bradstreet, whose rule proved weak and contentious. In 1691, the government of King William and Queen Mary issued a new Massachusetts Charter. This charter united the Massachusetts Bay Colony with Plymouth Colony into the new Province of Massachusetts Bay. Rather than restoring the old Puritan rule, the Charter of 1691 mandated religious toleration for all non-Catholics and established a government led by a Crown-appointed governor. The first governor under the new charter was Sir William Phips, who was a member of the Mathers' church in Boston.