The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race

ON July 12, 1716, the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston wrote to the Royal Society acknowledging that he had read with interest Emanuele Timoni’s description of smallpox inoculation in Turkey. But Mather was quick to point out that the information in Dr. Timoni’s letter to the Society’s Philosophical Transactions was not new to him:

I do assure you, that many months before I mett with any Intimations of treating the Small-Pox, with the Method of Inoculation, any where in Europe; I had from a Servant of my own, an Account of its being practised in Africa. Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow, Whether he ever had the Small-Pox; he answered, both, Yes, and, No; and then told me, that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox, & would forever praeserve him from it; adding, That it was often used among the Guramantese. [1]

Five years after Mather wrote this letter, smallpox returned to Boston for the first time in nearly two decades. For Mather, Onesimus’s description of African inoculation served as the kernel for a plan to wring some good out of the horrors of the epidemic. He enlisted a local doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, to start testing inoculation on Boston volunteers—setting off a rancorous debate among prominent Bostonians over the validity of a practice regarded by extremists as either a panacea or outright murder.

Onesimus’s transmission of medical knowledge to Cotton Mather has slipped into larger narratives of the 1721 smallpox epidemic only incidentally, since the history of the inoculation controversy is usually treated as distinct from the history of race. [2] An alternative is to regard discourses of human difference and social practices patterned on those discourses as integral to the history of eighteenth-century medicine and, conversely, to read the inoculation controversy as part of the ongoing construction of race in the early modern world. Historians of medicine have described how the mid- to late eighteenth century witnessed the beginnings of a scientific medical establishment in the North American colonies. [3] Intellectual historians have shown how scientific theories of the eighteenth century were critical to the emergence of a modern concept of “race” as an inherited complex of bodily characteristics linked to mental and social worth. [4] The separation of these two strands of scholarship obscures what the development of professional medicine and racial ideology shared—a tendency to give explanatory weight to physical, observable characteristics of the human body.

Historians interested in how race was inscribed onto the body in the early modern era have primarily analyzed contemporary sources that isolated and described different groups of human beings: scientific texts and natural histories, travel narratives and proto-ethnographies, biblical genealogies and scriptural exegeses. While these kinds of documents provide systematic and coherent introductions to past conceptions of human difference, it is not only in these abstract and self-conscious discussions that the elements of race are to be found. Sometimes the most revealing texts are those in which authors invoke categories of human difference in an incidental manner. The “unintentionality” of these documents can provide an insider’s view of contemporary social practices and ideologies around race or its prototypes. The Boston inoculation controversy is such an incident, in which the rhetoric and ideology of human difference were ever present but largely unexamined.

Many of the raw materials of modern racial ideology existed in early eighteenth-century Anglo-America and can be detected in the debates that took place over inoculation during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721–1722. The inoculation controversy might be described as a clash between religion and secularism, with Cotton Mather and his staunchest opponent, the Scots-born physician William Douglass, representing the two extremes. From this perspective, Mather embraced inoculation as a mysterious gift from God to save his people from the ravages of disease, and Douglass dismissed it as quackery that promised to do more harm than good to public health. There is some validity to these characterizations, as there is to the secularization argument in general. Indeed, both the intellectual history of human difference and the history of medicine lend credence to the suggestion that the eighteenth century was an age of secularization, when confessional identities and adherence to God’s law became less important means of categorizing people or explaining disease. But abstract teleologies such as secularization and broad dichotomies such as the opposition of religion and science deflect attention from the heterogeneity of the concepts and rhetoric that historical actors used to describe their world. Attending to how ideas of human difference were expressed in a specific local context (in this case, among Boston’s influential men in the urgency of an epidemic) reveals where the generalizations work and how they break down.

Compared to Mather, Douglass was far more skeptical both of the possibility that Africans were capable of medical innovation and of the scientific validity of Boylston’s inoculation trials. Still, as learned gentlemen, Mather and Douglass shared a similar orientation to the social structure of early New England and the social context in which science ought to be conducted. Their points of agreement reveal the chauvinistic continuities that carried over from the early modern into the modern period. These ideas included doubt that the testimony of blacks could be accepted on equal terms with that of whites and certainty that people of color should remain at the bottom of the social hierarchy. But because inferiority had not yet been indelibly written onto the bodies of Africans, their intellectual and especially spiritual worth seemed plausible enough for Cotton Mather to take seriously Onesimus’s explanation of inoculation and for the inoculation trials to go forward in the fall of 1721.

Following Perry Miller, most historians have—convincingly—characterized the inoculation controversy as a contest for professional authority, epitomized by the clash between the preacher Mather and the physician Douglass. [5] Their conflict was not between religion and medicine per se. Rather, the question was what roles men of the cloth and other medical amateurs were to be permitted in the realm of medicine. Mather considered himself solidly a man of science, as his proud membership in the Royal Society and interest in medical innovation demonstrated. For historians, making sense of Mather’s scientific proclivities is a notoriously thorny task. Those most eager to damn him see his dabbling in science as an intellectually dubious effort to ward off the Enlightenment by assimilating its less-threatening insights. His more sympathetic biographers perceive that Mather made an honest effort to grapple with the new science by incorporating natural philosophy into his religiously motivated lifelong project to “do good.” [6] The endeavor was not purely philanthropic. Mather’s scientific activities, including his letters to the Royal Society on what he called “Curiosa Americana,” were intended to show off New England as a source of natural wonders and to give Mather himself a distinctive place in the transatlantic community of the learned. [7]

Evident in the Curiosa Americana and other writings, two aspects of Mather’s scientific frame of mind are particularly pertinent to the intersection of his ideas about medicine and human difference. First is the heterogeneity of his interests. Mather’s biographers Otho Beall and Richard Shryock aptly describe the clergyman’s scientific writings as the product of “an open and encyclopedic mind rather than an original one.” [8] His collected writings are a testament to his boundless interest in the world around him, but their multiplicity has led some detractors (including Douglass) to dismiss Mather as gullible and indiscriminating. Mather’s long medical treatise, The Angel of Bethesda, contained theological explanations of disease, approving commentary on the latest European medical theories, and countless recipes for folk remedies, all jumbled together in more than sixty topical chapters. [9] For Mather, who embraced natural philosophy as a means of examining the manifold mysteries of divine creation, useful and enriching scientific information could be found just about anywhere in God’s wonderful world. His openness to diverse and sometimes conflicting forms of information predisposed him to believe Onesimus’s inoculation story.

What further compelled Mather to listen to Onesimus—and what distinguished Mather from Douglass—was his resistance to seeing the body as a unique and exclusive site of knowledge about disease and human difference. Mather was fascinated by the workings and failings of the human body—why some people had darker skin than others, for instance, or how smallpox progressed in both typical and complicated cases. But neither the body nor anything else in the observable world constituted his sole evidence in matters of health and disease. Central to The Angel of Bethesda was Mather’s theory of the nishmath-chajim (Hebrew for “breath of life”), “A Wonderful Spirit … of a Middle Nature, between the Rational Soul, and the Corporeal Mass.” In addition to its ethereal qualities, the nishmath-chajim was the source of disease and the force behind the body’s major physiological and regulatory processes. As Margaret Humphreys Warner explains, “The intermediary nature of the nishmath-chajim enabled Mather to integrate the physical and spiritual components of disease into one consistent system of medical explanation.” Through that integration, Mather intended his concept of the nishmath-chajim to reestablish preachers’ authority in the medical realm. [10] But the esteem traditionally accorded the preacher-physician had already waned considerably by the early eighteenth century. [11] Unable for the most part to drum up support for inoculation among the medical practitioners or secular leaders of the town, Mather did win the backing of Zabdiel Boylston, the apprentice-trained doctor, apothecary, and naturalist who carried out the inoculation trials in Boston. His vocal supporters also included other local clergymen, notably his erstwhile theological rival Benjamin Colman and his own father, Increase Mather. [12]

The rest of Boston’s medical community rallied behind Douglass, not because the other doctors in town shared the Scotsman’s educational or professional profile, but because Douglass’s training, experience, and confidence earned him admiration. Douglass garnered the vocal support of other influential Bostonians as well, including the town’s selectmen and newspaperman James Franklin. Having studied in the universities at Edinburgh, Leiden, and Paris, Douglass settled in Boston in 1718 as the town’s only physician who held a medical degree. [13] He balanced the intelligence, skill, and cosmopolitanism he brought to New England with marked disdain for colonial provincialism. Utterly heterodox by New England standards, he reserved special derision for the meddlesome clergymen he found in Massachusetts, as well as for the inadequacies of the apprenticeships that had introduced Boston’s other medical practitioners to their craft. [14] Preferring to reproduce European scientific and medical institutions in the colonies, Douglass scorned efforts to find anything of scientific value in America’s unique environment and mix of persons. He pointedly compared Indian medical practitioners (“Powowers”) to “Gospel-Ministers … apt officiously to intrude into the Office of a Physician.” Both indigenous healers and preacher-physicians were “great Nusances to a regular Medical Practice.” [15]

While the inoculation experiment that Mather initiated was clearly a success, in the long run Douglass’s approach to medicine increasingly became “regular Medical Practice.” Over the remainder of the eighteenth century, the American colonies witnessed a gradual emergence of professional medicine, based on what historian Richard Brown calls “scientific analysis and treatment of disease.” Critical to this development was the concentration of medical authority in the hands of formally trained physicians rather than “self-taught or slightly trained ’empirical’ doctors, midwives, clergymen, and self-dosing laymen.” [16] Shortly after the inoculation controversy—as early as 1730—a new enthusiasm for empirical science in European medical schools converged with economic and demographic expansion in the colonial cities to make it both attractive and feasible for young American men to go abroad for medical training. As their number grew in the colonies in the second half of the eighteenth century, European-certified physicians established local medical institutions, including general hospitals, professional societies, and medical colleges. Though Boston’s medical institutions tended to lag behind those of Philadelphia and New York, Douglass was a vanguardist for his early efforts to professionalize medicine in Massachusetts. He organized a local medical society in 1736, decades before permanent professional associations were started elsewhere. [17] And in the least bombastic sections of his anti-inoculation tracts, he pushed for medical methodology that emphasized firsthand observation and informed experimentation over what he perceived as Mather’s credulous readings of Royal Society reports and Boylston’s reckless testing of inoculation on a smallpox-stricken populace. [18]

Douglass’s approach to medicine shared with the emerging ideology of race an intensified attention to the body—examining it, classifying it, pathologizing it, and essentializing it as the basis for human difference. In his exhaustive history of race in Western thought, Ivan Hannaford identifies the long eighteenth century (circa 1684–1815) as the initial period in which “major writers dealt explicitly with race as an organizing idea.” Racial ideology differed from older schemes of describing human difference in that it relied primarily on “physiological and mental criteria based on observable ‘facts’ and tested evidence,” as opposed to the religious and spiritual categories that had been especially significant to earlier theorists. [19] Historians of European theories of race often focus on the classification systems created by major pioneers in Enlightenment-era biology and physical anthropology, notably Carolus Linnaeus, the comte de Buffon, and Johann Blumenbach. [20] American historians interested in the origins of racial science emphasize the early national period, when the young republic’s egalitarian nationalism seemed to clash with the post-revolutionary need to reaffirm a hierarchical social order. [21] But the inoculation controversy occurred even before Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae and well before Thomas Jefferson worried out the implications of a multiracial republic. The controversy’s significance is not so much that it anticipated the particular arguments that later systematizers of human difference would make but instead that it shows how, in the colonial context of early America, racial language and thought informed dialogues that, on the surface, had little to do with race at all. [22]

The racial discourse of the 1721–1722 smallpox debate reveals connections among medicine, social relations, and theories of human difference in early eighteenth-century New England. Focusing on these connections by no means implies that incipient racial ideas determined the outcome of the inoculation controversy. Had Cotton Mather’s parishioners never given him a slave as a gift in 1706, had no Africans ever been brought to New England at all, the controversy over inoculation probably still would have erupted in Boston coincident with the outbreak of smallpox in 1721. [23] By that time, Mather and other town elites had already encountered information about inoculation from other sources. The opposite counterfactual—what if African slaves had been the only ones to tell Americans about inoculation—is even trickier to resolve. Any effort to prove that the outcome of the inoculation debate hinged on the testimony of Africans will fall far short of evidence. [24] But the difficulties of isolating the Africans’ causal role in the inoculation controversy need not preclude an effort to sort out the meaning of racialized discourse and practice in the debate.

READ MORE: Counterfactual history

Given the ghastly potential of smallpox, it is no surprise that when reports of a technique to prevent the disease began to crop up in the early eighteenth century, scientifically minded Anglo-Americans took notice. The prospect that inoculation could render patients immune to smallpox intrigued some Bostonians in 1721, but others were wary, especially because inoculation ran counter to the one preventive method people already trusted: staying away from infected patients. In trying to decide whether to proceed with inoculation trials, Bostonians had to grapple with the medical, religious, and social consequences of the deliberate self-infliction of a deadly disease. As the debate polarized, advocates and opponents of inoculation examined cases in which the practice had been tried in the past. This research took them vicariously to exotic corners of the world. Most of the reports that reached England and America had originated on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The two most widely known accounts came from a pair of physicians—the Italian Emanuele Timoni and the Greek Jacob Pylarini—who wrote to the Royal Society from Constantinople. Other correspondents claimed that inoculation had reached the Levant by way of points farther east, such as Georgia or Circassia in the Caucasus or even some place in Asia. [25] New Englanders interested in medicine could read about inoculation as practiced in these distant lands, but as Mather’s 1716 letter to the Royal Society indicates, they also gained firsthand knowledge of the technique from a source much closer to home.

For Cotton Mather, the proof of inoculation came not only through Onesimus’s words but was also imprinted on him physically: “He described the Operation to me, and shew’d me in his Arm the Scar, which it had left upon him.” [26] This matter-of-fact comment disguised the power dynamics implicit in a white man’s inspection of a black man’s body. Did Mather insist he wanted physical proof of inoculation and order Onesimus to roll up his sleeve? Did Onesimus reveal his scar in an effort to illustrate a medical procedure he well understood to the preacher-scientist who seemed both intrigued and befuddled? When Mather looked at Onesimus’s bare arm, what exactly did he see? The inoculation controversy that exploded in Boston in 1721 involved arguments and accusations on a dizzying number of levels, touching on religious morality, professional authority, intellectual credibility, public respectability, and more than one case of personal resentment. Onesimus’s scar is a reminder that these debates about power, status, and identity were ignited by a very material fact: the horrid and often fatal effects of smallpox on the human bodies it infected, and inoculation’s potential to prevent or to intensify that damage.

Smallpox was about the body, just like any other disease, and perhaps more so because its effects were so visible. Yet in much of the pro-inoculation literature from 1720s Boston, commentary on the physical differences among the bodies involved is conspicuously absent. The existing historiography of race and disease in early America argues that colonists came up with a two-sided theory about how different bodies responded to disease—an explanation that neatly buttressed the European agenda on the American continent. On the one hand, colonists viewed Indian bodies as peculiarly susceptible to disease, as evidenced by their massive casualties in the “virgin soil epidemics” that conveniently cleared the landscape for European settlement. On the other, African bodies were seen as especially resistant to illness and infection. Slaveowners reasoned that Africans’ physical hardiness naturally suited them for the harsh living conditions and endless toil of slavery. [27] As far as Africans were concerned, this racialized theory of disease susceptibility did not enter the 1721 debate. Mather did notice that African slaves engaged in “constant Attendance on the Sick in our Families, without receiving the Infection,” but he attributed the slaves’ good health to the likelihood that they had been inoculated in Africa. [28] Instead of confirming any sort of essential bodily difference, this observation became one more bit of empirical proof of inoculation’s effectiveness.

Proponents of inoculation perceived no difference in the procedure’s effects on black and white bodies. Boylston first tried inoculation on three members of his household: “My own dear Child, and two of my Servants,” the latter his thirty-six-year-old “Negro man” Jack and Jack’s two-and-a-half-year-old son. In his Historical Account of the Small-pox Inoculation in New England, Boylston noted that the inoculation-induced disease proceeded on the same schedule in both children, black and white: fevers on the seventh day, the outbreak of “a kind and favourable Small-Pox” on the ninth, and restoration to full health shortly thereafter. The adult Jack barely responded to inoculation, recovering after a few days rather than the typical week or two and breaking out into pustules only along the site of his incision. Boylston noticed a similar response in the first black woman he inoculated, his thirty-seven-year-old slave Moll. Around the same time that he performed the procedure on Moll and Jack, Boylston also inoculated two white men, who did develop the weakened form of the disease. Rather than attributing these results to physical differences between the two sets of inoculees, Boylston concluded that the two black patients must have had smallpox before. [29] When he finally published the outcome of his inoculation experiment, he included charts that broke down the results by patient’s age and month of inoculation, but he did not distinguish among his white, Indian, and Negro patients.

Mather reported on the success of Boylston’s experiment in language that emphasized inoculation’s singular efficacy on all kinds of people. “The Experiment has now been made on Several Hundreds of Persons,” he proclaimed, “upon both Male and Female, both old and young, both Strong and Weak, both White and Black.” [30] This statement seems to suggest that physical differences mattered little to Mather. But it is also possible that he considered inoculation a medical wonder precisely because it worked on such diverse body types. Three of the four binary categories into which Mather divided his fellow Bostonians were clearly based on body type (sex, age, and physical strength). By including “White and Black” in the list, Mather implied that he also thought of Africans and Europeans as physically different in some fundamental way. Yet the four different dichotomies were not analogical. A person designated “male” or “female” could expect to remain that way for his or her entire life, but everyone who was “old” had once been “young,” and a “strong” person could become “weak,” or vice versa. [31] Given all these options, what was the relationship between “white” and “black”?

The best evidence of Mather’s response to that question comes from The Negro Christianized, his 1706 tract on the duty of masters to convert their slaves. Minimizing the importance of physical differences among groups of people in favor of emphasizing the universal value and necessity of Christianity, he espoused an environmentalist theory of complexion and expressed confidence in human progress through reason. In a passage rife with double entendre, Mather pleaded for a distinction between the darkness of religious ignorance and the darkness of African skin: “Let us make a Trial, Whether they that have been Scorched and Blacken’d by the Sun of Africa, may not come to have their Minds Healed by the more Benign Beams of the Sun of Righteousness.” Mather wanted to do “away with such Trifles” as concern over the effects of equatorial sun on a person’s skin, for he believed that “the God who looks on the Heart, is not moved by the colour of the Skin; is not more propitious to one Colour than another.” [32] He urged his readers to look beyond skin color to recognize the innate rationality of all human creatures. His conversations with and observations of Africans revealed their capacity for reason: “Their Discourse, will abundantly prove, that they have Reason…. The vast improvement that Education has made upon some of them, argues that there is a Reasonable Soul in all of them.” [33]

The Negro Christianized conjured an image of a spiritual family whose members, regardless of color, were all “Children of God” and “Joint-Heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ.” But the belief that anyone could be among the elect was, for Mather, perfectly consistent with social hierarchies on earth. Entreating masters to “treat, not as Bruits but as Men, those Rational Creatures whom God has made your Servants,” Mather sought to integrate slavery into a divinely ordained model of social relations. [34] In so doing, he refuted the familiar argument that baptized slaves had to be freed. Masters’ fulfillment of their duty to Christianize their slaves would prompt the slaves to live up to their reciprocal obligations to be industrious, obedient, and content with their station in life. [35] Moreover, although Mather insisted that Africans were “Rational Creatures,” he did not see their mental prowess as up to par with that of whites. He closed The Negro Christianized with practical instructions for religious education in slaveowning households, including a paraphrased version of the Lord’s Prayer that “may be brought down unto some of their Capacities” and two catechisms, a short one “For the Negroes of a Smaller Capacity” and a longer one for those “of a bigger Capacity.” [36] Perhaps Mather thought that Africans needed time to develop their innate “capacities,” with the simplified catechisms as steps in an educational process. Yet one is left to wonder if any amount of catechizing and education would permit blacks to be considered true equals of whites. [37]

That Mather was better read in contemporary science than most other New Englanders, that he felt compassion for the physical afflictions of smallpox sufferers—in short, that the material, empirical world mattered to him—is incontestable. But he also looked beyond the observable bodily differences between Africans and Europeans in order to argue that a medical procedure that worked on dark-skinned bodies could work on light-skinned ones as well and that physical characteristics did not make someone inherently unreasonable or incredible. What curbed the egalitarian impulses of Mather’s thinking about human difference was his sense that the social subservience of Africans was not only inevitable, but also desirable as a means of maintaining a divinely mandated earthly order. In this context, accepting testimony from people who were obvious inferiors was difficult to justify. Mather would approach that task with a characteristic blend of social, scientific, and religious reasoning.

Most early modern men of science believed that the quality of scientific testimony depended on the social status, or “gentility,” of the teller. Mather generally accepted this point of view. [38] In The Angel of Bethesda, he duly recorded slaves’ testimony about inoculation before conceding that “our Advice of this Matter, as it comes from Superiour Persons in the Levant, is what may have most Attention given to it.” [39] Simply put, the genteel European physicians Pylarinus and Timonious (the “Superiour Persons” in question) could lay claim to credibility in a manner in which the humble Onesimus could not. In recounting Boylston’s experiments in a Boston newspaper, Mather provided his standard list of human categories, with one addition. Inoculation, he explained, had been successfully performed on “Old & Young; Strong and Weak; Male and Female; White & Black; Many Serious and vertuous People; some the Children of Eminent Persons among us.” [40] Here the serious, the virtuous, and the eminent testified to their approval of inoculation, not through their words, but, more pointedly, through their very bodies.

While Mather took pains to emphasize the “quality” of the people who supported and tested inoculation, Douglass reveled in reminding readers that Mather had initially learned of the practice from a slave. In a jab at the pro-inoculation tracts of Mather and his fellow clergyman Benjamin Colman, Douglass jeered, “You have at length in two of their little Books a silly Story or familiar Interview and Conversation between two black (Negroe) Gentlemen, and a couple of the Reverend Promoters, concerning Inoculation. O Rare Farce!” [41] Douglass’s satirical appropriation of the word “Gentlemen” to refer to the Africans highlighted the sheer silliness of Mather’s claims. For his readers, “black gentleman” was an oxymoron, the parenthetical “Negroe” calling attention to the multiple meanings of “black.” [42] Patronizing and satirical representations of black virtue were common among the anti-inoculation crowd, who referred to Onesimus and his countrymen variably as “the good people in Guinea” and “those Judicious people call’d Africans.” Elsewhere, Douglass implied that the word “African” itself was merely a euphemism for degraded status when he charged Mather with being too eager to take advice from “an Army of half a Dozen or half a Score Africans, by others call’d Negroe Slaves.” [43]

As a staunch empiricist and something of an antiauthoritarian, Douglass was less likely than Mather to be swayed by the high social status of a scientific witness. [44] Still, that skepticism did not incline him to pay attention to the claims of a person of humble standing, and he did not hesitate to appeal to the link between gentility and credibility when it suited his position. Ever proud of his university training and Continental sojourns and ever ready to sneer at the Bay Colony’s backwardness, Douglass was no social leveler. He complained that medical practitioners in the colonies were “basely born and educated” and lamented the dearth of “Gentlemen Practitioners of Candour, Probity, Ingenuity, and good practical Knowledge.” [45] In the eyes of an eighteenth-century white New Englander, hardly anyone in society was more “basely born” than an African slave. It was therefore easy for a gentleman of science to dismiss African medical testimony on the grounds of social convention. It was harder for the genteel proponents of inoculation to explain how they could give such high authority to the claims of people of such low status.

Although not perfectly consistent with his professed bias in favor of “persons of quality,” Mather and his partisans responded to the anti-inoculators’ attacks by trying to make the purported naïveté of the Africans into a reason to believe them. The logic here is reminiscent of Montaigne’s defense of a humble informant’s trustworthiness: “This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more likely to tell truth … so simple that he has not wherewithal to contrive, and to give a color of truth to false relations, and who can have no ends in forging an untruth.” [46] Mather’s ally in the inoculation crusade, the Reverend Colman, explained that he learned of inoculation through “a plain, but to me pleasing & informing discourse … with a poor Negro.” Mather himself reported meeting with “a Number of Africans; who all, in their plain Way, without any Combination, or Correspondence, agreed in one Story”—that inoculation, as practiced in Africa, was prevalent, safe, and effective. [47] In The Angel of Bethesda, he hinted at how this “plain Way” of speech sounded:

I have since mett with a Considerable Number of these Africans, who all agree in one Story; That in their Countrey grandy-many dy of the Small-Pox: But now they Learn This Way: People take Juice of Small-Pox; and cutty-skin, and putt in a Drop; then by’nd by a little sicky, sicky: then very few little things like Small-Pox; and no body dy of it; and no body have Small-Pox any more. [48]

Mather’s attempt to transcribe eighteenth-century African English—”grandy-many,” “cutty-skin,” “sicky, sicky,” dropped or misused verbs—may seem dubious, but the point is that he wanted to make his retelling as authentic (to his white readers) as possible. [49] The result endows Mather with a strange mix of humility and condescension: humility because he was willing to pay attention to the Africans and condescension because he set their speech off as precious or even deviant.

Colman’s account of his own conversations with inoculated Africans concludes in a similar spirit. It is possible that both Mather’s and Colman’s acceptance of African testimony derived from their commitment to the Bible, which was full of wisdom from the mouths of the lowly. Colman advised his readers to cast off snobbery in seeking truth:

I believe I shall be scoff ‘d at for telling this Simple story, but I think it very pertinent & much to the purpose here; and whosoever seeks the Truth & desires to be informed will not despise it. And he that has learnt any thing as he ought, has this—to be willing to learn of the poorest Slave in the Town. [50]

Simple story, simple minds, simple truths, Colman’s passage implied. If Africans, in all their plainness and ignorance, could manage to inoculate themselves, could it really be that difficult or dangerous for Englishmen to do the same?

The problem with this line of argument was that, unlike Montaigne’s informant, Onesimus and his fellow Africans did have the wherewithal and the incentive to “forge an untruth,” as partisans on either side of the inoculation controversy well knew. After all, in his letter to the Royal Society, Mather had not referred to Onesimus as a “plain ignorant fellow” but as a “pretty Intelligent Fellow.” [51] In most cases when white authors acknowledged that blacks were not naïve, irrational creatures, the tone was not so complimentary. The Reverend Samuel Grainger, one of Douglass’s few vocal allies in the ministry, sarcastically described inoculation as “the New Scheme of those Judicious people call’d Africans, who had no Combination to cheat us.” Douglass himself wondered why the Africans “tell us now (tho’ never before) that [inoculation] is practised in their own Country.” [52] Given that there had been no smallpox epidemic in Boston for nearly twenty years—and therefore no immediate reason for local slaves to mention inoculation—Douglass’s musing over the Africans’ intentions was rather unfair. But amid the panic of the 1721 epidemic, the idea that slaves had concocted inoculation as a scheme to kill off their masters may have seemed plausible. However far-fetched, given the small number of blacks in Boston, fears of an uprising did exist. Mather himself could point to what would have motivated slaves to deceitfulness and rebellion. In May of 1721, preaching at the execution of a free black man, he lamented that slaves had too much “Fondness for Freedom.” [53]

Besides giving them a reason to conspire against the white population, the unfree status of most Boston Africans undermined their scientific credibility in the eyes of the elite. One of the reasons that scientific inquiry was seen as the exclusive province of the genteel was that only a gentleman could claim the unencumbered social position requisite for truth-telling. In contrast, as historical sociologist Steven Shapin puts it, “Those whose placement in society rendered them dependent upon others, whose actions were at others’ bidding, or who were so placed as to need relative advantage were for those reasons deemed liable to misrepresent real states of affairs.” Only when a dependent’s claim was subsumed under the speech of a superior could it be considered credible. [54] A case in point is how Colman related his conversation with his neighbor’s “poor Negro.” Even though the slave had the information that Colman needed, it was Colman himself who maintained control of the conversation. Colman noted three times that he asked the questions and the black man answered them: the white man had the power to initiate and direct the dialogue. Further, it was the white man’s prerogative to co-opt the black man’s speech. “I use but some of his words here,” Colman confessed, assuring that the written version gave “the true sense of what he said to me.” [55]

Though Colman’s informant could detail how African townspeople organized local inoculation drives when a smallpox epidemic broke out in their vicinity, there were limits to what the “poor Negro” could explain:

When I ask’d him (what I did not at all suppose he could inform me in) How his Countrymen came into the Knowledge of this Way of giving the Small Pox? and how long it had been among them? He told me he knew nothing of those Things; he suppos’d it was long before he was born; and no doubt but God told it to poor Negroes to save their Lives; for they had not Knowledge and Skill as we have. [56]

And so Colman answered perhaps the most troublesome question that African inoculation raised for American colonists: if the practice was such a good idea, why hadn’t Europeans come up with it? [57] Stripped of its paternalist platitudes, the inoculation advocates’ argument for the truthfulness of slave testimony rested on this staggering logic: African knowledge was trustworthy precisely because African people had no knowledge. In one stroke, those who used this explanation inverted the traditional relationship between status and knowledge and then set that linkage aright again by filtering the words of the base and simple Africans through the Englishmen’s own authoritative prose.

What also stands out in Colman’s explanation of African inoculation is his conclusion that the knowledge must have come to them through divine revelation. Mather shared this providential reasoning: “In Africa, where the poor Creatures dy of the Small-Pox like Rotten Sheep, a Merciful God has taught them an Infallible Præservative.” [58] Mather’s comparison of smallpox-infected Africans to “Rotten Sheep,” a description he used in a number of inoculation tracts, made the Africans seem especially pitiful and pitiable. This imagery of decomposition and dehumanization also evoked what Europeans saw as the horrid climate of Africa and helped explain why people living there would be in special need of God’s care. [59] For clergymen Mather and Colman, the providential explanation served multiple purposes. It provided a preemptive response to religious objections that inoculation was a “heathen” practice. It bolstered the ministers’ commitment to converting Africans by showing that divine mercy extended to Africa. It left English intellectual superiority intact by denying Africans credit for devising inoculation on their own. And it reinforced the image of Africans as simple and non-threatening (“poor Creatures” lacking “Knowledge and Skill”).

For religiously inclined proponents of inoculation, the idea that Africans were benign recipients of God’s universal grace helped make slaves’ descriptions of inoculation believable. As the standards for evaluating scientific evidence changed over the eighteenth century, this relatively easy acceptance of African ideas became more difficult. Systematic empirical investigation gained prestige at the expense of providential explanation. The enhanced professional authority of formally trained physicians discounted the usefulness and reliability of laypeople’s medical observations. These transformations in medical thought contributed to the creation of biological race, which linked unchangeable physical characteristics to the inferiority of blacks. This development made the testimony of Africans all the more suspect to those who championed the professionalization of medicine, including Dr. William Douglass.

In some of Douglass’s tracts, merely mentioning that Mather had gotten the inoculation idea from Africans served as an argument against the practice. At one point, Douglass did offer a longer critique of Mather’s reliance on African sources:

The more blundering and Negroish they tell their Story, it is the more credible says C. M; a paradox in Nature; for all they say true or false is after the same manner. There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Lyars, &c.; Their Accounts of what was done in their Country was never depended upon till now for Arguments sake. Many Negroes to my knowledge have assured their Masters that they had the Small Pox in their own Country or elsewhere, and have now had it in Boston. [60]

Douglass tended to use the word “Negro,” with its connotations of bodily blackness, rather than “African” or some other term evocative of cultural and geographic origins. His use of the neologism “Negroish,” in close proximity to “blundering,” indicates that he connected blackness to mental and moral worthlessness. There was no more possibility that blacks could tell the truth than that their skin could turn white, since both these traits were rooted “in Nature.” It is hard not to see Douglass’s appropriation of “Race of Men” as very close to the modern usage of “race,” linking observable physical characteristics (notably skin color) to notions of group inferiority or superiority. [61] The final sentence, in which Douglass argued that the Africans’ verbal claims to immunity were contradicted and superseded by the appearance of the disease on their bodies, confirms the importance that the university-trained doctor vested in physical evidence, as opposed to folklore or personal testimony.

Douglass’s primary commitment was to what he could observe in the world around him, whereas Mather’s priority was to serve as a caretaker of souls. Endeavoring to win conversions among the people of all nations, Mather in The Negro Christianized had downplayed the significance of innate physical difference, favoring explanations of different complexions that rested on the subtleties of the body’s response to geography and climate. “It is well known,” he scoffed, “That the Whites, are the least part of Mankind. The biggest part of Mankind, perhaps, are Copper-Coloured; a sort of Tawnies. And our English that inhabit some Climates, do seem growing apace to be not much unlike unto them.” Questioning the Hamitic justification for the bodily blackness of Africans, he offered an environmental explanation for how Negroes had come to be black: “From the long force of the African Sun & Soil upon them … [they] are come at length to have the small Fibres of their Veins, and the Blood in them, a little more Interspersed thro their Skin.” [62] To use a pun Mather would have appreciated, this dispersion of blood through the skin would pale in importance when the Africans were washed in the transforming blood of Christ.

Mather’s religious premises were at odds with Douglass’s cognitive framework. Without any recorded association with a particular church or sect, Douglass viewed Christianity more as a system of practical ethics than as transcendent truth: “The many Controversies in revealed Religions … occasion the wise and thinking Part of Mankind to regulate themselves by natural Religion only, and to conclude that all Religions only are good, which teach Men to be good.” [63] His skepticism toward organized religion and religious leaders was evident in his anti-inoculation writings, which frequently devolved to anticlericalism. Douglass’s quarrel with the New England clergy centered on his conviction that their authority was self-justifying and self-perpetuating. He complained that colonial Americans were quick to accept claims propagated by authority figures, even when empirical evidence contradicted them. In the realm of science, “Authorities must always give way to Experience,” Douglass preached, adding that “the Nature of Medical Affairs allow of no other Demonstration than that of good Observation.” [64]

Douglass used his powers of good observation to refute environmental theories of human bodily difference, such as the one Mather had proposed. The blackness of Africans, Douglass noted, came in “various constant permanent Shades or Degrees,” while white people who had tanned in the sun retained darker skin only temporarily. He detailed several conundrums that an interpretation like Mather’s could not explain, including “why the Negroes of Guinea should have woolly crisp black Hair, and those of the Indian Peninsula should have lank black Hair” and “how near neighbouring Nations, if they do not intermarry, differ in Features and Complexions.” While he did not offer a coherent alternative explanation, Douglass firmly concluded that “it is not various Climates that gives the various Complexions.” [65]

That emphasis on physical evidence is key to understanding Douglass’s response to the inoculation experiments of 1721–1722 and the place of racial thinking within his opposing views. The physician was wary of using a potentially lethal procedure without having any firsthand evidence that it was safe and effective. “The practice of Medicine,” Douglass admonished, is “no affair of Speculation or curiosity.” Medical knowledge ought to rest on “repeated observations … taken clinically from the life and not copied.” [66] By 1730, the next time smallpox hit Boston, reliable witnesses had published enough accounts of successful inoculation that Douglass had come to accept and even promote the procedure. Still, his opinion of Mather (who had died in 1728) and Boylston (since made a fellow of the Royal Society) had not changed. He called Mather rash and credulous and dismissed Boylston’s Historical Account as “jejune, lame, suspected, and only in the nature of a Quack Bill.” [67]

Douglass objected that Boylston’s approach to inoculation was haphazard and failed to take into account how different people might respond to the procedure. To reinforce that point, Douglass provided a list of people whom he categorically excluded from inoculation. Sometimes he based this determination on the patient’s behavior or temperament, calling people of “bad habits” and “the exceedingly Timorous” poor candidates for the procedure. Changeable physical conditions disqualified others, including the very old and the very young, the ill and the infirm, and pregnant women. Although Douglass did not say that women should be categorically denied inoculation, he only recommended the procedure for those who absolutely had to stay in town during a smallpox outbreak. Preferably, women would escape to the country during an epidemic—the implication being that female bodies (like those of the elderly and the chronically ill) were especially weak and therefore vulnerable to inoculation’s potentially dangerous side effects. [68]

Douglass’s misgivings about inoculation of women point to another set of exclusions, also based on immutable bodily characteristics. Empirical evidence suggested that one group, Indians, had more to lose from inoculation than any other. Douglass’s condemnation of Indian inoculation rested on an assumption that all Indians shared essential physical characteristics: “Few of them are observed to survive the Small-Pox in the natural way, & therefore are not without considerable hazard in the other way” (that is, via inoculation). He elaborated the point in a 1730 essay in which he tallied by race the cases from the 1721 epidemic that had involved “Purples and HÆmorrhages,” particularly gruesome complications of smallpox. “Of the various Races or Species of Mankind, if we may so express it,” he declared, “the American Indians are the most liable to [purples and hemorrhages], and the African Negroes the least.” Seven Indians but not a single African had died of “these dismal Symptoms,” in spite of the fact that “in the Year 1721 our Negroe Slaves were ten Times the Number of our Indian, (the Province having discouraged the Importation of Spanish Indians, because of their valetudinary state of Health).” Later, Douglass noted that “New Negroes from Guinea” were superior in “Constitution” to the native peoples of America. [69]

There was nothing new about the substance of Douglass’s conclusion. From the start of colonization, Europeans had remarked on Indians’ poor resistance to disease. Indeed, given the prevalence of commentary on Indian weakness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is curious how rarely Indians figured into contemporary discussion of the 1721 epidemic and inoculation question. [70] Part of the reason for the Indians’ absence from the inoculation controversy may have been the numerical discrepancy that Douglass observed between the local Indian and African populations in Boston. It is also possible that by the 1720s Bostonians thought that they understood Indians but were still in the process of working out how Africans might fit into English society. [71] Thus, when Douglass mentioned Indians’ high susceptibility to smallpox, he was not writing out of an intellectual framework justifying English dispossession of Indian lands—that damage had been done—but instead he was gesturing toward a medical science that linked physical characteristics to health. Douglass did not elucidate what about Indians made them easy prey to smallpox, but his categorical exclusion of them from inoculation shows he thought their Indian-ness was innate and inalterable.

When Douglass called blacks and Indians separate “Races or Species of Mankind,” his terminology accentuated the physical differences between human groups. Even in the early eighteenth century, “species” had a specific taxonomical meaning, usually distinguished from the looser “variety.” The notion of species as a fixed category that could contain different varieties of organisms according to climate, geography, and other external factors would come to be at the heart of the Linnaean system of biological classification. Douglass’s use of the term “species” to apply to non-human organisms suggests he recognized its fixity. In discussing the natural history of the British colonies, he wrote that “some Species of Trees only, are susceptible to peculiar Blasts … male Animals only impregnate Females of their own Species.” [72] Based on these criteria of disease susceptibility and reproductive success, Douglass could not argue that the different human races were in fact different species. He had watched black, white, and Indian New Englanders succumb to smallpox, and as a traveler throughout British North America and the West Indies, he had encountered the progeny of many interracial unions. But Douglass contrasted the complexion of such “mixed Breed” individuals with the “native and genuine” or “sincere” appearance of persons of a single racial background. [73] Furthermore, his observations on hemorrhagic smallpox cases suggest that he expected to find at least some medical differences among the races. While Douglass did not contend that some races were not human at all, he vested physical differences with a fixity and a salience that had not before been articulated by a New Englander. [74]

One problem Douglass was unable to resolve was how physical characteristics were transmitted from generation to generation. He did adhere to a vague conception of inheritance, as is evident from the final group of people he declared unfit for inoculation: “Some particular Families of Whites, who have something peculiar in their constitution that cannot bear this infection.” [75] Under that category, Douglass listed several local families in which more than one member had suffered from severe cases of smallpox. Even without recourse to the modern science of genetics and heredity, he sensed that disease susceptibility was something that relatives shared. While English thinkers had long recognized heritable physical traits within small homogeneous groups (like families or villages), Douglass’s singling out of “particular Families of Whites” suggests a racialist approach to inheritance. [76] His conception of human difference was a nod toward the scientific racism of a later period, though it lacked the coherence of a fully formed racial ideology.

That Douglass’s medical science differed from Mather’s and Boylston’s is indisputable, based on the records of the inoculation controversy. The significance of Douglass’s approach as part of a new way of conceptualizing bodily difference becomes clearer with a shift in time and space to a smallpox epidemic in South Carolina in 1738. There James Kilpatrick, a Scottish-born medical practitioner, took the opportunity to inoculate about 800 of his neighbors. [77] In a 1743 book about the experiment, Kilpatrick took pains to explain that for him “inoculation” did not refer to “the common Practice of Women in Turkey, and Negroes in Africa.” Scratching the skin to rub a little infected liquid into the bloodstream was something that “it is harder to say who cannot perform, than who can.” Instead, according to Kilpatrick, inoculation should be carried out by “a competent Physician” who understood the disease and knew how to discern which patients could handle the preventive procedure. Kilpatrick displayed his own professional competence in his account of the South Carolina inoculation trials, which differs starkly from Boylston’s record of the 1721–1722 Boston experiment. Where Boylston’s Historical Account generally mentioned only an inoculee’s name (or, if a servant, master’s name), age, gender, and race (if “Negro” or “Indian”), Kilpatrick gave extensive descriptions of his patients, including details about age, complexion, physiognomy, voice, lifestyle, and temperament, all of which he saw as relevant to their susceptibility to disease. John Harris, for example, was judged “a very bad Subject” for inoculation because he “liv’d pretty freely” and had a “sallow, dark Complexion,” “atrabilious Temperament,” and “very coarse Tone of Voice.” [78]

In their defenses of inoculation, Boylston and Mather sought to universalize the success of the procedure to all kinds of persons and bodies; in Douglass’s and Kilpatrick’s smallpox writings, classifying and discriminating among different bodies was a crucial step in the process of inoculation. Douglass distinguished among several “Races or Species” of humankind (Negro, Indian, White), though he did not clearly identify the phenotypic traits that characterized each. Kilpatrick went a step closer to giving skin color the explanatory weight it carries in modern conceptualizations of race. In a remarkably dispassionate passage on his inoculation experiments within his own household, Kilpatrick noted that one of his sons, “a weakly Child,” died after being inoculated, but his daughter, who was “of a much lighter Complexion,” took to it well. [79] The procedure reportedly backfired on the relatively few South Carolina blacks whom Kilpatrick inoculated. He declared one black man’s bad reaction to inoculation to have resulted from the man being “of a gross Habit” and “very subject to yawy Impurities.” In other cases, he attributed African South Carolinians’ failure to take to inoculation to the fact that “they are subject to a greater Number of eruptive Diseases, and cuticular Foulnesses than we are.” He added that, because of their “complexion,” it was harder to discern pock-marked Africans from healthy Africans and therefore difficult to determine whether inoculation had worked. [80] It seems no great stretch to say that Kilpatrick thought of African-ness itself as a skin disease.

The juxtaposition of Kilpatrick and Douglass illustrates that Douglass, although unique among contemporary medical practitioners in Boston, was part of a broader development in eighteenth-century Anglo-American medicine. That trend included a sense that medical knowledge and practice were the exclusive domain of trained physicians who, as Kilpatrick put it, possessed “a general Knowledge of the Principles of Physic, and the particular Nature of [a given] Disease … as well as a considerable Sagacity in discerning the particular Habits of different Bodies.” [81] These criteria could be used to discount the medical authority of both Onesimus and Cotton Mather. To persons like Douglass and Kilpatrick, who saw formal training and specialized knowledge as markers of scientific credibility, the source of medical information was the human body, methodically observed. Attention to the body was a crucial step in converting the racial “idiom” of earlier thinkers into a racist ideology. [82] Once the inferiority of Africans became tied primarily and inextricably to their complexion, the fluidity of early modern ideas about human difference gave way to the solidity of the modern concept of biological race.

Just as early eighteenth-century medicine involved an alchemy of different philosophies of disease—from ancient humoral theory to Christian ideas of sickness as manifestation of sin, from competing concepts of “iatrochemistry” and “iatrophysics” to the proto-germ theory of “animalcules”—so “race” emerged from a range of ideas about human difference. In the Boston inoculation controversy of 1721–1722, the multiplicity of contemporary racialist thought was evident through the diversity of responses to the local medical crisis, especially the problem of what to make of African testimony about inoculation. [83]

Cotton Mather, the most ardent advocate of inoculation, proposed several justifications for accepting the medical claims of Onesimus and other African Bostonians: Africans were rational human beings with useful knowledge about the natural world; the simplicity of Africans made them guileless and credible; and Africans (like anyone else) could be the instruments of God’s providence. These premises did not make for a consistent theory of human equality or difference, and some of their implications were contradictory. Mather believed that even slaves had reason, but he never clearly determined whether their intellectual capacities made them earnest truth-tellers or calculating underlings. God’s bestowing knowledge of inoculation on Africans and not directly on Europeans seemed to single out the former as objects of heavenly favor, but, at the same time, most Africans in Boston lived in a state of social subjugation that Mather considered divinely ordained. Such inconsistencies in Mather’s thought raise the possibility that he latched onto Onesimus’s story, not out of any well-formulated intellectual or spiritual commitment, but out of a belief that inoculation might be integrated into his projects to do good and to rehabilitate ministerial authority.

It is easy now—as it was for William Douglass then—to dismiss much of what Cotton Mather had to say for its illogic and opportunism. But Mather’s complicated and sometimes contradictory ideas about medicine and race stemmed in part from his genuine desire to understand the mysteries of the world around him. For Mather, the world that God had created was full of curiosities, and the Americas were especially so, with their mix of all kinds of people and their unfamiliar wonders and dangers in nature. Mather sought to observe and absorb all that he could of the material world, but in the end he was not bounded by what he could see and touch. That heterogeneity of his natural philosophy and medical thought, coupled with his religious inclinations, kept him from adopting an understanding of human difference centered on the body and enabled him not only to take Onesimus’s testimony seriously but also to think that inoculation could work in Boston as well as it had in Africa. In contrast, Douglass, as a man ahead of his time in his thinking about medicine, could not see beyond the Africans’ skin in evaluating their account of inoculation. [84] The doctor’s professional proclivity for focusing on the body tied what he perceived as black people’s mental and moral shortcomings to immutable physical characteristics.

To say that race is historically constructed is now a commonplace, but it is often unclear what preceded race and how race rose to prominence as a means of categorizing human beings. The inoculation controversy highlights the role of new medical theories and the gradual shift in medical authority in creating the historical fiction of race. Historians need to look more closely at this relationship between medicine and race, particularly for the early modern period, for it is likely that the Boston inoculation controversy was just one among many local contexts in which these two discourses based on the body were employed. The science of race did not originate solely in European laboratories and ivory towers but also arose from colonial naturalists’ responses to the epistemic quandaries of living in a diverse and stratified society. In the life-or-death setting of the 1721 smallpox epidemic, leading white Bostonians faced just such a question: what should they make of the medical knowledge of black African slaves? Their responses to that question provided no utopian or egalitarian alternative to the modern concept of race; rather, they displayed the muddled and manifold understandings of human difference that prefigured racial ideology. Even if most of the combatants in the inoculation debate argued without a modern vocabulary of race, they managed to perpetuate “racism without race” by questioning the truthfulness, belittling the knowledge, and concealing the words of their African informants. [85] Later it would be even harder to listen to African testimony in the first place.

Margot Minardi is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. She is especially grateful to Joyce Chaplin and the members of the Race in Early America seminar at Harvard for their many thoughtful readings of this article. She also thanks Ben Braude, Louise Breen, Lauren Brown, Richard Brown, James Egan, Yonatan Eyal, and Londa Schiebinger.

Notes

1ï¿½ Cotton Mather to John Woodward, July 12, 1716, transcribed in G. L. Kittredge, “Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 45 (1911–1912), 422. “Guramantese” is Mather’s spelling of “Coromantee,” which referred to Akan or Twi speakers from the Gold Coast region of West Africa (now Ghana). See Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago, 1983), 174, and John Thornton, “The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean,” Journal of Caribbean History, 32 (1998), 161–78.

2ï¿½ Winthrop D. Jordan devotes several pages to the inoculation controversy in his exhaustive White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 202–04. Jordan does not contextualize the controversy in the history of medicine; furthermore, my interpretation of William Douglass’s role differs sharply from Jordan’s.

3ï¿½ Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson, and J. Worth Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts 1620–1820 (Boston, 1980); James H. Cassedy, Medicine in America: A Short History (Baltimore, 1991); John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1993); Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 1780–1860 (New Haven, 1968); Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1660–1860 (New York, 1960).

4ï¿½ Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, new ed. (New York, 1997); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D. C., and Baltimore, 1996); Jordan, White over Black; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo., 1993). For a provocative theoretical perspective, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1993). Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), covers evolving ideas of human difference in the early stages of British expansion. T. H. Breen, “Creative Adaptations: Peoples and Cultures,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 195–232, is valuable in tracing the 18th-century social dynamics that shaped changing ideas about race.

5ï¿½ Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 345–66; Otho T. Beall, Jr., and Shryock, Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine (Baltimore, 1954), 102–13; James W. Schmotter, “William Douglass and the Beginnings of American Medical Professionalism: A Reinterpretation of the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy,” Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts, 6 (Fall 1977), 23–36; Maxine Van de Wetering, “A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy,” New England Quarterly, 58 (1985), 46–67. Dennis Don Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors: Inoculation of Smallpox in Boston in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Medicine” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1973), is unique in focusing more on medical history than on the pamphlet literature surrounding the inoculation controversy; his description of the divisions between Douglass and Mather is in accord with these other studies.

6ï¿½ Of the commentators considered here, Miller, New England Mind, passes the harshest judgment on Mather; Beall and Shryock, Cotton Mather, are the most generous. On Mather’s idea of “doing good,” see Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,” 109–23; Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (Oxford, 1971), 350–59; Van de Wetering, “Reconsideration,” 66–67; and Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), 243–44.

7ï¿½ Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 244–49, describes the Curiosa Americana. Thoughtful discussions of the tensions and interactions between religion and science in Mather’s thought include Michael P. Winship, “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy: The Example of Cotton Mather,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 51 (1994), 92–105, and Pershing Vartanian, “Cotton Mather and the Puritan Transition into the Enlightenment,” Early American Literature, 7 (1973), 213–24.

8ï¿½ Beall and Shryock, Cotton Mather, 64.

9ï¿½ On the making of The Angel of Bethesda, see Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 406–10, and Margaret Humphreys Warner, “Vindicating the Minister’s Medical Role: Cotton Mather’s Concept of the Nishmath-Chajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 36 (1981), 278–95. Also see the introductory material in Mather, The Angel of Bethesda, ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre, Mass., 1972). Mather finished this medical compendium in 1724, but it was not published until 1972.

10ï¿½ Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 28; Warner, “Vindicating the Minister’s Medical Role,”288.

11ï¿½ On the preacher-physician in early New England, see Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991), and Ola Elizabeth Winslow, A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (Boston, 1974), chap. 2. Specific to Mather, see Louise A. Breen, “Cotton Mather, the ‘Angelical Ministry,’ and Inoculation,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 46 (1991), 333–57, and Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,”107–09.

12ï¿½ For Boylston’s and Colman’s background and scientific interests, see Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 435–46; Reginald Fitz, “Zabdiel Boylston, Inoculator, and the Epidemic of Smallpox in Boston in 1721,” Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 2 (1911), 315–27; and Clifford K. Shipton, “Benjamin Colman,” in Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 123–24.

13ï¿½ Biographical sources on Douglass include Charles J. Bullock, “The Life and Writings of William Douglass,” Economic Studies, 2 (1897), 265–90; Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors”; Raymond Muse, “William Douglass, Man of the American Enlightenment, 1691–1752” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1949); and Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 477–79.

14ï¿½ Much to Douglass’s chagrin, the status structure that characterized the English medical establishment had not taken hold in New England by the time he arrived in the colonies. See Richard D. Brown, “The Healing Arts in Colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts: The Context for Scientific Medicine,” in Cash, Christianson, and Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620–1820, 37–42; Van de Wetering, “A Reconsideration”; Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,” 102–07; and Shryock, Medicine and Society, 2–18. Winslow, Destroying Angel, chap. 1, treats medical training in early New England.

15ï¿½ Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1749, 1752), 1:169.

16ï¿½ Brown, “Healing Arts,”37, 40. These changes happened later in rural regions than they did in cities: for the rural context, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1990), 254–58.

17ï¿½ Muse, “William Douglass,”93–96; Shryock, Medicine and Society, 18–19. Also see several essays in Cash, Christianson, and Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts: Christianson, “The Medical Practitioners of Massachusetts, 1630–1800: Patterns of Change and Continuity,” 49–67; Cash, “The Professionalization of Boston Medicine, 1760–1803,” 69–100; and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “Medicine in Boston and Philadelphia: Comparisons and Contrasts, 1750–1820,” 159–83.

18ï¿½ [Douglass], Inoculation of the Small Pox as Practised in Boston … (Boston, 1722), 13. Douglass was heavily influenced by Thomas Sydenham, one of the major figures in 17th-century English medicine, who advanced a rigorous empirical approach to identifying and treating diseases. As Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, 1998), 195–96, notes, Mather also followed Sydenham in advocating a theory of disease specificity and an innovative “cooling regimen” for the treatment of smallpox. See Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 98, and St. George, “‘Set Thine House in Order’: The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), 2:183–84. Unlike Douglass, however, Mather does not seem to have been committed exclusively to Sydenham’s methodology, which presumed that knowledge of the body came through direct, careful observation of the body. See Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,” 62–74, and Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:382–83.

19ï¿½ Hannaford, Race, 187. An excellent discussion of the move toward more explicitly racial terminology is Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 247–64.

20ï¿½ The often substantial differences among Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach, and others interested in human difference make it impossible to describe a monolithic 18th-century racial science. Most scholars of European thought are careful to note that not until the late 18th and especially the 19th centuries did scientific racism assume its most insidious form, imposing a hierarchy as well as an order on the varieties of humankind. See Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (1990), 387–405; Gossett, Race, chap. 3; Hannaford, Race, chap. 7; Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race,'”; Jordan, White over Black, 215–23; Smedley, Race in North America, chap. 7; and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), 30–33.

21ï¿½ Alexander O. Boulton, “The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science,” American Quarterly, 47 (1995), 467–92; Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1998), 137–62; Dana D. Nelson, “Consolidating National Masculinity: Scientific Discourse and Race in the Post-Revolutionary United States,” in St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, 2000), 201–15.

22ï¿½ A provocative discussion of how interracial contexts shape colonial science is Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 33–68.

23ï¿½ Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 264.

24ï¿½ On the complexities of determining the roots of medical innovation, see Genevieve Miller, “Putting Lady Mary in Her Place: A Discussion of Historical Causation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 55 (1981), 11–16.

25ï¿½ Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), 48–63. Timoni and Pylarini are usually referenced by their Latinized names, Timonious and Pylarinus.

26ï¿½ Mather to Woodward, in Kittredge, “Some Lost Works,” 422.

27ï¿½ Chaplin, Subject Matter, 160; Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” WMQ, 3d Ser., 33 (1976), 291; Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 194.

28ï¿½ [Mather], An Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox in Boston in New-England (London, 1722), 2. Kittredge, “Some Lost Works,” 444–59, verifies Mather’s authorship of the pamphlet.

29ï¿½ Boylston, An Historical Account of the Small-pox Inoculation in New England … (Boston, 1730), 2–6.

30ï¿½ Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 113.

31ï¿½ Such was certainly the case for most people’s everyday experience, though in terms of early modern science, the division between male and female was more often blurred than Enlightenment thought would make it. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 115, claimed that inoculation could make the weak strong.

32ï¿½ Mather, The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (Boston, 1706), 2–3, 24–25. Jordan, White over Black, 11–20, discusses environmentalist theories of blackness.

33ï¿½ Mather, Negro Christianized, 23. This insight likely came to Mather through his interactions with Onesimus. See Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th Ser., vol. 8, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709–1724 (Boston, 1912), 222.

34ï¿½ Mather, Negro Christianized, 4, 19. Mather used “Negroes” and “servants” more or less interchangeably in this tract instead of the word “slaves.”

35ï¿½ See Mather, Negro Christianized, 25–27. On hierarchical but reciprocal relationships in early New England families, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York, 1966).

36ï¿½ Mather, Negro Christianized, 34–40.

37ï¿½ In a reversal of the typically subordinate position of children to adults, Mather, Negro Christianized, 29, suggested that white children might be called upon to catechize African adults in their households.

38ï¿½ Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), chap. 2. Mather exemplified this idea in a 1721 broadside: “Men of Honour, and Learning, and Incontestible Veracity … agree in the Relation they give us, of [inoculation’s] being used with constant Success in the Levant”; [Mather], “Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated,” printed as a postscript to Increase Mather, Several Reasons Proving That Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox, Is a Lawful Practice … (Boston, 1721), 2.

39ï¿½ Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 107.

40ï¿½ As further proof of his point, Mather argued that “Persons of Quality” in England were also trying inoculation. See “A Faithful Account of What Has Occur’d under the Late Experiments of the Small-Pox …,”Boston Gazette, Oct. 23–30, 1721. On the authorship of this piece, see Kittredge, introduction to Several Reasons, by Increase Mather (Cleveland, 1921), 20 (facsimile in I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Cotton Mather and American Science and Medicine, vol. 2 [New York, 1980]).

41ï¿½ Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 7.

42ï¿½ See Jordan, White over Black, 7–9.

43ï¿½A Letter from One in the Country, to His Friend in the City: In Relation to Their Distresses Occasioned by the Doubtful and Prevailing Practice of the Inoculation of the Smallpox (Boston, 1721), 2; [Samuel Grainger], The Imposition of Inoculation as a Duty Religiously Considered, in a Letter to a Gentleman in the Country Inclin’d to Admit It (Boston, 1721), 3; Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 6.

44ï¿½ Douglass did not think that the publication of Pylarinus’s and Timonious’s reports by the Royal Society necessarily made their claims about inoculation scientifically valid. Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 4–5; Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,”178.

45ï¿½ Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:351.

46ï¿½ Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (Garden City, N. Y., 1947), 65–66; on Montaigne’s conception of truthfulness, see Shapin, Social History of Truth, 79–80.

47ï¿½ Colman, Some Observations on the New Method of Receiving the Small-Pox … (Boston, 1721), 15; Mather, Account of the Method, 1.

48ï¿½ Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 107.

49ï¿½ On the speech of 18th-century African-born slaves in the British colonies, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 39–42, and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 569–70.

50ï¿½ Colman, Some Observations on … Small-Pox, 16.

51ï¿½ Although Mather never mentioned any problems with his slave in his writings on smallpox inoculation, he and Onesimus actually had a difficult relationship through the 1710s, with Onesimus allegedly stealing from Mather and resisting Mather’s effort to shape him morally and spiritually. Onesimus purchased his freedom in 1716, though he continued to work for Mather; Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709–1724, in Collecions of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th Ser., 8 (1912), 139, 363, 446, 456; Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 290; Daniel K. Richter, “‘It Is God Who Has Caused Them to Be Servants’: Cotton Mather and Afro-American Slavery in New England,” Bulletin of the Congregational Library, 30 (1979), 6, 11.

52ï¿½ Grainger, Imposition of Inoculation, 3; Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 7.

53ï¿½ Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” WMQ, 3d Ser., 19 (1962), 201–02. New England newspapers frequently reprinted accounts of slave uprisings elsewhere. See Robert Ernest Desrochers, Jr., “Every Picture Tells a Story: Slavery and Print in Eighteenth-Century New England” (Ph. D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 117–40, although most examples Desrochers cites date after the 1720s. Not long after the smallpox epidemic, Boston’s blacks and Indians became the scapegoats for a rash of arson that afflicted the city in 1723. Robert C. Twombly, “Black Resistance to Slavery in Massachusetts,” in William L. O’Neill, ed., Insights and Parallels: Problems and Issues of American Social History (Minneapolis, 1973), 15, 35-37.

54ï¿½ Shapin, Social History of Truth, 66–95, 403–07, quotation on 86.

55ï¿½ Colman, Some Observations on … Small-Pox, 15. Similar is Englishmen’s “ventriloquizing” of Indian medical knowledge in terms that suited European scientific debates. See Chaplin, Subject Matter, 194–95.

56ï¿½ Colman, A Narrative of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small Pox in New England (London, 1722), 35–36.

57ï¿½ Early 18th-century Americans were apparently unaware of reports of inoculation as a folk medical tradition in parts of rural Europe. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 46.

58ï¿½ Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 107.

59ï¿½ Mather “was convinced that God had placed remedies in each part of the world where they were appropriate.” For example, American Indians had found botanical cures for diseases endemic to the Americas, and smallpox-ravaged Africa had access to inoculation. Beall and Shryock, Cotton Mather, 46–47.

60ï¿½ Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 6.

61ï¿½ On the etymology of the word “race” in English, see Smedley, Race in North America, 36–40.

62ï¿½ Mather, Negro Christianized, quotations on 24; see ibid., 2, on the curse of Ham. On the complexity of the Hamitic myth in the early modern period, see Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 103–42.

63ï¿½ Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 1:438n. Also see Bullock, “Life and Writings of William Douglass,” 282, and Muse, “William Douglass,”221.

64ï¿½ Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:382.

65ï¿½ Ibid., 1:158n, emphasis added to first quotation.

66ï¿½ Douglass, The Practical History of a New Epidemical Eruptive Miliary Fever, with an Angina Ulcusculosa, Which Prevailed in Boston New England in the Years 1735 and 1736 (Boston, 1736), ii, 18. See also Melchert, “Experimenting on the Neighbors,” 62–68, 176–91, on Douglass’s medical philosophy and response to the Mather-Boylston inoculation trials.

67ï¿½ [Douglass], A Dissertation concerning Inoculation of the Small-pox (Boston, 1730), 10.

68ï¿½ Ibid., 27–28.

69ï¿½ Ibid., 28; Douglass, A Practical Essay concerning the Small Pox (Boston, 1730), 38; Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, vol. 1:154.

70ï¿½ The significant exception was a cruelly satirical newspaper item written by Douglass, in which he proposed “A Project, for reducing the Eastern Indians by Inoculation,” allegedly inspired by the imaginative mixing of two recent items published in the paper—one on inoculation and one on Indians; New-England Courant, Aug. 7–14, 1721. On the authorship of this piece, see C. Edward Wilson, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy: A Revisionist Interpretation,” Journalism History, 7 (1980), 17. Douglass was not the last to posit inoculation as a form of biological warfare; see Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History, 86 (2000), 1555–57, 1567–71.

71ï¿½ While New Englanders had already experienced a century of contact with local Indians by 1721, the population of people of African descent was still growing toward its peak. Where there had been about 800 blacks in Massachusetts in 1700, there were 2,150 by 1720. Region, as well as timing, might explain the absence of arguments about African resistance to disease in the 1721–22 inoculation controversy. It is possible that New Englanders had less reason than southern and Caribbean slaveowners to characterize African bodies as unusually strong because New Englanders were not looking to build large, plantation-based slave labor forces. There was not a strong racial division of labor between black slaves and white servants or apprentices in colonial New England. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (1942; rpt. New York, 1968), 20–25 and chap. 24 ; Piersen, Black Yankees, 166–67.

72ï¿½ Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:411 n. On Linnaeus, see Gossett, Race, 35–36. I do not mean to suggest a causal connection between Douglass and Linnaeus but merely to underscore how biological vocabulary was used in the early to mid-18th century.

73ï¿½ Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 1:158 n. On Douglass’s travels, see Muse, “William Douglass,”8, 205.

74ï¿½ Following another Boston smallpox epidemic in 1752, Douglass yet again outlined the categories of people to exclude from inoculation: “The not qualified are Infants, their stamina VitÆ are too tender; pregnant Women, Pubescentes and for a few Years after Puberty, while their Juices are in a Juvenile Fret; Persons upwards of 45 … because their Juices become rancid; and all Persons under any constitutional or habitual Distemperature of Body.” In this case, Douglass did not explicitly exclude anyone on racial grounds, unless he meant to subsume Indians under the category of the constitutionally weak. The critical point is that he still saw certain bodies as more appropriate for inoculation than others. Elsewhere in the same tract, he continued to tally separately and compare the mortality of blacks and whites from natural smallpox and inoculation, contrasting the experience of Boston in 1752 with that of South Carolina in a 1738 epidemic; Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:395, 398.

75ï¿½ Douglass, Dissertation concerning Inoculation, 28. On smallpox susceptibility and inheritance, also see Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:393.

76ï¿½ Chaplin, Subject Matter, 117–18.

77ï¿½ Kilpatrick later changed his name to Kirkpatrick after moving to England, where he received a medical degree. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 594–95; Joseph Ioor Waring, “James Kilpatrick and Smallpox Inoculation in Charlestown,” Annals of Medical History, 10 (1938), 301–08.

78ï¿½ J. Kilpatrick, An Essay on Inoculation, Occasioned by the Small-Pox Being Brought into South Carolina in the Year 1738 (London, 1743), iv, 14, 38.

79ï¿½ Ibid., 45. On “complexion,” see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 3–6.

80ï¿½ Kilpatrick, Essay on Inoculation, 46–48. Yaws is a tropical skin disease that 18th-century whites associated with blacks. In his satirical proposal to wipe out the Indians through inoculation, Douglass also suggested adding “Negro yaws” to the biological arsenal. See New-England Courant, Aug. 7–14, 1721.

81ï¿½ Kilpatrick, Essay on Inoculation, 14. Also see Douglass, Summary … of the British Settlements in North-America, vol. 2, 351–52, 382–84. On the contemporary trend toward professionalism in medicine, see Cassedy, Medicine in America, 17–20, and Shryock, Medicine and Society, 18–37.

82ï¿½ The contrast between racial idiom and fully formed racism is elaborated in Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies,” WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 229–52.

83ï¿½ To describe how theories of difference evolved in the context of colonial encounters, literary historian Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 39, invokes a concept of “multiplicity,” “based on the premise that in historical terms, ideologies and practices do not disappear; rather, they coexist with new ways of thinking and living, are revisited partially to fit new conditions, or ‘go underground’ for awhile and resurface later.”

84ï¿½ Medical historian Cassedy, Medicine in America, 17–18, aptly assesses Douglass’s singular prominence in the Boston smallpox debate of 1721–1722 by noting “the inoculation controversy came at a time when colonial physicians were not yet in a position to effectively present, let alone defend, their various perceived interests as professionals.”

85ï¿½ On “racism without race,” see James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 165–66.

By Margot Minardi