Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 6: Great Awakening Summary & Analysis

In 1700, a public debate about slavery takes place after a New England businessman and judge John Saffin refuses to free a Black indentured servant, Adam, after Adam finishes his seven years’ contracted service. On hearing about this matter, Boston judge Samuel Sewall writes a text condemning slavery and systematically attacking various proslavery arguments. At the same time, he also recommends expelling Africans from New England on the basis that they cannot live properly among white people. Sewall is a powerful individual and close friend of Cotton Mather. Furious, Saffin pens a response to Sewall justifying slavery on the grounds of Black immorality and inferiority, claiming that enslaved Africans are bettered by bondage. 

Adam ends up being freed after a long trial in 1703, but it is Saffin’s position that ultimately prevails. As the population of enslaved people in America grows, new oppressive laws are introduced in order to prevent revolt. In 1705, Virginia rules that freed white servants be allocated land, a motion that noticeably increases white affluence and power. The following year, Cotton Mather publishes The Negro Christianized, in which he argues that God decided to send Africans into slavery in order to save their souls. He emphasizes that however supposedly unintelligent Africans may be, they are “Men, and not Beasts.” That year, members of Mather’s congregation give him an enslaved person, Onesimus (such “gifts” are a common practice at the time).

Africans resist slavery from the very beginning of their arrival in America. As a result, they are “stamped from the beginning as criminals,” their yearning for freedom coded as barbaric and brutal. But despite enslaved resistors’ and abolitionists’ efforts, the slave trade continues to thrive into the early 18th century. When Mather asks Onesimus if he’s had smallpox, Onesimus explains that he’s been inoculated against it using an early vaccination technique practiced by African physicians. At this point vaccination hasn’t been invented in the West yet and Mather, fascinated, collects stories about it from various Africans in Boston. However, he observes that those who explain it to him do so “like Idiots.”

After hearing Mather’s stories, a physician named Zabadiel Boylston inoculates his young son along with two enslaved Africans against smallpox. This horrifies other white men in Boston, some of whom claim the whole thing is a sinister African conspiracy. In 1723, Increase Mather dies in the arms of his doting son. Cotton begins dwelling on the question of his legacy, which largely rests in his singular impact on encouraging the conversion of the enslaved. In the early 1700s, more enslavers begin embracing the idea of Christian slaves, reasoning that converting slaves would make them more docile and submissive.

The First Great Awakening, a proslavery evangelical revival, takes place in the 1730s. Yet during this time the abolitionist movement gains momentum, too. Cotton Mather dies in 1728, a day after his 65th birthday. His lasting impact on the history of race and racism is to solidify the idea that Christianity has an ennobling and mollifying effect on the enslaved. Mather is thus “America’s first great assimilationist,” preaching the idea that Black people could and should strive to have “white” souls.