The Fever of 1721

The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics

Stephen Coss

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781476783123
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The "intelligent and sweeping" ( Booklist ) story of the crucial year that prefigured the events of the American Revolution in 1776—and how Boston's smallpox epidemic was at the center of it all. In The Fever of 1721 Stephen Coss brings to life the amazing cast of characters who changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution: Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, son of the President of Harvard College; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's avenues; James Franklin and his younger brother Benjamin; and Elisha Cooke and his protégé Samuel Adams.Coss describes how, during the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox matter. Public outrage forced Boylston into hiding and Mather's house was firebombed."In 1721, Boston was a dangerous place…In Coss's telling, the troubles of 1721 represent a shift away from a colony of faith and toward the modern politics of representative government" ( The New York Times Book Review ). Elisha Cooke and Samuel Adams were beginning to resist the British in the run-up to the American Revolution. Meanwhile, a bold young printer names James Franklin launched America's first independent newspaper and landed in jail. His teenaged brother and apprentice, Benjamin Franklin, however, learned his trade in James's shop and became a father of the Independence movement.One by one, the atmosphere in Boston in 1721 simmered and ultimately boiled over, leading to the full drama of the American Revolution. "Fascinating, informational, and pleasing to read…Coss's gem of colonial history immerses readers into eighteenth-century Boston and introduces a collection of fascinating people and intriguing circumstances" ( Library Journal, starred review).

PART ONE

TROUBLE NEAR

The common people of this Province are so perverse, that when I remove any person from the Council, for not behaving himself with duty towards H.M. or His orders, or for treating me H.M. Govr. ill, that he becomes their favourite, and is chose a Representative.

—Samuel Shute, royal governor of Massachusetts, letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations, London, June 1, 1720

A Devil was once an Angel, but Sin has brought him to be a Fallen Angel; an Angel full of Enmity to God and man.

—Cotton Mather, “A Discourse on the Power and Malice of the Devils,” in Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689)

1

IDOL OF THE MOB

For a few hours on a sunny, crisp morning in October 1716, royal governor Samuel Shute’s administration looked quite promising, at least from the outside. Salutes fired from the cannon of the town’s batteries and the guns of two British warships in the harbor alerted Boston of Shute’s imminent arrival and brought thousands of people to the waterfront for a glimpse of the first new governor in fourteen years. By the time the Lusitania docked at the end of Long Wharf a line of spectators extended the full third-of-a-mile length of the wharf and another quarter mile up King Street to the Boston Town House, where the formal welcome and swearing in would be conducted.

The man who appeared on deck, waving to his new constituents and acknowledging their cheers, had small, wide-set eyes, a puggish nose, full cheeks, and a capacious double chin that billowed like a sail over the top of his neck cloth. He was plumper and older than the war hero people had heard about, the man who had fought valiantly under Marlborough and been wounded on the battlefield in Flanders. Aside from his military credentials, all average Bostonians knew about the fifty-four-year-old retired colonel was that he had been raised a Puritan. Shute had converted to the Church of England, presumably in the interest of career advancement. But the knowledge that he shared the religious heritage of a majority of Bostonians was a comfort to those who remembered the hostility of an earlier, Puritan-hating Anglican governor who had commandeered their meetinghouses for Church of England services and had made an ostentatious show of his celebration of Christmas, a holiday Puritans not only refused to recognize but considered sacrilegious. More than anything, though, what excited the people of Boston about Samuel Shute was that he was not Joseph Dudley, his predecessor. With a new chief executive came new hope for solutions to the colony’s challenges, better cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of the colonial government, and more equitable relations with the mother country.

But many political insiders were skeptical that Samuel Shute constituted a new start, a change from the status quo. Although they, too, knew little about the man, they had discovered that his appointment had been finagled by friends of Joseph Dudley, who had first bribed the man originally appointed to replace Dudley into relinquishing the position. The mere possibility that Shute was in the pocket of Dudley and his son Paul, the colony’s attorney general, was enough to earn him enemies among his new constituents. Many persons had never forgiven Dudley for his betrayal of Massachusetts nearly three decades earlier, when he had served as henchman to the most despotic governor in the colony’s history, Edmund Andros. In 1689, the people had risen up and deposed Andros, jailing and eventually deporting him to England along with Dudley and another man, Edward Randolph. Thirteen years later the Crown had sent Dudley back to Massachusetts as its governor. Fears that he would revenge himself on his jailers with draconian assaults on individuals and group liberties had proven largely unfounded. But his administration had been both arbitrary enough and corrupt enough to spur two unsuccessful attempts to have him recalled. Having survived those, he might have remained governor for the rest of his life had Queen Anne not died prematurely at age forty-nine and her successor, George Louis, not decided to do as most new monarchs did and replace his predecessor’s appointments with men who would be in his debt. On his way out of office, Dudley had given his political opponents two final reasons to despise him, tacitly approving the scheme to rig the selection of his replacement, and double-crossing supporters of a plan to alleviate the worsening silver currency shortage by creating a private bank that would emit paper currency. After making those men believe that he would endorse the venture, he had worked secretly behind the scenes to assure its defeat.

The bank’s supporters were still smarting from that act of duplicity as the carriage carrying the man Dudley’s friends had picked to replace him made its way up King Street. In the months prior to Shute’s departure for America, Dudley’s men had thoroughly indoctrinated him in their anti-private-bank philosophy, preparing him to fend off any new attempts to launch the bank or force the government to emit paper currency. But the currency controversy was about to change in ways the new governor was unprepared to handle, evolving from a dry and somewhat tedious argument over monetary policy into a far-reaching debate over class entitlement, freedom of dissent, Americans’ liberties as Englishmen, and the colony’s right to self-determination, and becoming, as one historian put it, “the secret of political alignment” for a generation of emerging patriots and loyalists.¹

SHUTE MADE TWO stops along the parade route up King Street. The first was to greet a group of the town’s ministers. The second was to meet with Joseph Dudley. That meeting took place in view of a “great Concourse of People” and a sizable group of dignitaries who had gathered at the foot of the Town House for Shute’s public welcoming ceremony.² Those dignitaries included members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (who were known as deputies); their colleagues in the upper house, the Governor’s Council (who were known as councilors or assistants); the president of Harvard College; and numerous judges and other prominent gentlemen of the province. No one among that group was more put off by the conspicuous show of affection between the old governor and the new than the Boston representative Elisha Cooke, who had been elected to the Massachusetts House for the first time the previous year at the relatively young age of thirty-eight. Cooke came from Massachusetts political royalty: He was the grandson of John Leverett, an early governor of Massachusetts, and the son of Elisha Cooke Sr., the colony’s most influential anti-Crown politician. Cooke Sr. had been the most outspoken critic of England’s 1684 revocation of the founding Massachusetts charter, the act that had taken the power to choose its own governor away from the colony and given it to England, and one of the leaders of the 1689 uprising against Andros, the tyrant England had installed as royal governor shortly after the charter’s cancellation. He had been nearly as critical of the “New Charter” of 1691, which had restored some liberties but left with England both the power to appoint the governor and to disallow objectionable laws. Thereafter, he and members of his “Old Charter Party” had categorically opposed “royal authority over the colony and the governors’ attempts to rule by prerogative.”³ Outraged by the traitorous Joseph Dudley’s appointment as royal governor, Cooke Sr. had become his “pointed enemy.”⁴ The historian John Eliot wrote that Cooke Sr. “never missed the opportunity of speaking against his [Dudley’s] measures, or declaring his disapprobation of the man.”⁵ Right up until his death in 1715 he had also criticized Dudley’s “Prerogative Party” supporters, men who, he charged, kowtowed to the royal governor and the Crown in order to pad their fortunes or, in the case of some of the once-prominent families from the colony’s founding era, to prop up their diminishing status.

Elisha Cooke Sr. and his only son were so closely aligned politically that one detractor would describe Cooke Jr.’s contempt for English authority as a disease he had “caught” from his father.⁶ Indeed, he had followed his father’s example in nearly every respect. Both father and son had attended Harvard College, trained as physicians, and left the regular practice of medicine for success as businessmen. The younger Cooke’s ventures included a salt plant on Boston neck, a stake in Long Wharf (to that point the largest infrastructure project in America), and investments in Boston warehouses and taverns and in thousands of acres of prime Maine timberland. His real passion and talent, though, were for politics. Outmaneuvered by Joseph Dudley in his first foray into political dealings at the provincial level—the attempt to launch a private bank—he had nevertheless proven himself a formidable opponent. Dudley’s biographer wrote that the cagey old governor, who had survived two recalls, understood that Cooke Jr. and his bank partners represented “a faction more dangerous than any other combination he had faced.”⁷

With wealth, education, social standing, and a talent for public speaking—his oratory was described as “animating, energetic, concise, persuasive, and pure”—Cooke had the credentials and skills necessary to succeed as a conventional eighteenth-century politician.⁸ It surprised no one that within months of his election to the House he had already achieved a leadership position. But other, more unconventional talents and tactics would help him rise above conventional politicians and become the most significant and powerful Boston politician in the decades preceding the American Revolution—more hated by England than anyone but Samuel Adams (in whose political education Cooke would pay a formative role).

Shortly after their defeat of the private bank, Dudley’s Prerogative Party men had attempted to change the form of Boston’s government from the town meeting to an English-style incorporated borough system. Boston was and always had been the locus of political resistance and general incorrigibility. The town meeting, Dudley knew, fed that rebelliousness, since it gave all the people, even those without the vote, the power to speak their minds, required votes on all major issues, and mandated the yearly election of selectmen who managed town affairs. By instituting an incorporated system whereby representation came from aldermen appointed for life and vested with the power to choose a mayor, controlling the town became as simple as either arranging for the “right” men to be chosen alders or using favors and bribes to influence them. Recognizing what Dudley and his friends were up to, Cooke had published two anonymous pamphlets that declared incorporation “an oligarchic plot” by political and economic elites bent on rigging the government, the currency system, and the entire economy for their benefit.⁹ The pamphlets reminded rank-and-file Bostonians that each freeholder had the “undoubted right” to “speak his Opinion, and give his Advice, and Vote, too, concerning any Affair to be transacted by the Town,” and that to turn over that power to an alderman was to squander this “great Privilege their Ancestors have conveyed to them.”¹⁰ In asserting that the people were “Free-born and in bondage to no Man,” in claiming inviolable political liberties, and in rejecting the assumption that the wealthy, the powerful, the highborn, and, by extension, the royal, were superior to the average man, Cooke’s pamphlets articulated, perhaps for the first time, a distinctly and defiantly American political identity.¹¹

The success of those pamphlets—the incorporation plan was dropped before the next opportunity to vote on it—gave credence to Cooke’s instinct for a new kind of politics. No one, not even Cooke’s father, had thought to cultivate popular support or opposition to leverage a political agenda. Most conventional politicians wouldn’t have known how to do it if they had wanted to. Cooke, though, had begun to master the art of speaking the language of the people. His classrooms were the taverns of Boston, where, by lending an ear and buying a round, he earned a reputation as not only “a drinking man without equal” but also a political leader “generous to needy people of all classes.”¹² After a few rums the social and economic differences between the hardscrabble tradesmen and the wealthy Harvard man melted away, and the former saw the latter as one of their own. It helped that he looked the part. With a broad, fleshy face, full lips, jutting knob of a chin, and slight broadening at the bridge of his nose, he looked more like a workingman than an aristocrat, and more like a brawler than a fast-talking dandy. As he set about evolving his father’s Old Charter Party into what would come to be known as the Popular Party, he took every opportunity to exploit his workingman image. Eventually he would sit for his only known portrait wearing a brown periwig, the color of a tradesman. A future royal governor would sneer at his willingness to court the favor of the middling and the poor, mocking him as “the idol of the Mob.”¹³ But it was the support of the “mob” that would make Cooke the Crown’s most formidable threat.

HAVING REACHED THE Town House, Samuel Shute was welcomed with a brief proclamation thanking God for his safe arrival. That sentiment was punctuated by musketfire from two companies of militia. When the smoke cleared, the governor was escorted into the Town House and up the stairs to the Council chamber, where his commission was read along with that of the new lieutenant governor—Joseph Dudley’s son-in-law, William Dummer. Then both men laid their hands on the Bible and, in the words of one observer, “kiss’d it very industriously,” completing the ceremony.¹⁴ At one o’clock Shute was feted at a large, formal dinner whose guest list included his Council and “many” members of the Massachusetts House.¹⁵ After toasts had been drunk and the meal consumed, the speaker of the House turned to Shute, explained that the governor’s official residence, the Province House, was not yet ready for him, and offered him lodging in the home of William Tailer, the man who had served as interim governor between the end of Dudley’s commission and Shute’s arrival. The offer was important symbolically, since Dudley and the pro-bank Tailer had argued acrimoniously over who should occupy the governorship until Shute arrived, with each man accusing the other of trying to steal control of the colony. Tailer’s welcoming gesture reassured the people that a smooth, orderly transition of power was under way. Similarly, acceptance of the offer would send the message that although Shute was friendly with Dudley, he planned to work with both of the colony’s political factions. But much to the surprise of nearly everyone in attendance, Shute declined the offer, announcing that he had already accepted an invitation to stay with Paul Dudley, whose devotion to England’s prerogative rule of the colony eclipsed his father’s and who years earlier had infamously asserted that Massachusetts would “never be worth living in for Lawyers and Gentlemen, till the Charter is taken away.”¹⁶ In his diary that evening the conserv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part One: Trouble Near
• Part Two: Grievous Calamity
• Part Three: American Monsters
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Stephen Coss
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Copyright