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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2025
Historians of Boston’s 1721 smallpox epidemic have focused almost solely on the inoculation controversy, a heated debate among ministers, physicians, and other elites. This perspective overlooks the vast majority of Boston’s residents, who experienced the epidemic not as an episode in the history of medicine but rather as an event with powerful spiritual ramifications. As lay Bostonians sought comfort for themselves and their afflicted loved ones, they strengthened social cohesion through a variety of public, semi-public, and private devotional practices. Though their rituals sometimes laid bare societal divisions of race and class, on balance their devotions thickened social bonds in the face of a disease that threatened to sunder such connections.
1 Boston News-Letter, January 22, 1722, 2 (841 deaths); Boylston, Zabdiel, An Historical Account of the Small-Pox Inoculated in New-England, Upon All Sorts of Persons, Whites, Blacks, and of All Ages and Constitutions, 2nd ed. (1726; Boston: S. Gerrish, 1730), 33 Google Scholar (5,749 cases).
2 Barrows, , ed., The Diary of John Comer (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1893), 20–21 Google Scholar.
3 Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 159–60Google Scholar; Seeman, Erik R., Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 112–14Google Scholar.
4 Barrows, Diary of John Comer, 20–21.
5 Recent excellent histories of disease in America that do not focus on religion include Becker, Ann M., Smallpox in Washington’s Army: Disease, War, and Society during the Revolutionary War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023)Google Scholar; Wehrman, Andrew M., The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olivarius, Kathryn, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022)Google Scholar; Witt, John Fabian, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
6 Works that highlight the relationship between religion and disease include Koch, Philippa, The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2021)10.18574/nyu/9781479806744.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winiarski, Douglas L., Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), esp. 62–69 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628264.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gómez, Pablo F., The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)10.5149/northcarolina/9781469630878.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kelton, Paul, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Jortner, Adam, “Cholera, Christ, and Jackson: The Epidemic of 1832 and the Origins of Christian Politics in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 233–6410.1353/jer.2007.0025CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 196–204, 228–34.
7 Koch, Course of God’s Providence, chap. 3; Coss, Stephen, The Fever of 1721 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)Google Scholar; Kass, Amalie M., “Boston’s Historic Smallpox Epidemic,” Massachusetts Historical Review 14 (2012): 1–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Silva, Cristobal, Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 4; Wisecup, Kelly, “African Medical Knowledge, the Plain Style, and Satire in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy,” Early American Literature 46, no. 1 (2011): 25–50 10.1353/eal.2011.0004CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Minardi, Margot, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 1 (January 2004): 47–76 10.2307/3491675CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carrell, Jennifer Lee, The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox (New York: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar; van de Wetering, Maxine, “A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy,” New England Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 1985): 46–67 10.2307/365262CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winslow, Ola Elizabeth, A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974)Google Scholar; Blake, John B., “The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721–1722,” New England Quarterly 25, no. 4 (December 1952): 489–506 10.2307/362582CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Swain, Joseph Ward (1912; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 47, 423Google Scholar. Even though I invoke Durkheim, I reject the functionalism and racism of Elementary Forms.
9 Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (1893; London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1969), 223, 368 (“mutual dependence”), 228 (“durable bonds”).
10 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 389, 400.
11 For example, Ezzy, Douglas et al., “Religious Diversity in Australia: Rethinking Social Cohesion,” Religions 11 (2020): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hemming, Peter J., “Meaningful Encounters? Religion and Social Cohesion in the English Primary School,” Social and Cultural Geography, 12, no. 1 (February 2011): 63–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bouma, Gary D. and Ling, Rod, “Religion and Social Cohesion,” Dialogue: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia 27, no. 2 (February 2008): 41–50 Google Scholar; Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, “The Role of Religion in Establishing Social Cohesion,” in Religion in the New Europe, ed. Michalski, Krzysztof (New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 45–63 Google Scholar.
12 Schiefer, David and van der Noll, Jolanda, “The Essentials of Social Cohesion: A Literature Review,” Social Indicators Research 132, no. 2 (June 2017): 579–603, esp. 585–8910.1007/s11205-016-1314-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Wrightson, Keith, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City, and the Plague (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 82 Google Scholar.
14 Boston was founded in 1630 by English puritans seeking a less hostile place to practice their “hot” brand of Calvinist Protestantism. By spring 1721, the Congregationalist descendants of those puritans remained Calvinist and worshipped in six Boston meetinghouses—seven, if one counts the New North Brick Meetinghouse, which held its first services in May.
15 The best discussion of prayer bids is Winiarski, Douglas L., “The Newbury Prayer Bill Hoax: Devotion and Deception in New England’s Era of Great Awakenings,” Massachusetts Historical Review 14 (2012): 52–86, esp. 55–6110.5224/masshistrevi.14.1.0052CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The argument that they were usually posted is my own.
16 Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed., Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), 2:652, 653, 654, 656Google Scholar.
17 Stein, Stephen J., “‘For Their Spiritual Good’: The Northampton, Massachusetts, Prayer Bids of the 1730s and 1740s,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1980): 271 10.2307/1919499CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Thomas, , ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), 2:863 Google Scholar. On belief in the healing powers of private prayer, see Mann, Sophie, “‘A Double Care’: Prayer as Therapy in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 33, no. 4 (2019): 1055–7610.1093/shm/hkz016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Mather, Cotton, The Angel of Bethesda, ed. Jones, Gordon W. (Barre, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1972), 295 Google Scholar.
20 Ebenezer Turell, “Account of a Witchcraft Case” (1728), 47, Congregational Library (hereafter CL), accessed December 19, 2024, https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/manuscript-collections/browse-the-ebenezer-turell-account-of-a-witchcraft-case.
21 A significant number of magical healers were African and Indigenous, but no evidence survives of their efforts during the epidemic. Benes, Peter, “Fortunetellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers in New England, 1644–1850,” in Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600–1900, ed. Benes, Peter (Boston: Boston University, 1992), 127–48, esp. 132–33Google Scholar.
22 The French church is briefly described in Butler, Jon, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 83 Google Scholar.
23 Peterson, Mark A., The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Edward Bromfield Sermon Notes, 1682–1803, vol. 11, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (hereafter MHS). On lay sermon notes, see Neuman, Meredith Marie, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 2; and, focusing on England, Morrissey, Mary, “Sermon-Notes and Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Communities,” Huntington Library Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 293–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 On notetakers who included their own assessments of sermons, see Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 12–13.
26 Boston News-Letter, January 22, 1722, 2.
27 Bromfield Sermon Notes, May 28, 1721.
28 Bromfield Sermon Notes, October 1, 1721. In the 1720s, Cotton Mather linked Job to smallpox: Mather, The Angel of Bethesda, 96.
29 Samuel Checkley Sermons, 1721–1745, 23–24, dated November 4 [sic] for November 5, MHS.
30 Mather, Cotton, A Perfect Recovery: The Voice of the Glorious God, Unto Persons, Whom His Mercy Has Recovered from Sickness (Boston: T. Fleet, 1714), 12 Google Scholar; Ford, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:625 (“kinswoman”).
31 Bromfield Sermon Notes, October 1, 1721.
32 Goodman, Glenda, “‘The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church’: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the English Atlantic World,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 3 (2012): 691–726 10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.691CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 111–16Google Scholar.
33 Bromfield Sermon Notes, October 1, 1721.
34 Diary of Jonathan Willis, 1744–47, July 26, 1746, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston.
35 The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square, Boston, with Lists of Communicants, Baptisms, Marriages, and Funerals, 1699–1872 (Boston: The Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, 1902), 96.
36 Barrows, Diary of John Comer, 26.
37 Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 62. Exactly one conversion narrative from Boston during the epidemic survives, and I am grateful to Winiarski for sharing his transcription. Mary Lowden joined Brattle Street Church in August 1721. Her conversion narrative does not mention the epidemic. Letters to Benjamin Colman, August 13, 1721, MHS.
38 Second Church (Boston, MA) Records, box 1, folder 1: Record Book, 1650–1741, MHS.
39 For Old South Church, see Admissions, 1669–1855, Old South Church in Boston, MA, CL, accessed December 19, 2024, https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/admissions-1669-1855-old-south-church-in-boston-mass./2329 (average of 18.8 per year in the five years before 1721; annualized rate of 8 during the worst of the epidemic). For the First Church, see Pierce, Richard D., ed., The Records of the First Church of Boston, 1630–1868 , 3 vols. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1961), 1:105–10Google Scholar (average 28.6, annualized rate 8). For Brattle Street Church, see Manifesto Church, 97–98, 104–6 (average 26, annualized rate 12).
40 Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, 540–46.
41 Thomas, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 2:982; “Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630–1822” (Thwing Collection), reference code 7347, accessed December 19, 2024, https://www.americanancestors.org/search/databasesearch/530/boston-ma-inhabitants-and-estates-of-the-town-of-boston-1630-1822-thwing-collection.
42 On July 17, Cotton Mather referred to “that Part of the Flock, that are fled into other Towns, to escape the Dangers of the Small-Pox.” Ford, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:632.
43 Some eighteenth-century laypeople found it difficult to be thankful following the deaths of loved ones. Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 48–50.
44 Suffolk County Court Files, 1629–1797, 143:93, case 16041, accessed December 19, 2024, https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/240378.
45 Suffolk County Court of General Sessions of the Peace, 1719–1725, p.117, accessed December 19, 2024, https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/244319.
46 Brown, Anne S. and Hall, David D., “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. Hall, David D. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–68, esp. 51–56Google Scholar; Seeman, Pious Persuasions, 88–95.
47 Brown and Hall, “Family Strategies,” 53.
48 Second Church (Boston, MA) Records, vol. 8, Record Book, 1650–1808, MHS.
49 For Old South Church, see Baptisms, 1669–1875, Old South Church in Boston, MA, CL, accessed December 19, 2024, https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/baptismal-records-1669-1875-old-south-church-in-boston-mass./1748 (average of 70 per year in the four years prior to 1721; annualized rate of 40 during the epidemic’s worst months). For First Church, see Records of the First Church in Boston, 2:387–91 (average 43.25, annualized rate 32). For Brattle Street Church, see Manifesto Church, 137–45 (average 67.5, annualized rate 40). Kings Chapel, the Anglican church, is excluded from this analysis because detailed records were kept starting only in 1713 and there is great variability from year to year. In 1716, for example, there were thirty-four baptisms, while in 1717 there were only five. Still, there was no decline during the epidemic, with fifteen from September through November 1721. Bell, James B., ed., The Colonial Records of Kings Chapel, 1686–1776, 2 vols. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2019), 2:517–25Google Scholar.
50 In 1722–23, Old North Church averaged 67 baptisms per year (71 percent of pre-epidemic numbers); Old South Church averaged 55 (79 percent of expected numbers); First Church averaged 21.5 (50 percent), and Brattle Street Church averaged 52 (77 percent). Boston’s post-epidemic population was now 8 percent smaller, so one might expect an 8 percent decline in births. But, in fact, births declined only 3.3 percent in 1722–23 from their 1717–20 average (from 281.5 to 272). A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing Boston Births from A.D. 1700 to A.D. 1800, vol. 24 (Boston: Rockwell & Churchill, 1894), 119–63.
51 Colonial Records of Kings Chapel, 717. The baby’s mother died May 14, 1724 (p. 718), so this was not a case of the mother dying in childbirth.
52 Ford, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:678–80 (June through December); Increase Mather Diary, May 14, 1721, typescript at MHS.
53 Thomas, ed., Diary of Samuel Sewall, 2:912.
54 John Barnard Diary, 1716–1719, 132, 137, MHS. See also Seeman, Erik R., “The Spiritual Labour of John Barnard: An Eighteenth-Century Artisan Constructs His Piety,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 5, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 181–215 10.1525/rac.1995.5.2.03a00030CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 On rituals of private prayer, see Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, 175–86; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 233–34.
56 John Barnard Diary, 132.
57 On the importance of family worship, see Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, 143–50.
58 Ann Lechmere to John Winthrop, June 29, 1721, Winthrop Family Papers, Loose Manuscripts, MHS. Lechmere’s brother was the governor of Connecticut.
59 Thomas Lechmere to John Winthrop, October 30, 1721, Winthrop Family Papers.
60 On lay providentialism, see Koch, Course of God’s Providence, chap. 2; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 77–80.
61 “Admissions, 1669–1855, Old South Church, Boston, Mass.,” 24 (electronic pagination), CL, accessed December 19, 2024, https://congregationallibrary.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/admissions-1669-1855-old-south-church-in-boston-mass./2329.
62 New-England Courant, December 18, 1721, 4.
63 Ford, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:633.
64 For these numbers I owe my research assistant, Kevin Kostin, an enormous debt of gratitude. All Henchman sales figures are based on Daniel Henchman, Waste Book (Accounts), 1718–1725, Hancock Family Papers, Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, Harvard Business School, accessed December 19, 2024, https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/11/resources/7584.
65 The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New-Testament Faithfully Translated into English Meter, 20th ed. (1640; Boston: T. Fleet, 1720); [Cotton Mather], Psalterium Americanum: The Book of Psalms, in a Translation Exactly Conformed unto the Original; But All in Blank Verse (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1718).
66 Calamy, Edmund, The Godly Man’s Ark; or, City of Refuge in the Day of His Distress, 18th ed. (1657; London: T. Hive, 1709), iii Google Scholar.
67 Hall, David D., “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 61–62 Google Scholar. Hall bases his claim on the 1767 Boston edition of Alarm, which includes the 70,000 figure.
68 Alleine, Joseph, An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, in a Serious Treatise (1673; Boston: J. Allen, 1716), ii Google Scholar.
69 See, for example, Alleine, Joseph, A Sure Guide to Heaven; or, An Earnest Invitation to Sinners to Turn to God (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1691)Google Scholar, which has the same content as Alarm.
70 On steady sellers, see Hall, “Uses of Literacy in New England,” 61–64.
71 John Barnard Diary, 89. On the importance of group discussions of reading, see Cambers, Andrew, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript, and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
72 A Course of Sermons on Early Piety: By the Eight Ministers Who Carry on the Thursday Lecture in Boston (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1721). Each sermon is separately paginated, so pages will be given with the last name of the minister whose sermon is quoted, as “Cooper, 10.”
73 Boston Gazette, July 31, 1721, p.4.
74 On Cotton Mather as the organizer, see Ford, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:609.
75 Course of Sermons, Cooper, 28.
76 Course of Sermons, C. Mather, 26–27. For the number of burials per year, 1701–20, see Boston Gazette, March 20, 1721, 4.
77 Course of Sermons, Cooper, 28.
78 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 401.
79 Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer, 96.
80 Bullock, Steven C. and McIntyre, Sheila, “The Handsome Tokens of a Funeral: Glove-Giving and the Large Funeral in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 305–4610.5309/willmaryquar.69.2.0305CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Geddes, Gordon E., Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), chaps. 5 and 6Google Scholar.
81 Suffolk County Probate File Papers (hereafter SCPF), 4526:7. SCPF were viewed on AmericanAncestors.org and are cited by case number and page number. References to quartiles are based on my analysis of eighty-six inventories from the epidemic (not all are smallpox deaths). The bottom quartile ranges from £12 to £130, the lower-middle quartile from £130 to £391, the upper-middle from £414 to £938, and the top quartile from £938 to £7,262.
82 SCPF 4507:5–6.
83 SCPF 4507:13–14.
84 Schiefer and van der Noll, “Essentials of Social Cohesion,” 589–90.
85 All references are from Poor Relief Records of the First Church of Boston, 1696–1737, 1778–1813, 1:80–84, MHS. Also available online at https://www.masshist.org/collection-guides/view/fa0541 (accessed December 19, 2024).
86 These imprecise figures are based on a count of 400 African Americans in Boston in 1708 and 1,374 in 1742. Greene, Lorenzo Johnston, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 84 Google Scholar (400 in 1708); “An Account of the Town of Boston, Taken December 14, 1742,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. 1 (1825): 152 (1,374). If the numbers increased in linear fashion between 1708 and 1742, that would mean about 775 African Americans in 1721. But by all accounts the Black population grew more quickly in the years closer to 1742, which means a figure likely lower than 775.
87 Town officials did not break down all 841 deaths by race, but they did provide figures from the start of the epidemic to October 6, by which point about one-fourth of the eventual total had died. In that early period, African Americans made up 7.4 percent of the dead (15 out of 203) and Native Americans made up 6.9 percent (14). Boston News-Letter, October 9, 1721, 2; Boston Gazette, October 9, 1721, 4; New-England Courant, October 9, 1721, 2.
88 See the sizable funeral described in the New England Weekly Journal, February 24, 1729, quoted in Sweet, John Wood, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 333 10.56021/9780801873782CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
89 Report of the Record Commissioners, 13:87.
90 Thomas, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 2:983–84.
91 Seeman, Erik R., “Reassessing the ‘Sankofa Symbol’ in New York’s African Burial Ground,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Jan. 2010): 101–2210.5309/willmaryquar.67.1.101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perry, Warren R., Howson, Jean, and Bianco, Barbara A., eds., New York African Burial Ground: Archaeology Final Report, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Medford, Edna Greene, ed., The New York African Burial Ground: History Final Report (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
92 Sharpe, John, “‘Proposals for Erecting a School, Library and Chapel at New York,’ 1712–13,” New-York Historical Society Collections 13 (1880): 355 Google Scholar.
93 Boylston, Historical Account, 2–32.