A Meeting of Two Funerals

"We met a Niger Funeral."

- Samuel Sewall, 20 October 1721

In 1721, a virulent smallpox epidemic ravaged the city of Boston. Between April and December, 5,889 Bostonians contracted the disease and 844 died of it. The danger peaked in October, with 411 deaths.

The 1721 epidemic is most often remembered for sparking a controversy over inoculation. Most Bostonians agreed with Dr. William Douglass that inoculation was a dangerous innovation that threatened to spread disease and kill hundreds.* A few prominent citizens, including Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, supported inoculation based on information gathered from slaves (particularly Onesimus, a slave owned by Mather) who had undergone the procedure in Africa and from the Royal Society of London (which, in turn, got much of its information from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's female informants in Turkey). For a wonderful narrative treatment of this controversy, see Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster.

For me, one of the most interesting things about the 1721 epidemic is that the records it generated allow us to get a glimpse of how white and black Bostonians interacted in the context of illness and death. Onesimus' pivotal role in convincing white elites to adopt African medical knowledge is well documented, but it is far from the only instance of confrontation/collaboration between free and enslaved Bostonians during the crisis.

Samuel Sewall's diary provides a window into the events of that deadly autumn. The diary does not usually pay much attention to the comings and goings of slaves, but in September and October of 1721, they are unusually conspicuous. On September 16, Sewall noted that Jane Hirst had been brought home from her boarding house when she fell ill, and that "Boston carried her in his arms." When she was moved to another house on October 15, "Scipio carried a Note for Thanks." Five days later, Sewall attended a quintuple-funeral at the "South-Burying place" (later Granary Burying Ground), where he and his well-heeled acquaintances "met a Niger funeral."

With so many deaths, it is unsurprising that Sewall's burial party should have encountered another at the burying ground. I find this short entry very suggestive — a cadre of elite, white Bostonians burying five of their dead comes face to face with a group of their black neighbors in a space that is shared by both, yet their rituals are separate. Did the two funeral parties regard one another with hostility? Respect? Indifference? How did they feel about sharing the space of the graveyard? How did they judge each other's performance?

*It should be noted that these fears were not without merit. As Elizabeth Fenn has noted, wealthy citizens were much more likely to choose/afford inoculation than their poorer neighbors. Those who underwent the procedure (including Abigail Adams in 1775) saw no need to quarantine themselves, despite the fact that they were contagious and posed a very real danger to the non-immune public. According to Fenn, variolation "was really as likely to start an epidemic as it was to stop one, unless it was administered under a very strict quarantine."

Pox Americana

I love books about smallpox. Not just smallpox — I also enjoy reading about cholera, yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and most other epidemic diseases.

Elizabeth Fenn's Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 is one of my favorite disease-related light reads, right up there with The Speckled Monster and The Ghost Map. That's probably not fair — Pox Americana is more scholarly than either of the two, but it's not a dense text.

In Pox Americana, Fenn traces the path of smallpox from Boston to Mexico City to Vancouver, exploring how the disease affected social, economic, and political conditions wherever it struck. The best thing about this book is that Fenn follows the disease across the continent rather than confining her analysis to the eastern seaboard. By tracing the epidemic to the Spanish southwest, Hudson Bay, and across the Great Plains, Fenn offers a broad overview of the North American situation c. 1780.

Some of the more memorable take-aways:

• Rather than blaming opposition to inoculation on superstition or ignorance, Fenn argues that poor people opposed inoculation because it was a prohibitively expensive procedure and because the rich put everyone at risk by wandering around willy-nilly while they were contagious.
• Many of the African-Americans who took Governor Dunmore up on his offer of freedom didn't live long enough to enjoy it. 
• The Spanish had a pretty impressive infrastructure in place in Mexico in the 18th century, but control lessened considerably as one traveled away from Mexico City. 
• Native Americans in the American West were part of extensive trade and kinship networks that brought them into contact with European technologies and diseases long before they had direct contact with Europeans. (not earth-shattering, but worth a reminder)
  

Let's end this review Reading Rainbow style:
Whether your a big fan of infectious diseases or just interested in a study of 18th-century America that goes beyond Boston, this is the book for you. Pick it up at your local library!