76 Facts About Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather was a Puritan clergyman and author in colonial New England, who wrote extensively on theological, historical, and scientific subjects.

Cotton Mather has been referred to as the "first American Evangelical".

Personally and intellectually committed to the waning social and religious orders in New England, Cotton Mather unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Harvard College.

Cotton Mather championed the new Yale College as an intellectual bulwark of Puritanism in New England.

Cotton Mather corresponded extensively with European intellectuals and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Glasgow in 1710.

Cotton Mather researched the variolation method of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox contagion, which he learned about from an African-American slave who he owned, Onesimus.

Cotton Mather dispatched multiple reports on scientific matters to the Royal Society of London, which elected him as a fellow in 1713.

Scientist and United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who as a young Bostonian had opposed the old Puritan order represented by Cotton Mather and participated in the anti-inoculation campaign, later described Cotton Mather's book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good as a major influence on his life.

Cotton Mather was born in 1663 in the city of Boston, the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the Rev Increase Mather and his wife Maria nee Cotton.

Cotton Mather's grandfathers were Richard Mather and John Cotton, both of them prominent Puritan ministers who had played major roles in the establishment and growth of the Massachusetts colony.

Increase Cotton Mather was a graduate of Harvard College and the Trinity College Dublin, and served as the minister of Boston's original North Church.

Cotton Mather was therefore born into one of the most influential and intellectually distinguished families in colonial New England and seemed destined to follow his father and grandfathers into the Puritan clergy.

Cotton Mather entered Harvard College, in the neighboring town of Cambridge, in 1674.

At around this time, Cotton Mather began to be afflicted by stuttering, a speech disorder that he would struggle to overcome throughout the rest of his life.

Cotton Mather took an interest in medicine and considered the possibility of pursuing a career as a physician rather than as a religious minister.

Cotton Mather eventually returned to Harvard and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1678, followed by a Master of Arts degree in 1681, the same year his father became Harvard President.

In 1685, Cotton Mather was ordained and assumed full responsibilities as co-pastor of the church.

Cotton Mather would die less than five years after his father, and was therefore throughout most of his career in the shadow of the respected and formidable Increase.

When Increase Cotton Mather became president of Harvard in 1692, he exercised considerable influence on the politics of the Massachusetts colony.

One of the most public displays of their strained relationship emerged during the Salem witch trials, which Increase Cotton Mather reportedly did not support.

Cotton Mather did surpass his father's output as a writer, producing nearly 400 works.

Cotton Mather left him for ten days, returning when she learned that Mather's son Increase was lost at sea.

That day, Cotton Mather probably read the Declaration to a crowd gathered in front of the Boston Town House.

Unlike some other ministers [Cotton Mather] never called for an end to the trials, and he afterwards wrote New England's official defense of the court's proceedings, the infamous Wonders of the Invisible World.

Cotton Mather advised the judges against using spectral evidence and offered recommendations to proceed with caution lest innocent people come to harm.

In 1689, Cotton Mather published Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, based on his study of events surrounding the affliction of the children of a Boston mason named John Goodwin.

Cotton Mather documented these events and attempted to de-possess the "Haunted Children" by prayer and fasting.

Cotton Mather took in the eldest Goodwin child, Martha, into his own home, where she lived for several weeks.

Cotton Mather opposed any natural explanations for the fits, believed that people who confessed to using witchcraft were sane, and warned against all magical practices due to their diabolical connections.

Mr Cotton Mather, was the most active and forward of any Minister in the Country in those matters, taking home one of the Children, and managing such Intreagues with that Child, and after printing such an account of the whole, in his Memorable Providences, as conduced much to the kindling of those Flames, that in Sir William's time threatened the devouring of this Country.

Cotton Mather suggested that the afflicted girls be separated and offered to take six of them into his home, as he had done previously with Martha Goodwin.

In that document, Cotton Mather criticized the court's reliance on spectral evidence and recommended that it adopt a more cautious procedure.

Mr Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a Horse, addressed himself to the People, partly to declare that [Burroughs] was no ordained Minister, partly to possess the People of his guilt, saying that the devil often had been transformed into the Angel of Light.

Cotton Mather's Wonders did little to appease the growing clamor against the Salem witch trials.

Cotton Mather appears to have remained convinced that genuine witches had been executed in Salem and he never publicly expressed regrets over his role in those events.

Cotton Mather was an extremely prolific writer, producing 388 different books and pamphlets during his lifetime.

Cotton Mather began working on it towards the end of 1693 and it was finally published in London in 1702.

The work incorporates information that Cotton Mather put together from a variety of sources, such as letters, diaries, sermons, Harvard College records, personal conversations, and the manuscript histories composed by William Hubbard and William Bradford.

In 1693 Cotton Mather began work on a grand intellectual project that he titled Biblia Americana, which sought to provide a commentary and interpretation of the Christian Bible in light of "all of the Learning in the World".

Cotton Mather, who continued to work on it for many years, sought to incorporate into his reading of Scripture the new scientific knowledge and theories, including geography, heliocentrism, atomism, and Newtonianism.

Cotton Mather sought unsuccessfully to have Dudley replaced by Sir Charles Hobby.

Cotton Mather was a fellow of Harvard College from 1690 to 1702, and at various times sat on its Board of Overseers.

Cotton Mather sought the presidency of Harvard, but in 1708 the fellows instead appointed a layman, John Leverett, who had the support of Governor Dudley.

Cotton Mather came to see the Collegiate School, which had moved in 1716 from Saybrook to New Haven, Connecticut, as a better vehicle for preserving the Puritan orthodoxy in New England.

In 1718, Cotton Mather convinced Boston-born British businessman Elihu Yale to make a charitable gift sufficient to ensure the school's survival.

Cotton Mather sought the presidency of Harvard again after Leverett's death in 1724, but the fellows offered the position to the Rev Joseph Sewall.

When Sewall turned it down, Cotton Mather hoped that he might get the appointment.

In 1716, Onesimus, one of Cotton Mather's slaves, explained to Cotton Mather how he had been inoculated as a child in Africa.

Cotton Mather then declared, in a letter to Dr John Woodward of Gresham College in London, that he planned to press Boston's doctors to adopt the practice of inoculation should smallpox reach the colony again.

Cotton Mather believed that not all learned individuals were qualified to doctor others, and while ministers took on several roles in the early years of the colony, including that of caring for the sick, they were now expected to stay out of state and civil affairs.

The only reason Cotton Mather had had success in it, he said, was because Cotton Mather had used it on children, who are naturally more resilient.

Cotton Mather strongly challenged the perception that inoculation was against the will of God and argued the procedure was not outside of Puritan principles.

In 1716, Cotton Mather used different varieties of maize to conduct one of the first recorded experiments on plant hybridization.

Cotton Mather described the results in a letter to his friend James Petiver:.

Cotton Mather was the eighth colonial American to join that learned body, with the first having been John Winthrop the Younger in 1662.

Cotton Mather was a significant popularizer of the new scientific knowledge and promoted Copernican heliocentrism in some of his sermons.

Cotton Mather argued against the spontaneous generation of life and compiled a medical manual titled The Angel of Bethesda that he hoped would assist people who were unable to procure the services of a physician, but which went unpublished in Mather's lifetime.

Cotton Mather outlined an early form of germ theory and discussed psychogenic diseases, while recommending hygiene, physical exercise, temperate diet, and avoidance of tobacco smoking.

Cotton Mather presented a Boston tradesman named Grafton Feveryear with the barometer that Feveryear used to make the first quantitative meteorological observations in New England, which he communicated to the Royal Society in 1727.

Cotton Mather sponsored Isaac Greenwood, a Harvard graduate and member of Cotton Mather's church, who travelled to London and collaborated with the Royal Society's curator of experiments, John Theophilus Desaguliers.

Cotton Mather's household included both free servants and a number of slaves who performed domestic chores.

Cotton Mather received black members of his congregation in his home and he paid a schoolteacher to instruct local black people in reading.

Cotton Mather consistently held that black Africans were "of one Blood" with the rest of mankind and that blacks and whites would meet as equals in Heaven.

Cotton Mather advocated the Christianization of black slaves both on religious grounds and as tending to make them more patient and faithful servants of their masters.

The African slave Onesimus, from whom Cotton Mather first learned about smallpox inoculation, had been purchased for him as a gift by his congregation in 1706.

Cotton Mather ministered to Thomas Hawkins, Thomas Pound, and William Coward; having been convicted of piracy, they were jailed alongside "Mary Glover the Irish Catholic witch," daughter of witch "Goody" Ann Glover at whose trial Mather had preached.

Cotton Mather was twice widowed, and only two of his 15 children survived him.

Cotton Mather died on the day after his 65th birthday and was buried on Copp's Hill Burying Ground, in Boston's North End.

Cotton Mather was a prolific writer and industrious in having his works printed, including a vast number of his sermons.

Cotton Mather's first published sermon, printed in 1686, concerned the execution of James Morgan, convicted of murder.

Thirteen years later, Cotton Mather published the sermon in a compilation, along with other similar works, called Pillars of Salt.

However, other critics have praised Cotton Mather's work, citing it as one of the best efforts at properly documenting the establishment of America and growth of the people.

In 1721, Cotton Mather published The Christian Philosopher, the first systematic book on science published in America.

Cotton Mather attempted to show how Newtonian science and religion were in harmony.

Cotton Mather took inspiration from Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, by the 12th-century Islamic philosopher Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail.

Howard da Silva portrayed Cotton Mather in Burn, Witch, Burn, a December 15,1975 episode of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.