The Negro Christianized, An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro Servants in Christianity (1706)
By Cotton Mather
- Release Date: 2023-07-06
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality
"For Mather, leaving Natives and Africans outside the body of Christ...would only lead to trouble." - Faithful Bodies (2014)
"Every Sunday evening Mather invited black men and women into his home to listen to sermons." - Schooling Citizens (2010)
"Mather focused on the spiritual growth of his slave...after he became 'useless and froward.'" - Everyday Crimes (2019)
"Mather, in his tract The Negro Christianized...ranged scriptural...argument against those who denied the Negro's humanity." - Slave Religion (2004)
In 1706 New England Puritan minister, prolific author, and pamphleteer Cotton Mather (1663 -1728) wrote a short 30-page work titled "The Negro Christianized."
The booklet was groundbreaking, as In 1706, the proposition that slaves should be instructed in the Bible would have horrified more traditionalist slave masters who banned the Bible for dread that slaves might adhere to ideas of equality contained in the New Testament.
In making his argument for the conversion of slaves to Christianity, Mather writes:
"Christianity will be the best cure for this Barbarity. Their Complexion sometimes is made an Argument, why nothing should be done for them. A Gay sort of argument! As if the great God went by the Complexion of Men, in His Favours to them! As if none but Whites might hope to be Favoured and Accepted with God! Whereas it is well known, That the Whites, are the least part of Mankind. The biggest part of Mankind, perhaps, are Copper-Coloured; a sort of Tawnies."
About the author:
Cotton Mather was born February 12, 1663, and died February 13, 1728. He was a New England Puritan minister and a prolific author of both books and pamphlets. One of the most important intellectual figures in English-speaking colonial America, Mather is remembered today chiefly for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and other works of history, for his scientific contributions to plant hybridization and to the promotion of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox and other infectious diseases, and for his involvement in the events surrounding the Salem witch trials of 1692-3. He also promoted the new Newtonian science in America and sent many scientific reports to the Royal Society of London, which formally elected him as a fellow in 1723. A controversial figure in his own day, in part due to his role in supporting the Salem witch trials, he sought unsuccessfully the presidency of Harvard College, which had been held by his father Increase, another important Puritan intellectual.
