A History of the American People

Cotton Mather himself is a significant and tragic figure in American history. When he was
born in 1663, New England still seemed outwardly the religious commonwealth the Pilgrim
Fathers had wished to create, through Congregationalism was already losing its physical grip on
the machinery of government and signs of a growing secularization were manifest. He was born
to the Puritan purple: both his Christian and his surname proclaimed it. He entered Harvard, its
school for clerical princes, at the age of twelve-the youngest student ever enrolled there. He
seemed destined to inherit not merely his father's mantle as president of the college, but
leadership of the entire New England intellectual and religious community. But neither
happened. Indeed he was publicly defeated for the presidency of Harvard, and when he was
finally asked, in 1721, to become head of its rival, Yale, which had been founded in 1701 and
moved to New Haven in 1716, it was too late. He was too old and he refused.
Mather spent his entire life industriously acquiring knowledge and regurgitating it. He learned
seven languages, well. He was a living rebuke to the proposition that New England was
uncultured and lacked authors. He wrote 450 books. Many more remained unpublished but those
that saw print were enough to fill several shelves-and all this in addition to seven thick volumes
of diaries. He stood for the proposition that, in America, religion was the friend of
enlightenment. He promoted schemes of public charity for the poor and infirm. His books, The
Family Well Ordered and The Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, put forward sensible and in
some ways surprisingly modern views about the role of parents in education, and especially of
girls. He wrote about the rights of the slaves and the Indians. He tried to bring order and sense to
the medical and legal professions-something high-minded American intellectuals have been
trying to do ever since. He was not exactly a man for all seasons-he was too opinionated and
cantankerous for that-but he was a man for all disciplines, an all-purpose American do-gooder
and right-thinker who adumbrated Benjamin Franklin. But he lacked Franklin's chance to operate
on a world stage. He was damned at the time and for posterity (until recent scholarship came to
his rescue) as the man behind the Salem witch-trials. He appeared to move effortlessly from
Young Fogey to Laudator Temporis Actae.
Long before his death Cotton Mather recognized that the times had moved against him and
that the kind of religion the Puritans had brought to America was changing beyond recognition.
In 1702 he published his masterpiece, the Magnalia Christi Americana, which despite its
prolixity has a strong claim to be considered the first great work of literature produced in
America. It is a primary source-book because it gives lives of the governors of New England and
leading divines, a history of Harvard and various churches, and valuable details about early
Indian wars. But in essence it is an epic history of the New England religious experiment-the
attempt to create the Kingdom of God in the New World-and an inquiry into what went wrong.
He proclaims: I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depravations of Europe to the American strand,' and his tone is often wondering; but it is also querulous and elegiac. He put his bony finger on the inherent contradiction in the Puritan mission. Their Protestant ethic, their intensity of religious endeavor which was the source of their lawabiding industry, contained the seeds of its own dissolution. As he put it,Religion brought forth
Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.' He could see what had happened to Boston
in his own lifetime: the mercantile spirit flourishing in its busy streets, and its conformist
preachers in the well-filled churches goading on their complacent congregations to amass yet
more wealth as an outward symbol of inward grace. Thus America's success was undermining its
divine mission: `There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their
errand into the wilderness.'