Before we get to Washington, let’s set the stage with a look at the decade before he was born. Hegseth’s religious claim simply doesn’t pass the smell test in the context of people who keep trying to claim the mantle of the Founding Fathers. In the 1720s in Boston, a smallpox epidemic led to a widespread debate over variolation—an inoculation technique that is a precursor to today’s vaccines, introducing small doses of live smallpox to people so that they might have a mild infection and then develop protective immunity. The debate played in press and pulpit, because variolation could indeed cause fatal cases of smallpox.
And in 1720s Boston, the person with the loudest voice from the pulpit was Cotton Mather. If his name rings a bell, it might be of his association with witch hunting and apocalypticism—but that doesn’t mean he was anti-inoculation. In fact, he was the strongest advocate for inoculation in Boston.
That’s right. Cotton Mather—Puritan luminary, proponent of hunting witches—was a big believer in inoculation. Mather inoculated his own son after learning about the procedure from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the testimony of his enslaved servant Onesimus, who had been inoculated in West Africa before he was kidnapped. With Mather’s support, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston experimented on Mather’s son, Mather’s enslaved servant Jack, and Jack’s son, and when none of them developed full cases of smallpox, began continuing with other people. There was intense pushback—a bomb was thrown into Cotton Mather’s house on November 14, 1721, because of his advocacy—but the campaign moved forward.
A half-century later, smallpox was enough of a problem—and inoculation had become enough of a proven technique—that this was not just a matter for individual cities and individual clergy to debate but a matter of urgency for the war for independence. Smallpox broke out in the Quebec campaign, ravaging the Continental Army in 1775 and 1776. As John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in June 1776,
Our Misfortunes in Canada, are enough to melt an Heart of Stone. The Small Pox is ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indians together. This was the Cause of our precipitate Retreat from Quebec, this the Cause of our Disgraces at the Cedars.—I dont mean that this was all. There has been Want, approaching to Famine, as well as Pestilence.