Cotton Mather (15 February 1663 – 13 February 1728) was an American Puritan minister, author, and pamphleteer from late 17th century New England.
Biography[]
Cotton Mather was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1663, the son of Puritan minister Increase Mather and the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. At the age of 14, while fighting in King Philip's War, Mather detached the deceased Metacomet's jaw from his skull and helped to parade their remains around Plymouth. He came to be known as an intellectual prodigy, becoming the youngest student in Harvard's history at the age of 11; he read 15 chapters of the Bible a day and was very pious. From age 13 to 32, he wrote 7,000 pages of sermons in his notebooks, and his diary from 1681 to 1725 was the lengthiest diary available from any American Puritan. In 1683, Cotton and his father founded the Boston Philosophical Society, colonial America's first formal intellectual group, and he went on to become co-pastor of North Church with his father. On 17 April 1689, he held a meeting at his house with elite merchants and ministers and plotted to seize the captain of the royal warship guarding Boston Harbor, arrest royalists, and compel the surrender of the royalist contingent at Fort Hill, hoping to assist William of Orange's Glorious Revolution in the Thirteen Colonies. He went on to write The Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants, which tried to unify the Puritans of New England, and, in Small Offers Toward the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, Mather claimed that the Puritans were "the English Israel" and that Puritans should instruct all slaves and children an religion. Mather also saw egalitarian rebels as devils and witches, arguing that anyone who criticized the Puritan society of New England was led by the Devil. Mather's friends were appointed judges, and Mather supported capital punishments during the Salem witch trials of 1692. Mather would defend the trials for the rest of his life, and he died in 1728 at the age of 65.