When the first Puritans sailed into Massachusetts in the 17th century, weak from the ocean journey, they formed a covenant with each other and with God to establish a city on a hill—a commitment to live uncorrupted lives together, or all suffer divine wrath for their collective sin.
Almost 100 years later, this covenant would be put to its greatest test.
On April 22, 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, carrying goods, cargo, and, unbeknownst to its crew, a deadly virus. Soon, a smallpox epidemic had broken out in Boston, causing hundreds of death and panic across the city. The clergy, including the famed Cotton Mather, turned to their standard form of defense against disease: fasting and prayer. But a new theory was also being offered to the public by the scientific world: inoculation. The fierce debate over the right way to combat the tragedy would become a fierce battle between faith and reason that set the city aflame with rage and riot.
The Pox and the Covenant is a story of well-known figures such as Cotton Mather, James Franklin, and a young Benjamin Franklin struggling to fight for their cause amongst the death and debate—although not always for the side one would expect. In the end, the incredible results of the epidemic and battle would reshape the colonists view of their destiny, setting for America a new course, a new covenant, and the first drumbeats of revolution.
