The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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between these two missionary efforts, as well as the sheer quantity of material produced in connection with them, proved too vast for this study. A comparative examination of British missionaries’ depictions of Africans and Indians, especially a close analysis of the subtle affective differences between them, surely would yield important information, and it would be a worthwhile topic for future work.
How Widely Read Were Missionary Writings?
As with any question about early modern reader reception, there is no easy answer. Data on the distribution of the published writings are limited, but in general it seems that while few people read many missionary writings, many people were aware of a few of them. The three main organizations printed most of their texts with an eye toward distributing them to members and to associates who might contribute to their cause.98 The Journal of the SPG’s Standing Committee reveals that the society published its sermons in numbers ranging from 500 to more than 3,000, basing their decision sometimes on the reputation of the preacher.99 William Kellaway has noted that the New England Company’s members had trouble distributing more than 1,500 copies of their tracts.100 With the exception of blockbusters such as Jonathan Edward’s Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, the readership of these texts seems to have ranged into, but not past, the low thousands.101 Many of these texts were distributed in the American colonies and Europe as well as Britain, but the anticipated audience usually was a British metropolitan one. Having encountered copies of SPG sermons in rare-book rooms with the pages still uncut, I also suspect that some texts were received but not read. Certainly this reaction would fit with the response many of us today have to fund-raising texts.
When estimating the impact of these texts on British culture, though, it is important that we consider the multiple paths by which readers and listeners would have become aware of them. Although most of these texts had a select audience, fragments of them reached much of England, Wales, and Scotland in written or spoken form. Announcements of collections were often read aloud during church services, and newspapers occasionally published letters from missionaries or extracts from fund-raising sermons.102 Events such as the “four Indian kings’” visit and Occom’s tour heightened the public’s awareness of missionary projects, as did calls for nationwide or citywide collections by the monarch. These events were publicized through broadsides and pamphlets. We should also consider the symbolic importance attached to missionary images, such as charters, seals, and portraits of the “four Indian kings,” and we might consider texts presented for their iconic rather than textual value. After all, much was made of the presentation of Eliot’s “Indian Bible” to King Charles II, the Lord Chancellor, and other public officials in 1664, although none of these recipients could read the Massachusett translation.103 Such icons symbolized the ongoing salvation of foreigners through the rendering of well-known texts into dramatically illegible signs. If the vision of collective evangelical endeavor usually assumed a select core of gentlemen with financial means and feelings for “heathen” peoples, the references to national endeavor and the varying patterns of text distribution imply a series of concentric circles of emotionally invested citizens surrounding the missionary groups.
Chapter Outline
Missionary writings were only one subset of the many texts that early modern Europeans wrote about the Americas. Chapter 1 describes missionary tracts in relation to this broader context by surveying two prominent tropes of colonial endeavor. These are the images of husbandry—meaning the tending of the domestic sphere through farming, accounting, or housekeeping—and trade. They provided a religious validation for the plantation-style colonialism propagated by the British, and they enhanced anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric. As they persuaded readers through these images to save Indians, the missionary writings depicted British pity as an exportable commodity and an instrument of husbandry, the spiritual profits of which benefited Indians more than colonialism impoverished them. Ironically, these writings helped transform a symbol of exploitation, the exchange of American gold for European trinkets or glass, into an image of the priceless spiritual “gold” with which the British purchased America’s wealth.
Chapter 2 examines the importance of epistolarity to seventeenth-century English missionary writings. It shows how the letters that missionaries and their supporters wrote to each other, and often published for the consumption of a wider audience, constructed a transatlantic community through a shared desire to save America’s Indians. The boundaries and tenor of these communities shifted with the concerns of different writers and times. The New England Company’s publications, for example, stressed the importance of England’s links with Puritan colonists in New England, while Henry Jessey, a London Baptist, used accounts of missions in Taiwan and New England to strengthen Anglo-Dutch ties. Late seventeenth-century writings stressed interdenominational cooperation in a way that mid-century writings did not, reflecting the political changes England underwent in this era. If the qualities of the community described in these texts altered, the basic idea of a transatlantic connection did not.
Chapter 3 continues to examine the sympathetic network described in Chapter 2 by showing how the publications of two missionary societies founded in the early eighteenth century presented a voluntary society as the unifying center and active agent of Britain’s compassion. The Anglican SPG and the Presbyterian SSPCK drew on earlier models of cooperative endeavor for a worthy cause, but they refined those models to stress the utility of a central organization that maximized widespread benevolence. The publications set these groups apart from the public while making their operations trustworthy and admirable. They also configured prayer and financial donations as forms of active but displaced involvement that made readers feel included in the groups’ endeavors. Through their emphasis on collective pity for heathen souls they provided a religious template for what would become a secular model of imperial sentiment constructed as emotional involvement.
The missionaries’ emphasis on shared emotion enhanced Britain’s benevolent self-image, but it also introduced concerns about the moral status of pity. Chapter 4 shows how the anniversary sermons of the SPG grappled with the ethics of pity while debating the necessity of Indian conversion. As they encouraged contributions to support Anglican ministers in America, the authors of these sermons used descriptions of Indians to defend Christianity from challenges posed by heterodox thinkers, especially the idea that God had been cruel in denying Indians earlier access to the gospel. By arguing that the savage behavior of Indians proved the necessity of Christian conversion for salvation, and asserting that God had delayed revealing himself to heathens so that Christians would save them, most of the sermons’ authors sought to recuperate the compassionate character of God as they insisted on the necessity of their faith. These texts illustrate some of the ways in which the idea of Indians provoked debates about the capacity and moral consequences of pity.
Producing concerns about the ethics of compassion, Indians also propelled developments in the portrayal of emotion. Chapter 5 shows how mid-eighteenth-century missionary writings intersected with a broader culture increasingly interested in the depiction of feeling. I contrast the framing of emotion and human relations in two edited memoirs: Jonathan Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd, which describes how Brainerd evangelized several groups of Indians over a four-year period until his death in 1747, and Samuel Hopkins’s Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuck Indians, which describes the work of John Sergeant at the Stockbridge mission of western Massachusetts from 1734 until his death in 1749. Unlike earlier tracts, these memoirs present a missionary not only as an extension of collective feeling but also as an object of emulation. While Edwards’s text focuses on the solipsistic emotions of an isolated missionary and inscribes a transatlantic community through collective spectatorship of Brainerd’s spiritual experience, Hopkins’s account positions Sergeant within a network of transatlantic feeling. Together these texts suggest the effects that the culture of sensibility and the Great Awakening had on the representation of Christian