The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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accounts of emotion. They also show how missionaries began to supersede Indians as the central figures of promotional writings, paralleling a developing British fascination with vanishing Indians.
Chapter 6 illustrates some of the ethical problems that emerged from depictions of Indians in missionary writings, as it argues that missionaries unwittingly helped create the dying Indians that were so useful to Romantic literature and the claims of manifest destiny. It shows that while they evoked pity for the wasteful deaths of unconverted Indians, especially through violence, missionaries also surrounded the exemplary deaths of Indian converts with abundant detail and emotional response. The texts thus encouraged their readers to mourn the deaths of Christian Indians but also to feel pleasure at the recuperation of lost souls, which they saw as the outcome of British benevolence. Missionary writings prepared their readers to expect the disappearance of the Indians from America, associating the death of their bodies with the cultivation of their souls.
British missionary writings had a limited influence on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers. Their impact did not equal that of genres such as captivity narratives or travel writings, and the piteous figures presented in these texts received less attention than the noble savages and incorrigibly cruel brutes that filled more popular publications. Nonetheless, they exerted a subtle influence on Euro-American culture. They helped shape attitudes to Indians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributing in particular to notions that Indians should be pitied, saved, and mourned, sometimes all at once. They played a major role in the development of a benevolent imperialist rhetoric, the impact of which is still felt in the United States and Britain, indeed throughout the world. Finally, as they assisted in the construction of an optimistic moral philosophy intertwined with a culture of sensibility, they presented especially vivid examples of the dramatic transformations that emotion could provoke. What exactly those changes were, and whether they occurred for the better, were questions with answers that did not always match the expectations of the texts’ authors and audience. This book explores some of those answers, and their implications, for the twenty-first century as well as for the era of Britain’s colonization of America.
Chapter 1
Gold for Glass, Seeds to Fruit: Husbandry and Trade in Missionary Writings
“Your Spiritual Factory in New England”
In July 1649, a few months after the execution of King Charles I, Parliament established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to subsidize the efforts of John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew, and other Puritan ministers to convert the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard.1 By 1655, the society had received several thousand pounds from a nationwide parish collection commanded by Parliament.2 It used those funds to purchase land throughout England, some of which had just been confiscated by Parliament from loyalists to the king.3 Besides subsidizing a few missionaries and sending supplies abroad, the rents from these lands funded the printing of several tracts, among them A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel. Joseph Caryl, an Independent preacher of London, introduced this tract with a letter endorsing the organization’s work:
Read this short discourse, and it will tell you that the Lord hath blesed the labours of the Messengers of Sion in New-England, with the Conversion of some (I may say, of a considerable number) of the Indians, to be a kind of first fruits of his (new) Creatures there. O let old England rejoyce in this, that our brethren who with extream difficulties and expences have Planted themselves in the Indian Wildernesses, have also laboured night and day with prayers and teares and Exhortations to Plant the Indians as a spirituall Garden, into which Christ might come and eat his pleasant fruits. Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver. This gaine of soules is a Merchandize worth the glorying in upon all the Exchanges, or rather in all the Churches throughout the world. This Merchandize is Holinesse to the Lord: And of this the ensuing Discourse presents you with a Bill of many particulars, from your spiritual Factory in New England.4
Figure 1. An Act for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England established the first voluntary missionary organization in England. It founded a corporation of sixteen men in England for the collection of donations, named the Commissioners of the United Colonies as agent for the disbursement of funds, ordered that the act be read in every parish of England and Wales, asked that ministers “exhort the people to a chearful and liberal contribution,” and commanded parish officials to undertake a door-to-door collection. The act linked England’s piety and charity to emotion both felt and observed, as it “rejoyce[d]” that “the heathen Natives” of New England “give great testimony of the power of God drawing them from death and darkness … which appeareth by their diligent attending on the Word so preached unto them, with tears lamenting their mis-spent lives.” (The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)
As the exuberant tone and elaborate conceits of this passage suggest, English missionary projects sometimes enjoyed a richer existence in print than in reality. For many people in England, texts such as Caryl’s may have been the only outcome they would witness of their contributions to missionary work. As they offered a visible return on generosity and then sought more funds, descriptions like his superseded the activities of mission, and in this excess of representation re-created the worlds they described. Caryl himself never went to America, never encountered its natives, never experienced the difficulties of persuading them to abandon their own customs for alien beliefs. Unlike the writers of countless travel narratives, who claimed the authority of experience, he invented a land and its people from what he read, heard, and believed. While he presented a textually fabricated world to his readers, he compelled them to will a dramatic transformation of it.
These lines replicated England’s early colonial aspirations in miniature, linking the pursuit of material prosperity to spiritual growth and presenting Indian converts as the symbolic profits of both endeavors. Thomas Scanlon has noted, “In his characterization of the missionary enterprise as a mercantile adventure, Caryl accentuates the fact that the Indian discourse functioned as a commodity for England.”5 I would add that this depiction is positioned within a frame of agriculture and manufacture. Mission takes place first through metaphors of plantation, so that America is transformed into an orchard. Wild inhabitants of an uncultivated land, Indians become a “spirituall Garden,” the fruits of cultivation. The text then replaces gardens with gold, placing plantation within commerce. As Christ eats the garden’s “pleasant fruits,” images of these spiritual products are returned across the Atlantic, circulated among readers, and accepted as imported goods. The tone of the last sentence resembles a report to stockholders, promising a “Bill of many particulars,” as if it were a list of assets and expenses. Mission in America is made to suggest the accrual of English wealth.
Churches become orchards and factories, while mission becomes inseparable from commerce. The figure of the heathen, then Christian, Indian—cultivated, transported, and consumed—stands for the settlement and trade already undertaken by England. By focusing on the Indian, Caryl’s readers could visualize colonial settlement, follow paths of trade, and feel themselves to be benefactors and beneficiaries in this enterprise. The idea of the converted Indian made colonialism imaginatively possible. With a coyness worthy of modern advertising strategies, Caryl allured readers with a secular object that he then proclaimed they really did not want. He also offered them a spiritual object that he assumed their virtue must make them desire. This apparent disowning of greed merely brackets the real object he was selling: a sense of belonging, through shared desire and emotional response, to a transatlantic community.
Caryl was able to accomplish this rhetorical feat because of the way in which he drew on two of the tropes, or figures of speech, used most frequently in English missionary writings. These were the metaphors of husbandry—which described agriculture, thrift, and the careful management of the household—and trade. Both images have ample scriptural precursors,