The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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a contrast between pagan darkness and Christian light, the missionary texts seem most often to describe the conversion of Indians through images of trade or cultivation. Metaphors of husbandry were most prominent in Puritan writings, even in titles such as New Englands First Fruits (1643). In The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England (1649), the writer J. D., or John Dury, prayed “that those sometimes poor, now precious Indians … may be as the first fruits of the glorious harvest.”25 In The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day (1651), Thomas Mayhew, Jr., asked his readers to pray “that the Indians in this small begining [sic], being Gods husbandry, and Gods building, may be a fruitful glorious spreading Vine, and building together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”26 Urging for more missionary efforts several decades later, Cotton Mather warned his readers, “Verily, our GOD will not look on us as a Thankful People, if we are not also a Fruitful People.”27
Although used most vividly in Puritan writings, the rhetoric of husbandry pervaded missionary texts of all denominations. John Wynne, Bishop of Asaph, concluded his sermon of 1725 before the SPG by saying, “Let us then beseech Him, who alone, whatever pains we may take in planting and watering the Gospel, is able to give the Increase.”28 In his History of the Propagation of Christianity, Robert Millar, an affiliate of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), said of America, “The blessing of God, and the pouring out of his spirit from on high, are necessary to turn this wilderness into a fruitful field.”29 In a sermon of 1766 before the SSPCK, George Muir described Indians as “Ignorant of God,—unacquainted with themselves,—their reason, like their fields, quite uncultivated.”30 Whether the earth in which the gospel is seeded or the harvest of that earth, Indians appear in these texts as the objects of cultivation.
The real husbandry that missionaries taught underscored this rhetoric. Most promoters of mission assumed that “culture” or “civilization” – by which they usually meant the acquisition of British clothing and behavior – must accompany conversion.31 The practice of husbandry was crucial to both goals. As Claire Jowitt has explained, “From the end of the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century the main sense of ‘culture’ was to mean ‘human development’, especially in relation to an earlier connotation of husbandry.”32 The New England minister Solomon Stoddard saw conversion occurring along with training in husbandry and trade: “Many Nations, when they were in their Heathenism, lived miserably as to this World…. But since their imbracing the Gospel, they are got into a flourishing condition. God leads them in ways of wisdom, to follow Husbandry, Trades and Merchandize, and to live honourably and plentifully.”33
Of course the Indians of the eastern seaboard did farm and in fact had taught the English to cultivate indigenous crops. This escaped the notice of most proponents of mission, however. Cotton Mather took the Indians’ initial resistance to adopting English husbandry as the greatest sign of their depravity. Describing the first interactions between New England’s colonists and natives, he wrote, “Tho’ [they]…. saw this People Replenishing their Fields, with Trees and with Grains, and useful Animals, which until now they had been wholly Strangers to; yet they did not seem touch’d in the least, with any Ambition to come at such Desireable Circumstances, or with any Curiosity to enquire after the Religion that was attended with them.”34 Although there were ample reasons why the Indians did not accept English-style agriculture, their refusal only enhanced their “barbarous” qualities in his eyes.35 A group of Boston ministers signing a preface to Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727) acknowledged one of their greatest failures to be that “We cannot get the Indians to improve so far in English Ingenuity, and Industry, and Husbandry, as we would wish for.”36 More optimistically, John Sergeant reported in 1736 that the Stockbridge Indians “‘gave very much into Husbandry,… planted more this Year than ever they did before.’”37 The degree to which Indians settled into houses and plantations thus often directed how successful the British felt their missions were.
This rhetoric, along with the economy that supported it, was so pervasive that it shaped how Christian Indians talked about themselves. In Indian Converts Experience Mayhew quotes one Mary Coshomon, who “declared, that she look’d on the Officers of the Church of Christ, as Dressers of the Trees planted in God’s Vineyard; and that she greatly needed to be under such Cultivations,… as Members of Churches might expect to enjoy.”38 Clearly the trope of husbandry served multiple purposes for the missionaries. First, it was useful for fund-raising. As authoritative and accessible as the parables they imitate, these images were appealing to their audience, suggesting a link between initial contributions and long-term results. As the last example indicates, this rhetoric also seems to have offered at least some Indians a way of reconciling themselves to the rigors of conversion. More broadly, it presented Indians as unrealized organic potential. They are described as waiting for the British to save them, not only from the pains of hell but also from a limbo of sterility and waste.
This understanding of the Indians as a people who did not cultivate their land’s resources and did not allow themselves to be “cultivated” was central to the justifications the British developed for their usurpation of American territory. John Locke’s famous comment on America summarizes this perspective: “[I]t is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything…. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americas are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life…. [L]and that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste.”39 Because they derived rightful ownership from the maximal “improvement” of available resources and acknowledged only narrow definitions of improvement, such formulations allowed the British to define themselves as the caretakers of the American continent. Missionaries added to this understanding even as their projects benefited from it.
This claim becomes especially potent if we consider “husbandry” to connote not just farming but also frugality and the management of a household. As the prefatory letter to The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel (1648) proclaims, “An account is here given to thee, of the conquest of the Lord Jesus upon these poor out-casts, who have thus long been estranged from him, spilt like water upon the ground and none to gather them.”40 The image of spilt water transforms colonial conquest into miraculous recovery. That they conceived of their work in these terms may help explain why many found it so easy to believe that Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. Gathering and cultivating scattered souls, missionaries saw themselves engaged in spiritual husbandry.
Images of husbandry also suggest a Protestant distaste for what were perceived to be the baroque excesses of all things Catholic. The Black Legend, the collection of stories that marked Spain as the center of Catholic tyranny and cruelty, assisted in the propagation of this assertion.41 Early modern anti-Spanish propaganda, especially translations of Bartolome de Las Casas’s Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, linked the cruelty of the conquistadores in America to their prodigality and greed.42 In these translations, references to English harvests sometimes were contrasted with images of Mexico’s blood-soaked land. As The Tears of the Indians, a translation of Las Casas’s Brevissima relacion, said of the conquest of Jamaica, “So lavish were the swords of the bloud of these poor souls, scarce two hundred more remaining; the rest perished without the least knowledge of God.”43 The text juxtaposed the abundance of America’s population and agricultural production before the conquest with the destruction perpetrated by the Spanish. Mexico had been “a pleasant Country, now swarming with multitudes of People, but immediately all depopulated, and drown’d in a Deluge of Bloud.” The translator’s preface quoted from scripture to emphasize the countless souls who could have been saved from hell:
Never had we so just cause to exclaim in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah; O that our heads were waters, and our eyes fountains of tears, that we might weep for the Effusion of so much Innocent Blood which provok’d these sad Relations of devout CASAUS, by reason of the cruel Slaughters and Butcheries of the Jesuitical Spaniards, perpetrated