The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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Jesus Christ, were sacrificed to the Politick Interest and Avarice of the wicked Spaniards.44
The Spanish are cruel, and they are poor managers of wealth. Greedy for gold, they have destroyed a fortune in agricultural revenues and a rich harvest in souls. The only product of their venture has been an “Effusion of … Innocent Blood.” As they weep the English offer a compensatory outpouring of emotion to the sight of extravagant slaughter. They juxtapose Protestant pity with Catholic coldness, matching both affects to the contrasted tropes of conservation and waste.
David Humphries, the secretary of the SPG, summarized this anti-Catholic perspective in his history of the society (1730). Distinguishing between Spanish and English colonies, he wrote, “All the Riches drawn from these Lands now by the English, is owing chiefly to their own honest Labour, scarce any Thing to that of the Natives; whereas the Wealth of the Spaniards, is to this Day dug out of the Mines, at the Expense and Sweat and Blood of the miserable Natives and Negroes.”45 Humphries set English settlement apart from Indian indolence and Spanish violence, both of which waste land. The English deserve America, he suggested, because they are good caretakers, matching agricultural toil with spiritual labor.
Allusions to husbandry or trade often accompanied literary appropriations of the Black Legend such as John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1667), a heroic tragedy based on the conquest of Mexico. In the final act of this play a priest and several Spanish soldiers torture Montezuma, who heroically refuses to abandon his gods or his gold. Frustrated by Montezuma’s resistance, the priest says:
Mark how this impious Heathen justifies
His own false gods, and our true God denies;
How wickedly he has refus’d his wealth,
And hid his Gold, from Christian hands, by stealth:
Down with him, Kill him, merit heaven thereby.46
In a gruesome parody of the trope of gold for glass, the priest attempts at once to force Christianity upon, and extort gold from, Montezuma. The promise to the soldiers that they should “merit” heaven by killing Montezuma marks the priest’s economic paradigm of redemption as perverse. The Aztec king’s ensuing death becomes the only reward for their violent exertion, suggesting the inefficiency as well as the cruelty of the Spanish.
In contrast, British missionaries stressed their role as caretakers. In The Day-Breaking, if not the Sun-Rising of the Gospell (1647), John Eliot’s colleague Thomas Shepard juxtaposed English and Spanish missions in exactly this way. Defending the Massachusetts Bay colonists against accusations that they had not converted enough Indians, he stressed “the vast distance of Natives from common civility” and contrasted the quantity of false Catholic converts with the quality of Puritan ones: “[W]ee have not learnt as yet that art of coyning Christians, or putting Christs name and Image upon copper mettle.”47 The description of “coyn[ed]” Christians suggests spiritual counterfeit, and it alludes to the mines that were known to have helped the Spanish build their empire with the blood of indigenous Americans. In contrast, Shepard described New England’s missionary project through analogy to its agricultural one:
[M]e thinkes now that it is with the Indians as it was with our New-English ground when we first came over, there was scarce any man that could beleeve that English graine would grow, or that the Plow could doe any good in this woody and rocky soile. And thus they continued in this supine unbeliefe for some yeares, till experience taught them otherwise, and now all see it to bee scarce inferior to Old English tillage, but beares very good burdens; for wee have thought of our Indian people, and therefore have beene discouraged to put plow to such dry and rocky ground, but God having begun thus with some few it may bee they are better soile for the Gospel than wee can thinke.48
This comparison helped Shepard stress the difficulty of civilizing Indians, even as it contrasted a true return with the false profits created by Catholic counterfeiting.
Shepard presented other images of husbandry and organic growth that proved central to the developing discourse of Protestant mission. His insistence that “it must certainly be a spirit of life from God … which must put flesh and sinewes unto these dry bones” implied a promise fulfilled in later New England Company tracts.49 Listing the questions Indians asked missionaries four years later, John Eliot told his readers, “You might perceive how these dry bones begin to gather flesh and sinnews.”50 As he implied the presence of a divine spirit at work, Eliot sounded like an anxious parent fretting over a sickly child. He emphasized this parent-child relationship in letters to Robert Boyle, president of the New England Company from 1662 until his death in 1691. Eliot began a letter of 1684 by addressing Boyle as “Right honorable nursing Father” and then wrote, “Your hungry Indians doe still cry unto your honor for the milk of the word in the whole book of God, & for the bread of life.”51 The description of Boyle as a “nursing Father,” a term traditionally applied to monarchs in allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy, “Thou … shalt suck the breast of kings” (60:16), also echoes references to nursing from the biblical epistles. These references stress spiritual immaturity, as when the epistle to the Hebrews notes, “[E]very one who useth milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness” (Heb. 5:12), even as they assert a desire for spiritual nurturance in response to 1 Peter’s advice, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word” (2:2). In both private correspondence and published fund-raising texts, the heathen soul was described as an emaciated or infantile body nurtured by the English.
As poet laureate for the City of London, Elkanah Settle also discriminated between a nurturing British mission and the cruel incursions of Catholics. In the preface to his Pindaric Poem on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711), he praised Queen Anne for supporting the SPG’s plans to establish a mission among the Mohawks by distinguishing her “bloodless Crosade” from medieval crusades and Catholic missions: “Yes, Royal Christian Heroine, You send Your Deputed Champions over to those pitied Infidels, on a more sacred Expedition; whilst by thus truly performing the Vicegerency [sic] of God in so shining and so merciful a Charity to so many Thousand wandring Souls, You set up the Standart of Your own British Cross amongst them, not like the Romish nor Spanish Cruelty, for the sacrificing of so many innocent Lives; but laying them the Foundation of your own Eternal One.”52 British mission is described here as a curative endeavor. While the Spanish sacrifice America’s innocents, the British minister to them. Under the guidance of their benevolent queen they express their pity through charity, alleviating the effects of Spain’s empire.
Settle relied on Anne’s gender as well as her domestic initiatives to create an image of British benevolence. Howard Weinbrot has shown that in their efforts to imitate but morally supersede classical poetic models, many eighteenth-century odes supplanted the glory of Rome’s military empire with a British empire of peaceful commerce. “Many [odes] celebrate not Marlborough’s victory at, say, Ramillies or Blenheim, but Queen Anne’s arms as extended by Marlborough on behalf of the nation.”53 Settle exemplified this effort as he praised Anne for building new churches throughout London and supporting the SPG, describing her as a nursing mother to British and foreign Christians: “What a Glorious Aera of Christianity shall this Age commence … when turning our Eyes into our Holy Temples, we find not only so many Trebble Voices added to the Hallelujah Song, in the Religious Infant Nurseries now spread around the Kingdom: But not content with bounding so tender a Compassion to her own Native Sphere alone, we see the Royal Piety laying those yet greater Plans of Glory, resolv’d to make her Britannia, with such expanded Arms and flowing Breasts, a more Universal Nursing Mother in so extensive a Filial Adoption.”54 The references to motherhood, painfully ironic when considered alongside Anne’s ill-fated attempts to bear children, translate physical into spiritual fertility and personal into national maternity. They echo Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem as a mother suckling her children (Isa. 66:10–11). Britain becomes a boundless, compassionate body engaged in the nurturing of foreign souls, all of whom will rejoice with the new Jerusalem.
All these images valorize British mission by linking it to the tending of the domestic sphere. This spacial association echoes an ancient Greek distinction between the oikos, the private household space of