The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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religious sensibility, so that “a secret Joy run through every Part of my Soul.”4
The process by which Crusoe sublimated his hatred and his fear into heroic violence and evangelical fervor, while distinguishing himself from the cruel Spanish, has been a common one in the history of Britain’s colonial encounters.5 Assisted by Protestant propaganda, the horror the “civilized” person feels at the spectacle of “savagery” is overcome by a deeper need to establish difference between the people who feel compassion and those who can or will not. The ability to replace fear and disgust with pity, to transform the instinct to kill into the desire to convert, marks Crusoe, to himself, as civilized.
Joseph Conrad presented a reversal of this process, or a revelation of its underlying reality, almost two centuries later in Heart of Darkness. In this novel the ivory trader Kurtz, described to the narrator as “an emissary of pity” and a model of efficiency, cut off the platitudes in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs by scrawling, “Exterminate all the Brutes!” Imperialist pity, manifested in efforts to eradicate savagery and welcome new members into the circle of the civilized, is revealed to be a veil over exploitation and murderous desire, part of what inspires Kurtz’s famous dying words, “The Horror! The Horror!”6 His mission, supposedly a convergence of efficiency and compassion seen in his effort to transform the Congolese into organized exporters of ivory, has converted him into a man of unimaginable brutality. He has become as incapable of pity as the Spaniards to whom Crusoe could not bear to compare himself, and his transformation has exposed imperialists’ pretensions to benevolence.
Examined together, these two stories trace an arc in British attitudes to colonization. They shift from horror at the savage other, to a pity that inspires efforts to convert the other into a version of the self, then finally to a horror that is as much of the self’s own behavior as of the other’s. In a way, they describe the rise and then the fall of an imperial rhetoric built on the claims of compassion. This book is a study of the pity that British people expressed for Indians in the years preceding the American Revolution. It focuses on the pity they expressed for Indians’ souls, which prompted declarations of hopes to convert them to Protestant Christianity. It explores what this emotion, as articulated in missionary writings, tells us about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British attitudes to Indians, to the British themselves, and to the ethical value of feeling.
“Pitty to Mens Soules”: Protestant Structures of Feeling
The history of British mission in North America was one in which words outweighed deeds and textual production exceeded conversions. From the time they began to explore America, the British talked a great deal about their desire to convert the continent’s indigenous peoples to Christianity. These intentions did translate into efforts, but they were few and feeble, especially in comparison with the work of the Spanish and the French. When missions did not fail through the resistance of Indians or the indifference of the British, war and disease rendered the work tragically redundant, destroying those native peoples who had accepted their invaders’ religion.
This failure was an eloquent one, however. Although they did not create widespread conversions among Indians, the British people devoted much paper and ink to expressing their evangelical aspirations and seeking funds for missions. They produced many sermons, journals, letters, tracts, and even a few poems. Ironically, these writings are the primary accomplishment of British mission in the American colonies, as their influence often exceeded the effectiveness of the projects they were written to promote.
British missionary efforts among American Indians have received much attention from historians, but the documents produced in connection with these projects rarely have been examined as works of rhetorical complexity and depth.7 In the past decade literary scholars such as Thomas Scanlan and Gordon Sayre have incorporated these texts into studies of colonial travel writings, ethnographies, and literature.8 Others, such as Joshua Bellin, Sandra Gustafson, and Hilary Wyss, have examined some of them for evidence of the active but erased role Indians played in shaping colonial America or in maintaining their own culture in the face of conquest.9 Together these projects show us much about the responses indigenous peoples had to the colonizing force of Christianity, as well as the ways in which the British portrayed Indians.
Rather than asking what missionary writings tell us about Indians and their responses to a colonial presence, this book asks how these texts encouraged their readers to think about their own emotional responses. I have taken this approach in an effort to untangle the knot of ambivalent benevolence that is at the center of many British and American attitudes to Indians and that still influences portrayals of Indians. In taking this approach I have been inspired by Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Morrison describes her book as a study of “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” as part of an effort to break a “pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequence on the victim—of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes.”10 While attending to the differences between race and religion as rationales for categorization, I have tried to translate Morrison’s approach into the complex attitudes that produced and followed from missionary projects. I have considered the ways in which the tenor of Britain’s imperialism developed through reference to Indians in the same way that Morrison suggests figures such as the American “frontier gentleman” were “backgrounded by slavery.”11
Many missionary writings were basically advertisements for a charitable cause. As advertisements, they encouraged their readers to desire something they may not have known they wanted: the conversion of America’s natives. Sometimes they persuaded their readers to support this work by stressing the practical benefits of Indian conversion, such as the promotion of trade. What they sold most often, though, was pity. While the British expressed pity for all non-Christians and non-Europeans, Indians offered a uniquely poignant object for the expression of this sentiment. Unknown to Europe until recent times, absent from and unaware of the Bible, impoverished in countless ways but rich with the potential to be remade in the image of their invaders, they promised the British all sorts of fulfillment as by-products of their effort to fill the Indians’ need.
As soon as they encountered the native peoples of the New World, Europeans expressed their intentions to convert and “civilize” them. The propagation of the gospel was a traditional duty based on Jesus’ command, “Go ye … and teach all nations.”12 Europe had an obligation to extend the benefits of Christianity to heathen lands, just as it had been Christianized centuries before. When he asked the Archbishop of York to oversee collections for a school for Indians at Jamestown’s Henrico College in 1615, King James I did so by writing, “Wee doubt not but that yow, and all others, who wishe well to the increase of Christian Religion, wilbe willing to give all assistance and furtherance yow maie.”13 His logic was clear: to be Christian was to support the increase of Christianity. Millenarian beliefs that the conversion of heathens and Jews must precede the Final Judgment enhanced this obligation, as did many theories that Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel.14
While it drew upon traditional Christian duties, early modern missionary discourse acquired distinct characteristics from its development in the context of the Reformation and the rise of the nation-state. With the exception of the Jesuit Andrew White’s attempts to convert Algonquians in Maryland in the 1630s and 1640s, British projects were emphatically Protestant.15 Their characterization in fund-raising texts reflected the erratic and violent response of the British Isles to the Reformation in the Tudor years, as well as ongoing conflicts with Catholic powers. Defensive about the hundred-year head start Spain had acquired in the Americas, the English and Scots condemned Catholic missionary accomplishments as the result of tyranny. Claims about the deceptions of French Jesuits, who along with other missionary orders had made enviable progress among native groups in Canada, followed. As they contrasted the quantity of Catholic conversions with the quality of English and Scottish concern for Indian souls, they made benevolence central to an ideology of Englishness or Scottishness, and later of Britishness. The writings acknowledged a Christian mission to America as their duty, but they described it as a fervent desire generated from pity for a people who had never heard the gospel. This pity