The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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the true people of God.16
In 1641 William Castell, a minister of Northamptonshire, published a petition to Parliament “for the Propagating of the Gospel in America.”17 In this petition, which was signed by more than seventy English and Scottish ministers, Castell asked Parliament to fund a settlement, just south of the Virginia colony, which would be focused on the conversion of Indians. He argued that England must compete with Spain, and he stressed the benefits of transplanting England’s excess population abroad. At the core of his petition, though, was a basic complaint that the colonization of the Americas had “never beene generally undertaken in pitty to mens soules.”18
To illustrate this absence of pity, Castell attacked Spanish “boasts” to have converted the natives of their colonies by describing the “monstrous cruelties” that the missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas had said his own countrymen committed in America: “[T]hey cut downe men as they did corne without any compassion…. They lodged them like bruite beasts under the planks of their ships, till their flesh rotted from their backs: And if any failed in the full performance of his daily taske, hee was sure to bee whipped till his body distilled with goar blood.” Castell delivered this gruesome vignette not only to prove that the Spanish were “without any compassion,” but also to provoke compensatory pity in his readers for Spain’s victims. He defined a religious mandate as an emotional response, “compassion to mens soules.”19 This pamphlet precedes by at least twenty years an era often described as one of sensibility, in which philosophers argued that humans were inherently good because they felt sorrow at the sight of suffering.20 His petition, one of the first attempts to muster English and Scottish support for the conversion of Indians through the printed word, suggests an earlier starting date for an era of preoccupation with benevolent feeling. It also shows how the tendency to mark compassion as a sign of goodness found expression through Europeans’ efforts to understand their relation to the natives of foreign lands.
English missionary writings did not have the popularity of sentimental novels such as Richardson’s Pamela, nor did they have the lasting intellectual influence of philosophical tracts such as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. But as they linked Britain’s imperial self-image to the compassion its people felt for heathens and used that emotion to encourage donations, they anticipated many of the ideas and gestures that would constitute the culture of sensibility. Early missionary writings described the support of distant conversion efforts as an activity of national importance and a point of national pride. That is, they insisted that missions to Indians were crucial to securing English and then British interests abroad, while at the same time describing the concern that residents in Britain felt for Indians as a quality that demonstrated the country’s moral superiority over powers such as France and Spain. While early missionary writings seem to have stressed their readers’ pity in order to elicit financial support, the texts’ discussions of shared feeling came to have an importance that overshadowed missionary work. They influenced debates about emotion, and they helped foster the idea—commonplace in the present day—that voluntary participation in a large-scale charitable enterprise is in and of itself a virtuous and pleasing thing, making oneself feel part of a collective endeavor while maximizing one’s own potential to do good. Such notions had important implications for the development of British national feeling and for the culture of sensibility.
Perhaps the most significant contribution they made to this culture was to supply a mental framework for extending the emotional connections and obligations Britons felt they should feel. Asking why the British abolished the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, Thomas Haskell has argued that one cause of a widespread humanitarian sensibility was the rise of a capitalist market, which “inculcate[d] altered perceptions of causation in human affairs.” The vast networks of investment and trade that the market made possible also propelled “an enhancement of causal perception,” which “extend[ed] moral responsibility beyond its former limits.”21 This book suggests that if the market was the primary cause of this cognitive and ethical shift, the rhetoric of Protestant mission provided crucial preconditions for it.
Missionary writings often equated financial transactions with spiritual ones, and the spiritual links they envisioned among humans offered precursors to the webs of economic interdependence that would develop with colonial trade. Through the evangelical mandate of Christianity they linked pity metaphorically with profit, making possible stronger connections between economic and emotional discourse. By insisting on the effects that pity for Indians would have when translated into prayers and funds, they encouraged readers to understand emotion not just as something felt or expressed, but also as something that circulates, transacts, and connects. In this way missionary writings reinforced a transatlantic British consciousness, teaching their readers to imagine themselves connected to distant compatriots as they shared feeling for a pitied object. While they elevated the importance of emotion to ethics, these texts also called attention to the problems that an emotionally centered morality produced. In many ways, then, missionary writings can help us understand the complex status that emotion held in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies.
Between Christians: Pity, Sympathy, Proximity, and Distance
I tend to use the words pity and compassion in this book, rather than empathy, sympathy, sensibility, or sentimentality, to describe British attitudes toward unconverted Indians. All of these words connote an emotional response to scenes of suffering, but there are important differences among them. Missionary writings were more likely to ask for readers’ pity than their sympathy for Indians, and for good reason. Sympathy—which comes from the Greek word pathos, meaning feeling or suffering, and a prefix meaning like or the same—has to do, of course, with an imagined or authentic experience of shared feeling. Empathy—which combines pathos with the Greek prefix en or in—also suggests intimacy between one who witnesses and one who feels an emotion.
Pity comes from the Latin word pietas, or piety, which in turn comes from the word pius, meaning duty. In its most literal form this word does not describe an emotion born of sameness, but rather the mercy born of religious devotion. The King James Bible, the translation that would have been familiar to most English readers after its publication in 1611, only uses the term sympathy a few times in the Epistles (Phil. 2:1; 1 Pet. 3:8), but it uses pity (or the lack of it) to describe how God treats sinners and Israel treats its enemies (Deut. 7:16, Hos. 1:6, 2:23). Sympathy has narrow use, applying only to relationships within the Christian community, while pity applies to a broad spectrum of relations among humans or between humans and God. Pity also tends to describe relationships marked by an imbalance of power between those feeling and those provoking this emotion, suggesting in particular the omnipotence of God. The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560 and in print until 1644, does not even use the word sympathy when the King James does, translating pity in Philippians and compassion in 1 Peter.22 The terms the King James Bible uses most often to describe a reaction to the sight of suffering are mercy, derived from the Latin word for “reward,” and compassion, meaning “to suffer with,” a term that suggests imagined identification but not sameness.23 The missionaries often referred to “compassion,” and I sometimes use it interchangeably with “pity.”
Milton also distinguished between sympathy and pity in Paradise Lost (1667). When the Son of God decides to clothe the fallen Adam and Eve, he does so because he is “pitying how they stood / Before him naked to the air.”24 At the same moment, Satan’s monstrous daughter Sin is able to sense, from her place at the gates of Hell, that the Fall has occurred in Eden. She attributes this awareness to
… sympathy, or some connatural force
Powerful greatest distance to unite
With secret amity things of like kind
By secretest conveyance.25
“Sympathy,” as Milton uses it here, is a morally neutral term that conveys an awareness of shared feeling. “Pity,” on the other hand, suggests the benevolence bestowed by an all-powerful God.
In the seventeenth century pity usually