The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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non-Christian peoples, but it also includes sermons, letters, and genres usually marked as literary, written by people raising money for, or merely thinking about, missionary work. My concerns with transatlantic reception and the culture of sensibility as well as my footing in literary study often steer me to focus on the latter group of texts. I make some references to the earliest Indian converts in English colonies and to the first organized English attempt to convert Indians, the establishment of Henrico College in Jamestown from 1620 until the Powhatan massacre of 1622. I also occasionally draw upon promotional writings of the Virginia Company.71 For the most part, however, my study ranges from the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642 to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776.
I chose these dates because they coincide roughly with the beginnings and ends of sustained, as opposed to extremely short-lived, missionary efforts in the parts of America that would become the United States. I also chose them because they bracket an era when missionaries would rely on the transatlantic circulation of print to generate an English and then British identity through shared feeling for America’s Indians. The parish collection authorized by James I in 1616 would seem to provide the only English missionary writings that precede this era.72 While the few letters printed for this project may have provided a model for later writings, they did not have to demand their audience’s attention within the larger and less regulated print culture that developed during the English Civil War.73 They also did not have to construct English cohesion against the background of domestic conflict, a factor that enhanced the unifying force of later missionary projects. While sharing much with their predecessors, English-language missionary writings produced after the American Revolution were markedly different in their imaginative range, their audience, and their tone. Emerging from evangelical movements and from the dynamic leadership of figures such as William Carey, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionary writings reflected a new global consciousness, an altered sense of national and imperial identity, and an enlarged audience that openly included women.74
Although most of the texts I study were composed in English and for a transatlantic British audience, it is important also to understand their place within an international framework. Many writers of English missionary texts were aware of missions launched from other European countries. Sometimes these dealt with Protestant projects, such as August Hermann Francke’s Missionsnachrichten, an account of Danish and German efforts in India and then in other lands that he began to publish serially in 1710.75 More often British missionaries worked under the shadow of Roman Catholic missionary orders, especially the Jesuits, whose Relations had been distributed throughout Europe since the early seventeenth century. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, John Dryden dedicated his translation of Dominick Bohours’s Life of St. Francis Xavier to Queen Mary of Modena shortly after the birth of her son. This text constituted a celebration of a Catholic successor to the throne as well as an implicit critique of the Church of England’s failure to show substantial concern for heathen souls.76 English writings displayed defensiveness about Protestant projects, which revealed some acquaintance with Catholic successes. In their refutation of Catholic mission, these texts were central to the forging of a modern Protestant and British identity against the foil of Catholicism.
The missionary writings divide into five basic groups connected with the main denominations active in North America before the American Revolution.77 The first group includes texts connected with The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Established by the Long Parliament in 1649 and rechartered after the Restoration as the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America, the New England Company (as it was commonly called and as I shall refer to it) was at first a corporation of sixteen persons, merchants and Independent or Presbyterian clergymen, who publicized the cause of converting Indians, collected funds in England, and sent money across the Atlantic to be distributed by the Commissioners of the United Colonies.78 Robert Boyle, better known for his scientific work, became the company’s president after the Restoration. From the Restoration until Boyle’s death in 1691 the group’s membership covered a moderately wide range of religious and class positions.79 On the whole, however, the group retained a Dissenting majority. The missionaries it supported emphasized a Calvinist, mostly Congregational creed.
These missionaries included John Eliot, who established the praying Indian towns that housed more than one thousand Massachusett and Narragansett converts in New England, several generations of the Mayhew family (who converted the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket), and a handful of ministers scattered throughout the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. In the eighteenth century this group helped fund Jonathan Sergeant’s work with the Housatonic Indians of Stockbridge, the work of Gideon Hawley among the Mashpees of Cape Cod, and Joseph Fish’s efforts among the Narragansetts of Rhode Island.80 When the American Revolution began, the company abandoned its efforts in New England to focus on Canada. Although several figures were connected with both groups, the New England Company is different from the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge among the Indians in North America, which was established by the Massachusetts General Assembly in 1762. This organization failed to obtain royal confirmation for its founding, but it was reestablished in 1787 as the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and others in North America.81
The New England Company printed some of the eleven “Indian tracts” during the seventeenth century, which contain reports from missionaries, testimonials from Indian converts, letters from supporters, and pleas for money, prayers, and supplies.82 It also subsidized the publishing of Algonquian translations of the Bible, an Indian primer, and several religious tracts, which John Eliot completed with the help of Nesuton and James Printer, two native assistants.83 Eliot published other texts relating to his work, such as the Indian dialogues (1671) and The Dying Speeches of several Indians (1685). Eighteenth-century publications connected with projects funded by the New England Company included Cotton Mather’s India Christiana (1721), Experience Mayhew’s Indian converts (1727), and Samuel Hopkins’s Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuk Indians (1753). Texts including Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans are of that Race (1650) were not officially connected with the company but promoted its work. Although Roger Williams was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resisted active missionary work on theological grounds, I also include some of his writings, especially his Key into the Language of America (1643), here.
The second collection includes the texts produced by the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which was founded in 1701.84 Made up mostly of high-ranking churchmen and affluent laymen interested in the establishment of Anglican churches in America, the SPG devoted much textual attention to the spiritual state of Indians. Of British missionary organizations, the SPG was the least involved in actual missionary operations, but it did have some success with the Mohawks. Individual SPG missionaries made occasional attempts to convert Indians, including John Wesley, who along with his brother Charles briefly collaborated with Moravians to convert a group of Yamacraw Indians in the Georgia colony.85
The central SPG publications were the anniversary sermons. Every February throughout the eighteenth century the society invited a bishop or dean to deliver a sermon at London’s Mary-le-Bow parish church amid some fanfare, advertising in the London Gazette and inviting the city’s leading citizens to attend. The society then distributed the sermon to its missionaries, members, and correspondents in Britain, Europe, and America. These usually were printed with “Abstracts,” which included descriptions of the society’s accomplishments, reports from ministers in the colonies, financial accounts, membership lists, and template forms for donations and bequests. From time to time it published broadsides, including requests for parish collections authorized by the monarch, requests for missionaries, and instructions to its ministers. As with the New England Company there are associated texts that promoted the SPG’s work, such as An Essay Towards an Instruction For the Indians (1740), by Thomas Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, and A Pindaric Poem on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711) by Elkanah Settle, the laureate poet of the City of London.
The third group