The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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with the Presbyterian Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and the Foreign Parts of the World (SSPCK), which was chartered in 1709. The original mission of this group was to establish schools and distribute ministers throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. In 1717, however, the Dissenting clergyman Daniel Williams left the SSPCK a generous bequest on the condition that it send at least three ministers to preach among non-Christian peoples of foreign lands.86 After thirteen years the society began to dispatch missionaries to Indians in Connecticut and Long Island. Throughout the century it subsidized several projects through its colonial Boards of Correspondents. Among these were David Brainerd’s mission to the Delawares (which was taken over by his brother John after his death) and Eleazar Wheelock’s establishment of Moor’s Indian Charity School and then of Dartmouth College.87 The SSPCK also organized part of the visit to Britain in 1766–68 by Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom.88 Most of the ministers supported by the SSPCK adhered to a Presbyterian creed, and some of them supported the transatlantic revivals of the mid-eighteenth century.89 The membership of its Boards of Commissioners in New York, Boston, and Connecticut overlapped with the membership of the New England Company’s board, and missionaries employed by these groups sometimes worked together.90
Like the SPG, the SSPCK published anniversary sermons, accounts, and histories of its work. The missionaries employed by this society produced a variety of texts, such as David Brainerd’s famous journal and the Narrative[s] of the Indian Charity-School (1766–75) published by Wheelock. Occom also wrote the first English publication to be authored by an American Indian, A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772).
The fourth group is a small and diffuse collection of texts relating to the missionary efforts of the Quakers, or the Society of Friends. Although the Quakers developed close relations with many indigenous groups, and although some individual Friends preached to Indians, they did not undertake organized missions until 1794.91 The Friends published few missionary writings during this era. I do, however, draw on George Fox’s Journal along with a few texts suggesting Quaker efforts, such as John Cripps’s A True Account of the Dying Words of Ockanickon, an Indian King (1682).
The fifth group includes texts relating to the work of the United Brethren, or Moravians. They were descended from Hussites, named after John Hus, a Roman Catholic priest of Prague who was burned at the stake in 1415 for preaching against church corruption. His followers built a reformist movement and in 1467 established their own ministry. Almost eradicated during the Counter-Reformation, the Moravians remained largely in hiding until 1722, when they migrated to Saxony and settled on the lands of Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, a Lutheran pietist who became their bishop. Evangelical concerns, especially a desire to convert Indians and African slaves, motivated Moravian emigration to the new colony of Georgia, via a small settlement in England, in 1735. Establishing Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as their central settlement, they launched successful missions throughout the British colonies. Although they and their Indian converts suffered persecution from other colonists for their radical theology, Zinzendorf was able to establish some legitimacy for his church in England, so that in 1749 Parliament formally declared the United Brethren to be an ancient Episcopal Church.92 The Church of England remained supportive of the Moravians throughout the eighteenth century, and in 1765 it hired the Moravian Christian Frederick Post, who had lived among the Mohegans for seventeen years, to preach to the Moskito Indians of present-day Honduras.93
In spite of their success in converting Indians, the Moravians occupy a minor position in my book because they produced few missionary writings for a British audience. Many Moravians did keep journals and write letters about their work, however. Most of these accounts were circulated within the Moravian community, and they may have encouraged contributions from Moravians in Europe. Except for the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, which existed from 1745 to 1764 and sought external support, the Moravians did not publicize their work with a British audience for quite a while.94 John Heckewelder’s journal was not published in English until 1820, and it was not until 1769 that a fund-raising tract for the Moravians’ work, Heckewelder’s A Letter to a Friend, appeared in London.95
Linguistic barriers and tensions with British colonists account partly for the dearth of published texts. Primarily, however, the Moravians neglected to publish many texts because their intense dedication and their communal ethos led them to fund their missions through a socialist economy supported by a variety of industries in Bethlehem. Moravians also were willing to live in poorer conditions than many British ministers were.96 This group illustrates a central irony of my project: there often seems to have been an inversely proportional relation between the degree to which early modern Europeans talked about their desires to convert Indians and the degree to which they actually labored toward this end.
Alongside these publications I read documents written for private audiences. These texts include the correspondence of John Eliot and Richard Baxter, the minutes of the SPG’s Standing Committee, the journals and letters of missionaries, and the Moravian papers. Besides providing additional information about the missionary work, these writings serve as a counterpoint to the published ones. They suggest how the carefully crafted portrayals of missionary projects related to the ways in which Indians, missionaries, and their supporters in Britain evaluated those efforts when they were removed from a public gaze.
These texts make up a vast and diverse corpus, especially because they include denominations that waged fierce disagreements with each other and underwent significant changes in the century and a half that this book covers. Any one of these collections would provide sufficient material for a book-length study of missionary discourse, as would any twenty or thirty years within the study. A book encompassing all of this data must overlook topics that would inform more specialized studies, such as the nuances of the Great Awakening or the finer points of debate between Calvinists and Arminians over salvation. From the earliest stages of this project I elected to examine the writings of all Protestant missions connected with Britain because I wanted to see the full range of representational strategies that developed through efforts to convert Indians. As I read more of these texts I became struck less with the range than with the rhetorical uniformity of these writings, which in spite of conflicting theological stances display a remarkably stable approach to the tasks of describing Indians and raising readers’ interest in their conversion. My approach throughout most of this book thus has been to focus on the common discursive features of Protestant missionary writings, leaving doctrinal variety in the background except for those points where it produced significant rhetorical differences. The result, I hope, is a study that emphasizes similarity without ignoring important differences in various denominations’ portrayals of Indians.
If I could have expanded my project without making it too cumbersome for a single book, I would have examined missionaries’ depictions of both African slaves and Indians. Certainly any study would have to examine depictions of both groups if it were to provide a comprehensive account of the British encounter, both textual and actual, with “heathens” in America. Such a study also would reflect the parallel status Indians and Africans held in many missionary projects and texts. Groups such as the Moravians and the SPG simultaneously undertook missions to Indians and Africans, and discussions of both peoples often appeared alongside each other in fund-raising tracts. The enslavement of Indians as well as intermarriage between Indians and Africans also led to some blurring of categories in British or colonial writings, especially in an era before race was identified primarily through skin color.97
In spite of these overlaps, British missionaries tended to treat Africans and Indians as separate groups whose conversion required different strategies and whose existence, as “heathen” or Christian, provoked distinct emotions and debates. As Chapter 4 will show, the complete isolation of Indians from the Christian world until the fifteenth century produced a theological quandary that Africans, who at least theoretically had had access to the gospel, did not. The noble savage produced forms of pathos related to but still distinct from the emotions that met images of African slaves, and slaveholders’ concerns about the legality of owning Christians created particular obstacles for missionaries that were different from the difficulties