On the issue of colonization, most early modern thinkers agreed with Locke. Grotius contended that any military action against the natives was just because they had no legal claim to their territory.120 Hobbes believed that because they had not developed an agrarian economy, the Native Americans—“few, savage, short-lived, poor and mean”—must relinquish their land.121 And in a sermon delivered in London in 1622 to the Virginia Company, which had received a royal charter to settle all the terrain between what is now New York and South Carolina, John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, argued that: “In the Law of Nature and Nations, a Land never inhabited by any or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possess it.”122 The colonists would take this belief with them to North America—but unlike these early modern thinkers, they had absolutely no intention of separating church and state.
10
The Triumph of the Secular
When the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630, they would have been horrified to hear that they were about to lay the foundations of the world’s first secular republic. They had left England because Archbishop Laud, they believed, had corrupted their church with popish practices; they regarded their migration as a new Exodus and America, the “English Canaan,” as their “land of Promise.”1 Before landing, John Winthrop, first governor of the Bay Colony, reminded them that they had come to the American wilderness to build a truly Protestant community that would be a light to other nations and inspire Old England to revive the Reformation:2 “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.”3 One of their most important missions was to save the Native Americans from the wiles of the French Catholic settlers in North America, making New England a “bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist, which the Jesuits labour to rear up in these parts.”4 Winthrop would have found the notion of a secular state inconceivable, and like most of the colonists, he had no time for democracy. Before they set foot on American soil, he reminded the migrants firmly that God had “so disposed the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.”5
The Puritans were convinced that God had given the land to them by a special dispensation, but this covenantal faith blended seamlessly with the humanists’ more secular doctrine of natural human rights. On the eve of their departure from Southampton in 1630, their minister, John Cotton, had listed all the biblical precedents for their migration. After showing that God had given the children of Adam and Noah, who had both colonized an “empty” world, the “liberty” to inhabit a “vacant place” without either buying it from the original inhabitants or asking their leave, he segued quite naturally into the argument: “It is a principle in nature, that in a vacant soil he that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his right it is.”6 England was overcrowded, contended Robert Cushman, business manager of the Bay Company, and America was “a vast and empty chaos” because the Indians were “not industrious, neither having art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities but all spoils, rots and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering etc.” It was therefore “lawful” for the settlers “to take a land which none useth.”7 This liberal doctrine would inform their dealings with the Native Americans quite as much as the biblical teachings.
The centrality of Original Sin in their theology predisposed these staunchly Protestant colonists toward an absolutist remedy for man’s fallen nature in their polity. If Adam had not sinned, government would have been unnecessary; but unredeemed men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government. Those who had been “born again” enjoyed the freedom of the sons of God but were at liberty only to do what God commanded. At their conversion, they had surrendered the right to follow their own inclinations and must submit to the authorities God had placed over them.8
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was, of course, not the first English settlement in North America. The founders of Jamestown in Virginia had arrived in 1607. They were not ardent Puritan dissenters but mercantilists, intent on making their colony a profitable commercial enterprise. Yet on disembarking, the first thing they did was build a makeshift church, with a sail for a roof and logs for pews. Their colony was almost as strict as Massachusetts.9 Church services were obligatory, and there were fines for drunkenness, gambling, adultery, idleness, and ostentatious dress. If an offender failed to change his ways, he was excommunicated and his property confiscated.10 This was a Christian as well as a commercial enterprise, hailed in London as a pivotal moment in salvation history. According to its royal charter, the Virginia Company’s chief objective was the conversion of the native peoples rather than financial success.11 As good early-modern Protestants, Virginians adhered to the principles of the Treaty of Augsburg: cuius regio, eius religio (“whoever controls the region controls religion”). Where most agrarian rulers had rarely attempted to control the spiritual lives of their subjects, the commercially minded Virginians took it for granted that in a properly regulated society all citizens should have the same faith and that it was the duty of any government to enforce religious observance.
John Locke was not yet born, so in the American colonies, religion, politics, and economics were still inseparable. Indeed, the Virginians were incapable of thinking of commerce as a purely secular activity.12 Samuel Purchas, the company’s propagandist, gave fullest expression to their ideology.13 If Adam had not fallen, the whole world would have retained its original perfection and exploration would have been easy. With the arrival of sin, though, men became so depraved that they would have slaughtered one another had not God scattered them over the earth after the destruction of the Tower of Babel and kept them in ignorance of one another. Yet he had also decreed that commerce would bring them together again. In Eden, Adam had enjoyed all essential commodities, but these too had been dispersed after the Fall. Now, thanks to modern maritime technology, a country in one region could supply what was lacking in other places, and God could use the global market to redeem the non-Christian world. In America the Virginians would supply staples for famine-prone England and at the same time bring the gospel to the Indians. A company broadsheet explained that God no longer worked through prophets and miracles; the only way to evangelize the world these days was “mixtly, by discoverie, and trade of marchants.” Living on the Indians’ land and trading with them, the colonists would “sell to them the pearles of heaven” by “dailie conversation.”14 So the quest for commodities, Purchas insisted, was not an end in itself, and the company would fail if it sought only profit.
Purchas initially believed that the land must not be forcibly taken from the Indians because it had been assigned to them by God.15 His Protestant ideology may have been paternalistic, but it also had a measure of respect for the indigenous peoples. Yet during the first two terrible winters, when the colonists were starving to death, some of their conscripted laborers had fled to the local Powhattans, and when the English governor asked their chief to return the fugitives, he disdainfully refused. Whereupon the English militia descended on the settlement, killed fifteen Native Americans, burned their houses, cut down their corn, and abducted the queen, killing her children. So much for peaceful “dailie conversation.” The Indians were bewildered: “Why will you destroy us who supply you with food?” asked Chief Powhattan: “Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner.”16
By 1622 the Indians had become seriously alarmed by the rapid growth of the colony; the English had taken over a significant acreage of their hunting grounds, depriving them of essential resourc
es.17 In a sudden attack on Jamestown, the Powhattans killed about a third of the English population. The Virginians retaliated in a ruthless war of attrition: they would allow local tribes to settle and plant their corn and then, just before the harvest, attack them, killing as many natives as possible. Within three years they had avenged the Jamestown massacre many times over. Instead of founding their colony on the compassionate principles of the gospel, they had inaugurated a policy of elimination imposed by ruthless military force. Even Purchas was forced to abandon the Bible and rely on the humanists’ aggressive doctrine of human rights when he finally agreed that the Indians deserved their fate because, by resisting English settlement, they had broken the law of nature.18 More pragmatic considerations were beginning to replace the old piety. The company had not been able to produce the staples England needed, and investors had not seen an adequate return. The only way their colony could function was to cultivate tobacco and sell it at five shillings a pound. Begun as a holy enterprise, Virginia would gradually be secularized not by Locke’s liberal ideology but by pressure of events.
The Puritans of Massachusetts had no qualms about killing Indians. They had left England during the Thirty Years’ War, had absorbed the militancy of that fearsome time, and justified their violence by a highly selective reading of the Bible. Ignoring Jesus’s pacifist teachings, they drew on the bellicosity of some of the Hebrew scriptures. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached Alexander Leighton, and the Bible “the best handbook on war.” Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation”—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics. In 1636 William Bradford described a raid on the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the Connecticut shore to avenge the murder of an English trader, contemplating the fearsome carnage with lofty complacency:
Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.20
When the Puritans negotiated the Treaty of Hertford (1638) with the few Pequot survivors, they insisted on the destruction of all Pequot villages and sold the women and children into slavery. Should Christians have behaved more compassionately? asked Captain John Underhill, a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War. He answered his rhetorical question with a decided negative: God supported the English, “so we had sufficient light for our proceedings.”21
Thirty years later, when Europeans were recoiling from the violence in the Thirty Years’ War, some Puritans had begun to question the validity of these Indian campaigns.22 After the murder of an Indian convert to Christianity in 1675, the Plymouth authorities, on very shaky evidence, pinned the blame on Metacom, chief of the Wampanoag, whom the English called “King Philip.” When they executed three of his aides, Metacom with his Indian allies promptly devastated fifty out of the ninety English towns in Plymouth and Rhode Island; by the spring of 1676 the Indian armies were within ten miles of Boston. In the autumn the war turned in the colonists’ favor. Yet they were facing a hard winter and the Narragansetts on Rhode Island had food and supplies. Accusing them—again on dubious grounds—of aiding Metacom, the English militia attacked and looted the village, massacred its inhabitants—most of them noncombatant refugees—and burned the settlement to the ground. The war continued with atrocities on both sides—Indian warriors scalped their prisoners alive; the English disemboweled and quartered theirs—but in the summer of 1676, both sides abandoned the struggle. Almost half the prewar Indian population had been eliminated: 1,250 were killed in battle, 625 died of wounds, and 3,000 died of disease in captivity. The colonies, however, suffered only about 800 casualties, a mere 1.6 percent of the total English population of 50,000.
The Puritan establishment believed that God had used the Indians to punish the colonists for their backsliding from godly ways and for the decline in church attendance and were therefore unconcerned about the Indian casualties. But many of the colonists were now less convinced of the morality of all-out warfare. This time a vocal minority spoke out against the war. The Quakers, who had first arrived in Boston in 1656 and had themselves been the victims of Puritan intolerance, vigorously condemned the atrocities. John Easton, governor of Rhode Island, accused the Puritans of Plymouth of arrogance and overconfidence in provocatively expanding their settlements and mischievously playing the tribes off against one another. John Eliot, a missionary to the Indians, argued that this had not been a war of self-defense; the real aggressors were the Plymouth authorities who had fudged evidence and treated the Indians with rough justice. As in Virginia, flagging piety meant that gradually more rational and naturalistic arguments would replace theological ones in their politics.23
As is often the case, a general decline in religious fervor tends to inspire a revival from some dissatisfied element of society. By the early eighteenth century, worship had become more formal in the colonies and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York and Boston. But to the horror of these polite congregations, a frenzied piety had erupted in the rural areas. The Great Awakening broke out first in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734, when the death of two young people and the powerful preaching of its minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) whipped the town into a devotional fever that spread to Massachusetts and Long Island. During Edwards’s sermons, the congregation screamed, yelled, writhed in the aisles, and crowded around the pulpit, begging him to stop. But Edwards continued inexorably, never looking at the hysterical masses, offering them no comfort, but staring rigidly at the bell rope. Three hundred people experienced a wrenching conversion, could not tear themselves away from their Bibles, and forgot to eat. Yet they also experienced, Edwards recalled, a joyous perception of beauty that was quite different from any natural sensation “so that they could not forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”24 Others, broken by the fear of God, would sink into an abyss of despair only to soar to an equally extreme elation in the sudden conviction that they were free of sin.
The Great Awakening showed that religion, instead of being an obstacle to progress and democracy, could be a positive force for modernization. Strangely enough, this seemingly primitive hysteria helped these Puritans to embrace an egalitarianism that would have shocked Winthrop but was far closer to our present norms. The Awakening appalled the Harvard faculty, and Yale, Edwards’s own university, disowned him, but Edwards believed that a different order—nothing less than the Kingdom of God—was coming painfully to birth in the New World. Edwards was, in fact, presiding over a revolution. The Awakening flourished in the poorer colonies, where people had little hope of earthly fulfillment. While the educated classes were turning to the rational consolations of the European Enlightenment, Edwards brought the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness to his unlettered congregation in a form that they could understand and prepared them for the revolutionary upheavals of 1775.25
At this date, most colonists still believed that democracy was the worst form of government and that some form of social stratification was God’s will. Their Christian horizons were bound by the systemic violence that had been essential to the agrarian state. In the congregations of New England, only the “saints” who had experienced a born-again conversion were allowed to participate in the Lord’s Supper. Even though they comprised only a fifth of the English population, they alone had a share in God’s Covenant with the New Israel. Yet not even the saints were allowed to speak in church but had to w
ait in silent attendance on the minister, and the unregenerate majority had equality before the law but no voice in government.26 Edwards’s grandfather, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton, had brusquely dismissed the masses as incapable of serious thought: “Let the government be put into their hands and things will be carried by a tumultuous cry … things would quickly be turned upside down.”27 Yet Stoddard had urged his entire congregation, including the unconverted, to partake of the Lord’s Supper and ordered them, in highly emotional gatherings, to stand up and publicly claim the covenant for themselves.
Jonathan Edwards understood that, despite his autocratic views, his grandfather had in fact given the masses a voice. He now demanded that his congregants speak out in church or be forever lost. Edwards belonged to the New England aristocracy; he had no interest in political revolution, but he had realized that a preacher could no longer expect his audience to listen submissively to eternal verities that did not speak convincingly to their condition. That might have worked in seventeenth-century England, but a different kind of society was coming into being in America, one that was not in thrall to an established aristocracy. In 1748, at the funeral of his uncle, Colonel John Stoddard, Edwards delivered a remarkable eulogy that listed the qualities of a great leader. In this New World, a leader must come down to the people’s level.28 He must have a “great knowledge of human nature” and acquaint himself with “the state and circumstances” of the nation, adapting his ideas to the realities of human and social experience. A leader must get to know his people, be attentive to current events and foresee crises.
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