One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Inoculation was blasphemy, but that was not all. As the scholar of American Puritanism Perry Miller has written, in New England “There was no social niche for the infidel.” This was a place that had formerly preferred, like Catholic Spain, to evict its spiritual dissenters. Mather’s support for a religiously suspect practice was an open questioning of the assumption of religious uniformity and shared covenant on which Puritan society was based.

  Moreover, the origins of Mather’s thinking on the matter showed that, Miller’s comment notwithstanding, there was in fact a social niche for people with faiths and practices far outside the mainstream. Society at the time may have seen them as less than people, but they were there, living and dying among Christians. The fact that they had beliefs of their own is often forgotten, but those beliefs—the hidden faiths of the enslaved—helped shape the world around them, the world on which our own is built.

  In the years following the display of the slave’s scar that set all this in motion, the unlikely relationship between the scion of the first family of Puritanism and a man stolen in his youth from the nation of Coramantee began to fray. Without Mather’s knowledge, Onesimus for years had been earning money and hiding it away, until he was finally able to buy his freedom by purchasing another African youth to replace him.

  Mather seems to have had mixed feelings about this separation. “My Servant Onesimus, proves wicked, and grows useless,” he noted, in reference perhaps to St. Paul’s original play on the “useful” meaning of the name. Other words Mather used to describe his behavior were “Froward” and “Immorigerous,” archaic expressions indicating that Onesimus was not a man to be told what to do. If he was truly one of the legendarily rebellious Coramantee, Mather might have feared having Onesimus remain within his fragile household, a possibility supported by his further reflection: “My Disposing of him, and my Supplying of my Family with a better Servant in his Room requires much Caution, much Prayer, much Humiliation before the Lord. Repenting of what may have offended Him, in the case of my servants, I would wait on Him, for his mercy.”

  Mather had been watchful for some time of the company Onesimus kept, and wondered if praying more for his wayward servant would make a difference. Ultimately, however, Onesimus made the choice for him. Mather prepared the necessary paperwork:

  My servant Onesimus, having advanced a Summ, toward the purchase of a Negro-lad, who may serve many occasions of my Family in his Room, I do by this Instrument, Release him so far from my Service and from the claims that any under or after me might make upon him.

  Even after granting Onesimus his freedom, Mather mentions him frequently. He is concerned about the young man’s future, distraught that he has not done enough praying for his soul. It is clear that Onesimus made an impression—perhaps because they had more in common than Mather admits.

  Not long after Mather had lost his wife and two of his children, he made another mention of Onesimus in his diary. This time it is not to complain about the man or to record another medical innovation but simply to note that his former servant’s son had also died.

  While Mather makes no mention of which gods Onesimus might have appealed to in his own time of fear and mourning, they likely were those he brought from a distant shore, the same gods that had led him to transform the faith of a man who had tried—and failed—to convert him.

  The Iroquois longhouse. Illustration from Emory Adams Allen’s The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races. Cincinnati: Central Publishing House, 1885.

  CHAPTER 7

  Longhouse Nation

  1744–1754

  They arrived in the heat of a summer afternoon, a crowd so large it could be heard before it was seen, shaking the dry earth with the footfalls of men and horses.

  Though the town’s residents had known they were coming, the actual sight of the throng’s advance could only have been unnerving. Anyone who unhooked shutters or inched open doors to catch a glimpse of the cause of the commotion would have seen more than two hundred well-armed men, marching like an invading army down the main path through town.

  They carried French-made muskets, tomahawks of freshly sharpened iron, sapling bows and quivers of arrows. Despite this weaponry and their orderly movement, however, there was no military precision in their appearance. Some dressed in ragged match-coats, others in shirts so dirty they seemed stained with spilled ink, others with no shirts at all. They looked less like soldiers than marauders spied in the instant before the pillaging began. The only small solace to be found in what one observer called this “great concourse of people” was that among the many warriors there were also a number of women, some with young children tucked in the crooks of their arms. Their presence alone served as a reminder in case anyone in the grip of their fright had momentarily forgotten: These Indians had come not for battle but for negotiation.

  Yet no sooner had these initial worries been put to rest than a chilling sound rose from the street, entering every window in town. From somewhere within the cloud of dust that moved along with the advancing crowd, a deep voice sang out a chant whose very rhythm was enough to throw off the regular beating of English hearts. Compared to the colonies to the north and east, Pennsylvania had endured relatively few Indian raids in the preceding decades—thanks in large part to the promise made forty years before by its founder, William Penn, who, in the pluralist spirit with which he had established his settlement, vowed to be “true Friends and Brothers” to “all and every” tribe in the region. Nevertheless, the residents of Lancaster knew well the stories of less happy relations with the natives. The vision of armed “savages,” as the townspeople called them, marching through town to the cadence of what could only seem a war chant no doubt brought them all to mind.

  Inside the courthouse, a contingent of white men had gathered in anticipation of the Indians’ arrival. Their visitors had not come quite when they had been expected, however. The colonists were seated at dinner in a makeshift dining hall arranged around the judge’s bench when they heard the singing voice echo in from the street, growing louder as it drew near. Pausing over their plates, most would have recognized the sounds of this once local and now foreign tongue, but few among them could understand the words.

  It fell to the official interpreter of the meeting for which they all had come, a German-born New Yorker named Conrad Weiser, to explain that what they were hearing was an invitation.

  The significance of Indian invitations was a subject Weiser knew personally. He had been just a boy when his father, an immigrant from the Duchy of Württemberg to New York’s Schoharie Valley, had been invited by a local chief to send his eldest son to live among the Mohawk people for three seasons, including a bitter winter when food was scarce. The year then was 1712, and the elder Weiser had by then seen sixteen children born. Perhaps taking such a risk with one of the eight still living made good practical sense at the time. Throughout the century that had then barely begun, the Mohawk would remain a dominant factor in the colony’s politics, trade, and security. Young Conrad’s father apparently hoped that having a member of the family endure hardship to become versed in native languages and customs would be a sure investment in the future.

  His gamble seemed to be paying off as Weiser, now a man of middle age, translated the chanted words giving voice to the arriving crowd. The Indians were to be treated as guests, the interpreter would have explained to the others in the courthouse, and so the negotiation sessions would take place according to their rules. The chanting—which Weiser knew came from a sachem, or chief—indicated that the elaborate protocol had already begun. Ringing through the open windows of the courthouse, carried on what little summer breeze could be found on this late June day, the song formally invited the colonists to reaffirm all prior efforts at establishing a lasting peace, and to forge a new treaty in a precarious time.

  This was no local meeting between a handful of settlers and a neighboring tribe. It was a summit of the governors and representatives of the colonies of Maryland
, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and the emissaries of the Six Nations, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The union the Iroquois cohort represented—which first, when it was known as the Five Nations, consisted of the northern Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples, and later added the Tuscarora, who extended as far south as the Carolinas—was the oldest political body in North America, preexisting the earliest-founded colonial government by more than two hundred years. As such, these new arrivals to Lancaster had a legislative process at least as well established as the imported British system, and a polity far more certain of itself as a coalition of shared interests than the colonists had yet achieved or had even attempted.

  Long before the birth of the notion of manifest destiny among Americans of European descent, the members of the Six Nations also had a clearer sense of the spiritual connection, and religious right, to the land on which they lived. This can be seen in the earliest accounts of the Iroquois creation myths, which were a key to their own understanding of how their confederacy came to be. The earliest publication of these myths was found in a short book by David Cusick, an artist and writer of the Tuscarora people, who collected and translated the oral tradition of the Six Nations early in the nineteenth century. His Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations brought a wider audience to tales that had been passed down for generations and also had been recorded in various forms by Jesuits traveling in New France.

  “Among the ancients there were two worlds in existence,” Cusick wrote. “The lower world was in a great darkness—the possession of the great monsters—but the upper world was inhabited by mankind.” In this upper world there was once a woman preparing to give birth to twins. As her labor began, her body and mind were in such distress that she was urged to lie down and rest. So deep was the sleep she fell into, however, that she began to sink from one world to the other, from the sky world to the world of darkness. Below, the monsters of the great water that covered all of the lower realm of existence saw the woman begin to fall. They gathered together in council to determine what to do. One creature was dispatched to the depths of the ocean to find some earth to bring to the surface to make a place where the woman might land. But what would hold up the land within the water?

  As Cusick wrote, “A large turtle came forward and made proposal to them to endure her lasting weight, which was accepted.” Earth and muck brought up from the bottom of the primordial sea were then spread across the turtle’s back—just in time for the woman to land. “While holding her, the turtle increased every moment and became a considerable island of earth, and apparently covered with small bushes.” It was there, on the turtle’s back, that the woman who fell from the sky gave birth to twins—a good mind and an evil mind, or a son with a gentle disposition and a son with insolent character, the warring inclinations of humanity.

  This was the origin of the designation of the North American continent as “Turtle Island.” It was also only the beginning of the elaborate cosmology that explained the relationship between humanity and the environment in which they lived, as well as the political circumstances that led several native peoples to unite.

  Untold generations after the birth of the Sky Woman’s two sons, one of these sons was said to be born again in the form of an Indian called Degawida. Also known as the Law Giver or the Great Peacemaker, he was the man—according to legend—who united the original Five Nations, teaching them to live together symbolically, under one code, and in the literal sense, through the construction of the longhouses that would provide a constant reminder of the lasting peace that had been achieved.

  Though the colonists who met with the representatives of the Six Nations for the most part could not shake their feelings of cultural superiority when interacting with Indians of any sort, the spiritual confidence of the Iroquois gave them leverage in the business at hand, which was the brokering of a new and enduring accord between themselves and the American subjects of the Crown. There were ongoing disputes involving settlers encroaching on Indian lands, and lingering questions about the allegiance of the Iroquois should England go to war with France over control of territory and trade. Like the Six Nations’ unsettling arrival in Lancaster, the meeting was fraught from the start with the awareness that misunderstandings could prove calamitous.

  One of the junior members of the Maryland contingent, a legislative secretary named Witham Marshe, put the Indians’ number at 252. He had rushed out to witness their grand entrance to town and had seen the source of the invitation song. It came from a figure leading the procession with a royal bearing and imposing presence: a man of perhaps sixty, whom Marshe would later describe as tall and well made, with a “very full chest, and brawny limbs.”

  Still singing as he passed the courthouse, the Onondaga chief Canassatego led his diplomatic mission to a clearing on the outskirts of town, where the colonists had arranged poles and boards as building materials. The first rule of Iroquois treaty negotiation protocol: Under no circumstances would they sleep in structures built by white men. The deepest beliefs of the people revolved around the image of the home, the traditional longhouse, which was to them a symbol of both their political alliance and the communal nature of all life. To sleep in English dwellings even for a night while negotiating a treaty would have amounted to a kind of apostasy. Instead, they created in a matter of hours a compound that was a rough approximation of the villages from which they had come. Adding boughs gathered from the nearby woods to the supplies prepared for them, they quickly assembled a series of shelters arranged by each man’s rank and his nation’s current standing in the coalition, making their corner of the negotiation site a small-scale iteration of the confederacy itself.

  While the Iroquois set camp, the colonists finished their dinner in the courthouse, drinking huzzahs to the health of the local hosts. Once these niceties were dispensed with, a group of young Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and Marylanders, including Marshe, made their way to the Indian village that had risen as if by magic from the earth. As they loitered among the shelters, the colonists offered snuff to the Iroquois men, threw coins to the Iroquois children, and watched in fascination as some of the visitors began to decorate themselves with white paint made of bear grease mixed with ash.

  Breaking away from the curious young men, the interpreter Conrad Weiser immediately sought out Canassatego and another Six Nations leader, Tachanuntie, known as the Black Prince because one of his parents was rumored to have been of African blood. Weiser shook the men’s hands and spoke to them in their native tongue, causing Canassatego to respond with a liveliness surprising for his age. The sachems knew Weiser well—so well, in fact, that they had given him an Iroquois name: Tarachawagon, “He who holds the reins.” As the man through whom all negotiations would be filtered, he was in control of a process that could run wild without a steady hand.

  Even as the Iroquois continued to paint themselves, becoming “frightful,” in Marshe’s estimation, Weiser continued to converse with the elders, as if more comfortable in native company than among his own people.

  The ways of the Indians were nothing to Weiser. For one with such an essential official capacity, he was a man of unexpectedly eclectic background. Not only had he been exposed to Mohawk beliefs in his youth, he had also, as an adult, lived for a time with a breakaway religious sect, only twelve miles from this meeting site. The Ephrata Cloister, as it was known, was a utopian, occasionally apocalyptic community, where men and women slept—separately and celibately—on wooden planks, ate just a single vegetarian meal each day, and rose for two hours every night to watch for the return of Christ. Weiser remained at Ephrata for two years but soon had a falling-out with its founder, who complained that Weiser was “entrapped in the net of his own wisdom.”

  Weiser was what might be called today, for lack of a better term, a seeker. In the words of his nineteenth-century biographer, “We may term Conrad Weiser a sort of religious vagrant.… His spiritual activity seems to be all circumference without centre.�
�� A born diplomat, he was “all things to all men, without being anything to himself, in a religious sense—perhaps as dangerous a spiritual state as one can well occupy.”

  He was spiritually dangerous, apparently, because he frequently frustrated his countrymen’s expectations. With his language skills in high demand, he had been enlisted briefly, following his monastic sojourn at Ephrata, in efforts to convert Native Americans. His heart was not in it, however. He had, it seems, far too much respect for the original inhabitants of America to become overzealous in attempts to change them.

  “If by the word of religion people mean an assent to certain creeds, or the observance of a set of religious duties, as appointed prayers, singing, baptism, or even heathenish worship, then it may be said, the Five Nations and their neighbors have no religion,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “But if by religion we mean an attraction of the soul to God, whence proceeds a confidence in, a hunger after the knowledge of Him, then this people must be allowed to have some religion among them, notwithstanding their sometimes savage deportment. For we find among them some traces of a confidence in God alone.”

  As illustration of this, he recounted story after story of moments when he had learned from, or been shamed by, the religious certainty of the members of the Iroquois Confederacy. On one of his earliest diplomatic missions, for example, he was sent to the village of Onondago at the request of the governor of Virginia. He departed in February “for a journey of five hundred English miles through a wilderness where there was neither road nor path, and at such a time of the year when animals could not be met with for food.” Together with a Dutchman and three Indians as companions, Weiser had traveled 150 miles of this journey when the party came to a valley one mile wide and thirty miles long, packed with snow three feet deep. As they attempted to traverse along the slope of a mountain to avoid the hard passage of the valley floor, one of the Indians slipped and “slid down the mountain as from the roof of a house.”