Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  The sensitive French Jesuit Claude Chauchetière, on his own mission of self-examination, used Tekakwitha’s story to resolve his own personal crises of faith. The Indian saint’s narrative became an international sensation. Translated into several languages, it circulated through Europe. After receiving baptism, she seemed to be not a “neophyte needing to be confirmed in the faith, but a soul filled with the most precious gifts of Heaven who had to be guided in the most sublime spiritual ways.” Her perfect purity, in fact, issued a challenge to the young men of her village, “and laid many snares for her with the sole view of dimming a virtue which dazzled them.” The missionary “thought he could discern that God had great designs as to that virgin.”

  Kateri’s death at the age of twenty-four in 1680 created an ideal hagiographical subject. Soon, the invocation of her name became associated with miracles and healing. Kateri Tekakwitha personified the noble savage turned ideal ascetic Christian. She appealed to European visions of the New World as both virginal territory and souls awaiting the word of Christ. The Jesuits took her as an icon of the ultimate triumph of true religion among the savages they struggled to understand. Tekakwitha’s story, once presented in hagiographic form, ultimately served as handmaidens to the reorganizing of Indians peoples and nations in New Canada.

  Everywhere, the Christian-Indian contact was complex and contested, as both sides assimilated and synthesized the ideas of the other. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from a continent-wide survey, however, is that missionizing was never simply a one-way street. “Converts” never simply left behind older ways. Conversion and domination were never bound inextricably together even if the two were sometimes reinforcing. The experiences of praying Indians in New France and New England show some of the complexities of the religious dialogue carried on throughout the continent between European newcomers and disparate groups of natives whose religions, dependent as they were on local ecologies and on a natural balance of forces, came under severe stress in the age of colonization.

  MASSACHUSETTS AND METACOM

  Protestants in New England faced, if anything, an even greater challenge than had the Jesuits in New France. Puritans found it difficult enough to discern the movement of God’s grace in the souls of their fellow church members or even themselves; in the seventeenth century, they set about searching for such a movement in the souls of natives whose ways were otherwise inscrutable or terrifying. They operated from a mixture of proselytizing and civilizing motives, from both idealism and realpolitik. As one Puritan told the educator Eleazar Wheelock, “Nothing can be more Agreeable to our Christian Character than to send the Gospel to the benighted Pagans,” and “Nothing more Conducive to our Civil Interests than to bring them to a Subjection to the Religion of Jesus.”

  Christian missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, filled the pages of their journals, pamphlets, and books with their hopes and visions for conversions. This was signified in the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It shows a classic noble and winsome savage saying “Come Over and Help Us,” designed as much as anything to inspire funders at home. They wrote just as extensively about their frustration at the seeming inability of the Indians, even of the converts, to adopt Christian doctrine and practices. In not doing so, Indians clearly not yet been “reduced” to civilized ways of thinking and living.

  In New England, John Eliot translated the Bible into Algonquian, intending to teach Indians the word and train up their own ministers. He published that Bible in 1663; it was the first Bible produced and published in North America. Meanwhile, beginning with Natick in 1651, Eliot and his colleagues created a series of some fourteen Indian praying towns. They eventually held upward of 2,300 individuals in a string of villages around the Massachusetts Bay and into Martha’s Vineyard. Eliot hoped to concentrate the work at Natick, which was to be the centerpiece of the New England strategy of reducing Indians to civility. However, a number of other praying towns soon sprouted in the region. Indians migrating to them sought to remain as close as possible to their own homelands. The praying towns themselves merged the division between those such as Eliot, who sought to reach the Indians in their own languages and through the idioms of their own customs, and other Puritans such as the Mather family, who insisted that converting the Indians into Englishmen was the only sure way to banish barbarism from their souls. “Some of them began to be seriously affected, and to understand the things of God,” wrote Puritan leader John Winthrop in his journal, describing the effect of Eliot’s preaching, “and they were generally ready to reform whatsoever they were told be against the word of God, as their sorcery (which they call powwowing,) their whoredomes, etc., idleness, etc.”

  Besides working on his Bible in the Massachusett language, John Eliot prepared manuals for Indian missionaries who sought to preach among their own people. Included in them were fictional “dialogues” between native ministers and skeptical tribespeople. In these works, unconverted kinsmen of the Christianized Indians respond in wily and sophisticated ways to Christian pleas. The unconverted Indians in these fictional discussions resemble Satan in Paradise Lost—obviously in the wrong, but yet more interesting and in some ways wiser and sharper than the formulaic language in which the Christian message appears. As a kinswoman ends one message, after acknowledging that the convert had wearied himself with “long discourses,” she urged him to “stop your mouth, and fill your belly with a good supper, and when your belly is full you will be content to take rest yourself, and give us leave to be at rest from these . . . heart-trembling discourses. We are well as we are, and desire not to be troubled with these new wise sayings.”

  Title page of John Eliot’s Bible

  Source: Courtesy of Dartmouth College Rauner Special Collections Library.

  In the Massachusetts Bay region, Eliot’s work failed to persuade one important leader. Metacom, the Wampanoag Indian later christened King Philip, was a member of a tribe in which, by the 1670s, a majority had made their lives in praying towns. Metacom employed as his assistant a Christianized Indian named John Sassamon, who had briefly attended Harvard College. Later, when Sassamon mysteriously turned up dead, apparently drowned in a river but upon closer examination clearly clubbed in the head before being tossed into the water, three Indians were tried and executed for the murder. The violence and vengeance clearly exhibited the tensions leading to King Philip’s War.

  In this 1676 uprising, Indians attacked half of all New England villages. The death toll was staggering, for both sides. Approximately 5,000 Indians (or about forty percent of the natives of southern New England) lost their lives, as did 2,500 New Englanders (around five percent of the English population). Captives on both sides numbered in the hundreds. While a substantial number of Indians, praying and otherwise, remained loyal to (and even fought for) white New Englanders, the sheer destructiveness of the war itself deepened white New Englanders’ animus toward Indians. Those who wore “the Name of Praying Indians,” as one contemporary tract put it, had “made Preys of much English Blood.” The war also broke up and destroyed most of the praying towns and forced the relocation of Christian Indians into a consolidated group of smaller villages which, even when reestablished after the war, struggled along with relatively few members. The surrounding English population increasingly suspected that good Indians were dead Indians.

  The entire enterprise of Christianization and the establishment of praying towns, effectively collapsed after King Philip’s War. This East Coast debacle of destruction paralleled the contemporaneous Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico, as regional tribes banded together, launched ferocious attacks on white colonists in the hinterlands of their respective empires, and self-consciously sought a revitalization of Indian ways and a destruction of Christian symbology. Meanwhile, during the war, Eliot’s praying Indians huddled on Martha’s Vineyard, without food, clothing, and fuel. The preeminent Puritan divine of the late seventeenth century, Cotton Mather, rejoiced at the victories of white New Englanders, conv
inced that God’s plan called for less proselytization and more subjugation.

  Mather wrote in reflecting on the brutal event: “These parts were then covered with nations of barbarous Indians and infidels, in whom the prince of power of the air did work as a spirit; nor could it be expected that the nations of wretches, whose whole religion was the most explicit sort of devil-worship, should not be acted by the devil to engage in some early and bloody action, for the extinction of a plantation so contrary to his interests, as that of New England was.”

  While New Englanders battled a constant Indian threat, they also imported blacks, both from Africa and from the Caribbean, and attempted to discern God’s will for integrating enslaved people into the Puritan experiment. One of those imports, ironically, was a girl from Barbados probably of mixed Indian and African descent, named Tituba. She served in the household of the Puritan minister Samuel Parris. In the early 1690s, she confessed to teaching two other girls the arts of witchcraft, setting off what became the Salem witch trials.

  Debating the place of race and slavery, New Englanders had to define what constituted civilization and who could be rational versus who were not capable of being so. New Englanders, however, also saw slavery as a path to redemption, and their own soul-saving efforts as a way to save themselves by saving others. They devised special catechisms, including this one for enslaved New Englanders: “I must be Patient and Content with such a Condition as God has ordered for me.” They also instructed black New Englanders to learn Ephesians 6:5–8 by heart, the passage ordering servants to be obedient to their Masters.

  Cotton Mather, the prolifically published Puritan minister of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, argued for the humanity of the slave and the Negro, in intensively biblical tracts such as The Negro Christianized, while also justifying servitude through those biblical texts. Christian slaves, he said, would know “that it is GOD who has caused them to be Servants, and that they serve JESUS CHRIST, while they are at work for their Masters.” “Show yourselves Men,” Mather wrote, “and let Rational Arguments have their Force upon you, to make you treat, not as Bruits, but as Men, those Rational Creatures whom God has made your Servants.”

  Mather’s exhortations, part of a familiar litany of arguments in favor of Christianizing the slaves, met vigorous refutation among a number of northern ministerial writings in the eighteenth century. John Saffin, a Massachusetts jurist in the early eighteenth century and a slaveholder, enunciated an argument soon to be familiar in proslavery circles. The Bible sanctioned slavery, he insisted. The great patriarch Abraham owned slaves, so “our Imitation of him in this his Moral Action” was warranted. Captives from “Heathen Nations” could be enslaved, even if Christians could not buy and sell one another. Beyond that, God had “set different Orders and Degrees of Men in the World,” including some the Divine had made “to be born Slaves, and so to remain during their lives.” At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, Saffin also articulated another point dear to the heart of proslavery theorists: that “it is no Evil thing to bring them [Africans] out of their own Heathenish Country, [to] where they may have the knowledge of the One True God, be Converted and Eternally saved.” Saffin even composed his own doggerel on “the Negroes Character”:

  Cowardly and Cruel are those Blacks Innate,

  Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate.

  He that exasperates them, soon espies

  Mischief and Murder in their very eyes.

  Libidinous, Deceitful, False and Rude,

  The Spume Issue of Ingratitude.

  As the spread of Enlightenment ideas and evangelical Christianity began to impact the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, proslavery ideology began to rise as well. Well before the full rise of proslavery thought in the mid-nineteenth-century South, proslavery ideologues in the North fleshed out many of the themes that would define the American defense of slavery. One popular argument was that God created people to exist in particular social stations, reflecting varying degrees of freedom or subjection. For some to enjoy full liberty, others would have to be servants; this best served the happiness of the whole. This traditional conservative stance was a defense of hierarchy, not overtly or especially related to racial considerations. But most expositions of this sort followed up with a defense of racial bondage in particular. They provided explications of why the enslavement of black people contributed to God’s plan for the Americas. The African slave, wrote one Massachusetts conservative, was already enslaved to “the tyrannizing power of lust and passion” (the image of overpowering sexuality already being a standard image associated with blackness), and thus “his removal to America is to be esteemed a favor,” for it brought Africans “from the state of brutality, wretchedness, and misery . . . to this land of light, humanity, and christian knowledge.”

  Christian colonizers assumed that acquiring religion meant also taking on the trappings of civilization. A Christian was, by definition, a civilized man. In English North America, to make a Christian was to make a white man, hence the need for devices of protection such as praying towns. When confronted with slavery, questions of Christianity and race arose in new and disturbing contexts. Christianity’s central metaphors were those of freedom, which posed difficult questions of how to integrate such a faith with a social order dependent upon coerced labor and the ownership of humans. While Puritan thinkers devised some of the first extended proslavery arguments, the real issue of race, slavery, and Christianity was emerging rapidly in the colonies to the South—in particular, Virginia and South Carolina.

  RELIGION, RACE, AND THE RISE OF SLAVERY

  English colonizers in North America pondered whether Christianity would apply to black slaves at all. The answers they came up with depended in part on deciding whether Africans and African Americans were fully human. This debate raged for several centuries and indeed continued on into the post–Civil War era of scientific racism. English and Anglo-American theologians grappled with whether there was a separate category, apart from “man,” into which blackness could be fit.For many, blackness conjured images of savagery even in the practice of religion itself. As one early commentator put it, Negroes were “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or commonwealth.” The Reverend Morgan Godwyn, who ministered in seventeenth-century Virginia, charged that “nothing is more barbarous and contrary to Christianity, than their . . . Idolatrous Dances, and Revels.”

  As some slaves converted to Christianity, however, reality once again mugged ideology and theology. Anglo-Americans faced this question: Would baptism require freedom? That is, did baptism into the Christian religion make men white? Further, as the 1723 letter from the slaves to the bishop made clear, slaves recognized that conversion implied that they should have the rights of free men. The answers to these questions contained momentous implications for American ideas of freedom and the American practice of chattel slavery.

  Colonial law attempted to resolve the ambiguous status of black slaves and the tradition that slavery was for heathen others, not fellow Christians. When some Africans converted to Christianity and as a result claimed their freedom, colonial assemblies in Maryland (1664) and Virginia (1667) responded by dissociating baptism from freedom. They defined “blackness” as a state of perpetual servitude continuing beyond one’s potential baptism into the Christian faith. In 1664, the Maryland legislature worked out a law mandating that all slaves would serve for life. From that point on, Christianity and enslavement were theoretically compatible. Indeed, one of the main purposes of the law was to encourage conversion by disabusing anyone of the notion that it would lead to freedom from slavery. Instead, it was only about the freedom of the soul in Christ. Children born of slave women, even Christian slave women, would be bondspeople for life.

  In the late seventeenth century, as slavery began to supplant indentured servanthood as the primary labor system in the Chesapeake, Virginians clarified further the meaning of race and Christian belief. The 1667
Virginia law read in full:

  WHEREAS some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by virtue of their baptisme be made ffree; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome; that diverse masters, ffreed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament.

  The laws from the Chesapeake colonies provided a model for later legislation in other colonies. In 1705, Virginians further defined and enumerated the status of free and unfree people, detailing what had been more implicit in the initial legal forays of the 1660s. A law of that year added that servants who were “not Christians in their native country . . . before they were shipped” would be classified as slaves, “and as such be here bought and sold notwitstanding a conversion to Christianity afterwards.” Baptism, the act stated, did not affect a person’s status as slave or free.

  The 1705 act protected indentured servants of Christian parentage but condemned non-Christians to slavery. The law gave new protections to English servants assuming they were white and Christian, including the prohibition of the whipping of a “Christian white servant naked.” The act provided for the “Christian care and usage of all Christian servants” and forbade all “negros mulattos or Indians” from owning Christian servants. Further, Africans and Indians could not have the legal protections of marriage, and the legal rights of free people also were denied to those born of unions between Anglo-Virginians and enslaved Virginians. The 1705 laws defined white and Christian privilege by separating it from black (or Indian) and heathen submission. Thereby, as historian Rebecca Goetz explains, “Race trumped religion as the most important category in an ordered society.”