Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Indian converts found the European pressure for land pushing them aside just as well as their non-Christian brethren. Even the Moravians, who established very close ties and alliances with tribes in their area of Pennsylvania and often served as the Indians’ protectors and diplomats, needed to purchase land. In 1742, they received permission from the governor to “dispossess the Indians in Nazareth,” land they had purchased from the Great Awakener George Whitefield, which had supported an Indian village. Delaware Indians resisted the loss of land, arguing in a petition to the governor of Pennsylvania that they practiced Christianity and had “attained some small Degree of Knowledge therein,” and so were “desirous of living under the same Laws with the English, and praying that some place might be allotted to them where they may live in the Enjoyment of the same Religion and Laws with them.” They had no more success than did the southeastern Indians of the nineteenth century, prior to their removal to Oklahoma.

  John Heckewelder drawn by Henry Howe

  Source: Howe, Henry (1907), Historical Collections of Ohio, The Ohio Centennial Edition, 3, invalid ID: The State of Ohio, p. 375.

  The missionary John Heckewelder also observed the rise and eventually the explosion of ethnoreligious conflict between whites and natives. Competition for land and resources pitted white men against red men in bitter and violent struggles. A native of England, Heckewelder had come to Pennsylvania in 1754 and begun his missionary work among the Delawares in the early 1760s. He thereafter served as a Moravian missionary for several decades, as well as a careful chronicler and interpreter of Indians, especially of the Delawares.

  Heckewelder’s narrative of the Moravian mission, a sprawling canvass painting vivid scenes of white-Indian contact from the 1740s to the early nineteenth century, portrays backwoods white men as first thinking of the savages as “incapable of embracing the Christian religion.” Whites in the backwoods classed missionaries and advocates of the Indian such as Heckewelder as part of the enemy. In his work, he frequently encountered many in the backwoods who held that “an Indian ‘has no more soul than a buffalo’; and that to kill either, is the same thing.” Once the embrace of Christianity by some natives undermined this view, white men in the backwoods demanded the removal of missionaries from the country because of “the loss the whites sustained in not having these Indians in their interest” and under the same control as before, “when they were accustomed to take unlawful liberties and advantages of them.” Some compared the Brethren (the Moravians) as being “tinctured with Catholicism.” Others censured them for “endeavouring to civilize the savages, a race of beings, which (in their opinion) had no claim to Christianity, and whom to destroy, both root and branch, would not only be doing God a service, but also be the means of averting his wrath which they otherwise might incur by suffering them to live, they being the same as the Canaanites of old, an accursed race, who by God’s command were to be destroyed.” To them, not destroying the present-day Canaanites could induce God to “bring about wars and chastisements” as punishment for their disobedience. Heckewelder perceived the aim of white settlers and aggressors to be “first, to cause a general consternation, thereby spreading devastation and misery over the country, and then to take the reins of government into their own hands.”

  The fears of Heckewelder and Indians in Pennsylvania and Ohio came to pass in the slaughter of dozens of Christian Indians at Gnaddenhutten (located in present-day Tuscarawas County, Ohio) in March of 1782. While attempting to gather supplies from their old settlements to move away from conflict, a group of American frontiersmen accidentally stumbled on a group of Moravian Indians from Gnadenhutten. Insisting that the Indians were pro-British and in any case dangerous in spite of their demeanor, the American militiamen slaughtered ninety pacifist Indians, including twenty-seven women and thirty-four children. Even though the “Christian Indians were well known by their dress, which was plain and decent, no sign of paint to be seen on their skin or clothes” nor feathers on the head, white settlers still perceived them to be a threat. They had concluded that “when they killed the Indians, the country would be theirs; and the sooner this was done, the better!” The attacks also suggested that a Christian country could also be an aggressively expansionist one, and that notions of God’s will easily incorporated paroxysms of violence.

  CONCLUSION

  The Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries effectively created popular evangelicalism as the dominant style of American religious expression. In doing so, the awakenings reinforced what was already evident to Indians and African Americans, namely, that spiritual freedom did not extend to temporal liberation and that religious expressiveness could be embraced but could also be repressed when it appeared threatening to the dominant Anglo-American community. Black and red Americans could be in, but not fully of, the world of evangelical America. They were to be permanent aliens in the new white Republic, subject to enslavement and colonial domination. Christianity itself, with its universal message, could invite all those in a community, but Christian institutions and the nation-state that emerged from the colonial era would draw sharp lines and divisions based on evolving but apparently solid notions of race.

  In the early national era, repression and violence accompanied the expansion of the nation-state, one that countenanced a Christian America in formerly pagan or Catholic lands recently acquired from France and conquered from natives by force. The period from the American Revolution to the early Republic, from the 1770s to the 1820s, in fact, gave Americans both their greatest and most classic statements of liberty and freedom and also their most horrific instances of religiously sanctioned violence and repression. The dialectic of religious freedom and religious repression, one that roiled through the Puritan contests with natives in New England and the Spanish attempts to recover from the Pueblo Revolt, came into clearer focus in the first generation following the First Amendment. The religiously tolerant nation-state, and the racialized nation-state that increasingly defined itself as a white Protestant Republic, arose in tandem, defining the bounds of the habitation of American religion for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The messianic and millennialist dreams that inspired the rise of a democratic culture as well as the aggressive expansionism that displaced and enslaved peoples all came together in the generation of the revolution and the young Republic.

  2

  Religious Freedom and Religious Repression in the Early United States

  “We Love our country, but we love liberty more.” (Black National Convention, 1843)

  “Beware of the religion of the white man . . . every Indian who embraces it is obliged to take the road to the white man’s heaven; and yet no red man is permitted to enter there, but will have to wander about forever without a resting place.” (Gregory Dowd, 1745–1815)

  In the first third of the nineteenth century, white Americans created a new republic that valorized democracy. Meanwhile, they seized vast tracts of lands from ancestral peoples and extended a plantation economic ecosystem that produced incredible wealth, in part because the collateralization of property in slave bodies fueled a credit boom. Millions of people moved into newly opening regions, including over nine hundred thousand slaves dragged there in the “internal middle passage” from the revolutionary era to the Civil War. During these same years, the “Second Great Awakening” implanted evangelical religion as a dominant force in American cultural life. By the Civil War, pietist Christianity and chattel slavery fundamentally shaped life in the United States. The two in tandem also led directly to the American Civil War.

  African Americans and Native peoples attempted to make sense of the revolutionary transformations of the early antebellum era. From the mild A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister in the early nineteenth century and Richard Allen’s work to create the nation’s first black denomination in the early nineteenth century (the African Methodist Episcopal Church) to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the W
orld and the religiously inspired revolt of Nat Turner in 1831, they moved from dialogue with people perceived as fellow Christians, to confrontation with slaveholders perceived as demonic.

  The religious ferment of the new Republic came to a head in the early nineteenth century. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his epic study Democracy in America, there was “no country in the world where the Christian religion retains greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, some three-quarters of the American population of about twenty-three million regularly attended church. The Methodists, a small sect representing just two percent of American churchgoers at the time of the Revolution, comprised nearly twenty percent of the American population as a whole by 1820, and by mid-century numbered over one million, more than one-third of American churchgoers. By that time, there were about ten times more American Methodists than there were Congregationalists, the denomination that descended from the Puritans. With circuit-riding preachers combing the countryside on their horses, preaching to congregations throughout the newly settling areas, Methodists proved flexible enough to meet the need for religious organization on the frontier.

  In the first years of the nineteenth century, the revivals in the newly settled region around Cane Ridge, Kentucky, kicked off decades of camp meetings. At these countryside fests, several ministers simultaneously preached in large communal services, while families (including slaves) camped out along the grounds. The day alternated between devotions and prayers, meals, and ecstatic religious experiences. Peter Cartwright, a tireless Methodist camp meeting exhorter through the early nineteenth century, recalled that, even though the preachers of the time “murdered the king’s English almost every lick,” nevertheless “Divine unction attended the word preached, and thousands fell under the power of God.” Up to 10,000 people gathered from miles around and heard a dozen or more ministers of various denominations exhort. Converts at the early, most enthusiastic meetings from 1801 to 1805 recounted “trances and visions.” In later decades, religious leaders enforced stricter codes of decorum, but the camp meeting remained a popular and effective tool of democratic Protestant proselytizers.

  The democratic explosion of evangelical Christianity through the antebellum era accompanied a vast geographical expansion of slavery. For African Americans in the southern states, the promise of the American Revolution collapsed under the weight of the expansion of short-staple cotton and chattel slavery into the newly opening states of the Deep South. The Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, technological developments such as the cotton gin, military action, the subjugation of Indians in the Southeast, and the worldwide demand for cotton for textiles all fueled the rise of cotton-based economies in the Deep South. Eventually, they also spurred the rise of southern religious denominations and eventually a nascent albeit militarily conquered nation-state—the Confederate States of America.

  For Native Americans, the era of democratic Christianity also represented the apogee of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing. Most famous was the Trail of Tears episode, but that was only one of many such removals and land grabs. Democratic Christianity, the market revolution, the rapid expansion westward and southward, and a populist faith in self-determination joined together in upsetting fragile balances of power on the frontier and making the bounds of American habitations free and white. This chapter tracks particularly the varied responses from Native and African American leaders, writers, and religious prophets to the creation and rise of the white American republican experiment. The subjects include the Native prophets Tenskwatawa and Handsome Lake; the Moravian and Baptist missionaries among (and advocates for) Indians in the Southeast; and African American voices of protest from the African Methodist Episcopal Church organizer Richard Allen to Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Highland Garnet.

  NATIVES IN THE NEW REPUBLIC

  Native Americans were compelled to respond to Anglo-American power in the new Republic. No longer able to play French territorial holdings and military threats against the British, and with the failure of some abortive attempts to ally with the British against their colonists in America during the Revolutionary War, Anglo-Americans reigned as the powers that be.

  Native American leaders used religious awakenings to revitalize their beleaguered communities. From the visions of the Delaware Neolin in the mid-eighteenth century to the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa in the early nineteenth century, to Handsome Lake’s teachings among the Iroquois, and to the Redsticks and militant nativists among the Creeks and Seminoles in the Southeast, religiously inspired prophetic resistance ran through Indian communities from the Great Awakening forward into the era of Anglo-American expansionism and ethnic cleansing through the remainder of the nineteenth century.

  Although widely separated in time and geography, common visions and dreams unite the stories recounted by the Indian nativist prophets. Each of them took dream journeys and reached forks in the road along the way, with narrow roads leading to paradise and wide and more easily traversed paths taking the journeyer to some form of hell. Indeed, the concept of hell itself was probably the closest connection of these dreams to Christian theology; few Native American groups had any such definite idea of eternal torment prior to the introduction of Christianity. Those who took up the European vices, especially alcohol, found punishment. The Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa’s visions came in the early nineteenth century, following a feast in which Indians “danced and rejoiced before the Great Spirit and proposed to revive the religion of their ancestors.” Americans were children of the Evil Spirit, he said, invoking Shawnee folklore of a serpent who had come from the sea, just as had white Americans. Observers among the tribes in the early nineteenth century noted the differing and contested theologies at play. Nativists and prophets insisted on the separate creation of peoples and the notion that the “Great Spirit did not mean that the white and red people should live near each other.” After all, whites had “poison’d the land.” Eventually, Tenskwatawa led a substantial force of Indians who had gathered at Tippecanoe (also known as Prophetstown), Indiana, where they were defeated by forces led by William Henry Harrison. Harrison’s presidential campaign platform for his election in 1840 praised him as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe.

  Another Indian seer of the revolutionary era, Handsome Lake (1735–1815), was born in upstate New York and lived through the severe decline of the Iroquois nation in the late eighteenth century. Following the American Revolution, which proved disastrous for the Senecas and other Iroquois people, Handsome Lake experienced visions and called for a renewal of rituals to restore spiritual power to natives who had been corrupted by Anglo-American ways. Handsome Lake’s original message melded Iroquois lore and Christian beliefs learned from Quaker missionaries. “Our lands are decaying because we do not think on the Great Spirit,” Handsome Lake had written to President Thomas Jefferson, “but we are now going to renew our Minds and think on the great Being who made us all, that when we put our seeds in the Earth they may grow and increase like the leaves on our Trees.” Originally consumed with apocalyptic visions of Iroquois destiny, in later years Handsome Lake turned to a gospel of sobriety and industry among Indians, peace with whites, and preservation of Iroquois lands. In the religion of Handsome Lake, salvation came through following the code of Gaiwiio (“Good Word”), with a mixture of Iroquois practices (including a traditional ceremonial calendar and a mythology consonant with older beliefs) and Christian influences (temperance, confession, and a notion of conversion to a new religion). Handsome Lake presented himself originally as a messenger of the new code, a preacher, but later claimed special supernatural revelations and divine powers.

  Handsome Lake preaching his code at the Tonawanda longhouse

  Source: Painting by Ernest Smith, Tonawanda Reservation. From the collections of the Rochester Museum & Science Center, Rochester, NY.

  Native Americans faced an aggressively expansionist state intent on realizing Thomas Jefferson’s
vision of an empire for liberty. Some chose to Christianize and Anglicize. Others engaged in limited economic commerce with Europeans but otherwise maintained their own cultural practices. Still others resisted violently under the leadership of messianic individuals. For all, the outcome was more or less the same––forcible removal from their lands, repression of religious practices, and exile far westward out of the way of white settlers.

  Along the way, Creeks, Cherokees, and others in Georgia and elsewhere picked up white allies, namely missionaries intent on using the force of the Americans’ own legal codes to provide some degree of protection for besieged natives. Since the mid-eighteenth century, Moravians had established fruitful cooperative relationships with tribes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and elsewhere. In the early nineteenth century, the Moravians established a mission at Springplace, Georgia, right on a main thoroughfare connecting the roads leading out of the northern part of the state toward Chattanooga, Nashville, and other important market destinations in the upper Southeast. The missionaries built a self-sufficient enterprise using land loaned them in part by the Cherokees. They played host to a constant stream of visitors, whites and Indians alike, in a place that became a central stopping and meeting point in the heart of Cherokee country.

  At the Cherokees’ demand, the Moravians quickly took in Indian students as pupils. For the Cherokees, the main point was practical education; few evidenced much interest in Moravian religious doctrines. From 1805 to 1821, the Moravian couple John and Anna Rosina Gambold took charge of the mission and the school, where Anna Rosina served as the primary teacher at the mission school. The daily diary entries and records they kept provide one of the most complete accounts of this portion of Indian country during the time of white expansion and settlement.

  The Moravians were allowed to stay as long as they seemed to provide educational tools that might help lead to a defense of land sovereignty and to teach English needed to negotiate with powerful nation-states. Indians respected the Moravians. One Cherokee leader told the Gambolds, “We do not view you as White people at all, but rather as Indians . . . you are here only for our sake.” They did not seem to possess the same rapacious desire for land they had encountered among other whites, a lust for expansion captured in the Creek Indians’ slang term for white men—“those who grasp greedily after Indian lands.” Thus, while other whites would have to leave the country, the Moravians could stay. They pointed out to the missionaries that “some Indians allow themselves to be taken in by the white people when they claimed that they were seeking their true interests, but actually only had their own in mind,” leading to the sales of Indian lands for a pittance. He added that “it is basically not our earth, it is God’s earth. He gave it to us to live on it. He makes grass and corn grow . . . One day, when we are all dead, God will burn this earth that He has given us, and that He has given the white people, and so on.”