The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ Salvation’s glory,—compass’d helm

      With fortitude assume, and o’er your heart

      Fair trust’s invulnerable breast-plate spread. (ll. 119–23)

      Smart describes Europe in terms of her military might but the other continents in terms of their available products. The peoples of America, Africa, and Asia offer the riches of their lands for the glorification of an altar guarded by Europa. In exchange for this generosity, America receives only “a portion … of thanks and praise.” Charitable as her intentions may be, Europa wages a crusade of conquest and becomes the caretaker of God’s wealth.

      Such expectations of gifts from America also directed the ways in which real Indians were treated and discussed. After the “four Indian kings” of the Iroquois Nations visited London in 1710, for example, an apocryphal story circulated that they had offered some of their land to the “Poor Palatines,” German religious refugees camped out on the hills of Blackheath.⁸³ That this legend circulated at all is significant, especially in light of the attention the visitors’ request to the queen and the Church of England for a mission received.⁸⁴ This story was not the only episode that connected the visitors with pity and generosity. While touring London, the kings were reported to have given alms to a poor woman in a scene that affected the crowds watching them.⁸⁵ I suspect that the vision of Indian Kings remedying the material poverty of pitied Europeans suffering from Catholic persecution was viewed as the complement to their highly publicized desire for Protestant missionaries, reinforcing the model of spiritual-material exchange.

      But the more vividly English poets identified Indians with luxury, the more impoverished real Indians, especially those on the eastern seaboard, became. A letter from the missionary Gideon Hawley to the Massachusetts Historical Society, describing his almost forty years of work with the Mashpee Indians on Cape Cod, presents us with a wry fulfillment of Herbert’s prophecy. Writing in 1794, Hawley described his first meeting with the Mashpees in the late 1750s: “The natives here appeared in a very abject state…. They were dressed in English mode; but in old tattered garments and appeared below a half naked Indian in possession of his Liberty…. Their children were sold or bound as security for the payment of their fathers’ debts…. These Indians and their children were transferred from one to another master like slaves. Nevertheless to console them they had the Christian religion.”⁸⁶ Like Herbert, Hawley paired material poverty with spiritual wealth. He described the latter as compensation for the former, “consoling” the Mashpees for the loss of their wealth and freedom. Although Hawley did depict himself as trying to ameliorate the Mashpee’s material conditions, his description of their status presents an uncanny repetition of Herbert’s vision.

      The metaphors of husbandry and trade were pervasive enough that they shaped the articulation of the early Indian policy of the United States. In an address to Congress in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson noted, “The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the United States have for a considerable time been growing more and more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although effected by their voluntary sales.” Because some tribes had begun to protect their land by refusing to sell it, he argued that the government should convert the Indians entirely to a sedentary, agriculturally based economy supported by federally subsidized trading posts. Because farming required less land than hunting, “the extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless” to them. This project, combined with efforts to “multiply trading houses among them, and place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort than the possession of extensive but uncultivated wilds,” would make the Indians more willing to sell their lands. After all, he predicted, “Experience and reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.”⁸⁷ Like many a missionary, Jefferson sought to reduce the Indians to a civility marked by land enclosure, and he sold this scheme as a mutually profitable exchange.

      In this public address Jefferson insisted, “I trust and believe we are acting for [the Indians’] greatest good.” In a private letter, though, he described a less benevolent plan: “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.”⁸⁸ Jefferson described a transaction that, while more complex, amounted to the same trade Columbus’s soldiers had made of their glass for the Indians’ gold. In exchange for the lasting wealth of land, he offered only the fleeting “comfort” of manufactured goods, the alleviation of a debt in which the government had entrapped them, and the skills to farm their diminished land. He was able to describe his plan in the way he did because the discourse of mission had transformed this symbol of unfair exchange into an expression of benevolence.

      Stephen Greenblatt has observed that “the whole achievement of the discourse of Christian imperialism is to represent desires as convertible and in a constant process of exchange…. The rhetorical task of Christian imperialism then is to bring together commodity conversion and spiritual conversion.”⁸⁹ This chapter has explored one such aspect of this intersection. From the time of Columbus’s first encounter with the natives of what would be called America, one of the most important images of that encounter became the trade of gold for glass. It is one of the cruel ironies of imperial history that even as they condemned the exploitation of America and sought to save the souls of its indigenous residents, British missionaries set in place a rhetoric that bridged the benevolent and acquisitive desires of Europe in relation to America. Describing colonial commerce through biblical references to charity and the Kingdom of God, they made it possible to see Christian conversion as fair compensation for the vast sufferings of America’s natives.

      Ironically, the proponents of mission used the tropes of husbandry and trade to align their work with the domestic sphere, even as they helped define the burgeoning public sphere. They sought nationwide charitable collections, established some of Britain’s earliest philanthropic organizations, and reified the idea of voluntary collective endeavor. With Indian visitors such as the Iroquois in 1710 and Samson Occom in 1766–68 they gave Britain some of its most memorable public spectacles. As they presented the pitiable state of Indians to their readers, the texts of British mission developed new ways of expressing shared and public sentiment. Yet they did all this while separating British mission rhetorically from the world of politics and violence. How missionary letters and sermons contributed to the development of collective identity and shared sentiment is the topic of the next two chapters.

       Chapter 2

       “I Have Received Your Christian and Very Loving Letter”: Epistolarity and Transatlantic Community

      Early British missionary writings encompass an eclectic corpus of narratives, dictionaries, biographies, and journals, but one of the most prominent genres is the letter. The British hardly set precedent here, as the vast collection of letters making up The Jesuit Relations testifies. The earliest English effort at fund-raising for a mission in America was organized through letters from James I to the archbishops, and then from the archbishops to their church wardens, who raised money at the parish level.¹ Most of the “Indian Tracts” describing work in New England are made up of letters between ministers on either side of the Atlantic, along with epistles to the reader, Parliament, and Cromwell. The SPG’s annual reports include abstracts of letters from missionaries, and from 1708 to 1718 this group also published a series of letters from one of its members to a friend in London.² The SSPCK published some of its texts, such as A Genuine Letter from Mr. John Brainard [sic] (1752), in epistolary form. The Moravians’ first fund-raising publications, such as Latrobe’s Succinct View of the Missions Established Among the Heathen by the Church of the Brethren, or Unitas Fratrum СКАЧАТЬ