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Introduction

“The Common Bowels of Pity to the Miserable”

In Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe tells us that in his eighteenth year as a castaway he stumbled across the remnants of a cannibalistic feast. Repulsed by “this horrid Spectacle,” he “gave God Thanks that had cast my first Lot in a Part of the World, where I was distinguish’d from such dreadful Creatures as these.” He then spent several weeks plotting “how I might destroy some of these Monsters in their cruel bloody Entertainment.” After a while, though, he gave up these fantasies, as he considered the injustice of “so outragious an Execution as the killing twenty or thirty naked Savages.” Several factors prompted this change of heart. Crusoe admitted that the Caribes had not hurt him by slaughtering each other. He considered that any attack might result in his own death. He began to pity the Caribes, “who it seems had been suffer’d by Providence in his wise Disposition of the World, to have no other Guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated Passions.” He wondered, how could God want him to kill Indians for their sinful acts when he had never told them those acts were sins?¹

The real change, though, occurred when he realized that killing cannibals “would justify the Conduct of the Spaniards in all their Barbarities practis’d in America.” After all, the Indians of Mexico “had several bloody and barbarous Rites in their Customs,” but they were “yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent People.” To kill these Caribes would make Crusoe just like the Spanish, who, he categorically proclaimed, were “without Principles of Tenderness, or the common Bowels of Pity to the Miserable.”² Crusoe gave up on murdering the Caribes because he pitied them, but more because he could not bear to think of himself as a man without pity. His response was ponderous and self-conscious, precisely because it emerged from his need to think of himself as one who, unlike the Spanish, spontaneously felt pity. A few years later he did find an opportunity to be both compassionate and violent. After dreaming of and planning for such an occasion, he killed two Caribes in order to rescue and enslave one of their captives, another Caribe he named Friday. Although Crusoe was pleased to hear reports from Friday of some white men nearby who had killed many people, “by all which I understood, he meant the Spaniards, whose Cruelties in America had been spread over the whole Countries,” his hopes for rescue from the island did not distract from his need to understand himself as a more compassionate colonist.³

The primary expression of Crusoe’s benevolence, the action that provided him with a sense of his difference from the Spanish, was his effort to convert Friday to Protestant Christianity. Crusoe assures his readers, “I was not wanting to lay a Foundation of Religious Knowledge in his Mind,” and he relates some of their conversations about religion. Stymied by difficult questions from his student, he “seriously pray’d to God that he would enable me to instruct savingly this poor Savage, assisting by his Spirit the Heart of the poor ignorant Creature.” Finally, after three years he concluded that “the Savage was now a good Christian, a much better than I.” Friday’s conversion solidified Crusoe’s own reform, and it offered evidence to Crusoe of his own religious sensibility, so that “a secret Joy run through every Part of my Soul.”⁴

The process by which Crusoe sublimated his hatred and his fear into heroic violence and evangelical fervor, while distinguishing himself from the cruel Spanish, has been a common one in the history of Britain’s colonial encounters.⁵ Assisted by Protestant propaganda, the horror the “civilized” person feels at the spectacle of “savagery” is overcome by a deeper need to establish difference between the people who feel compassion and those who can or will not. The ability to replace fear and disgust with pity, to transform the instinct to kill into the desire to convert, marks Crusoe, to himself, as civilized.

Joseph Conrad presented a reversal of this process, or a revelation of its underlying reality, almost two centuries later in Heart of Darkness. In this novel the ivory trader Kurtz, described to the narrator as “an emissary of pity” and a model of efficiency, cut off the platitudes in his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs by scrawling, “Exterminate all the Brutes!” Imperialist pity, manifested in efforts to eradicate savagery and welcome new members into the circle of the civilized, is revealed to be a veil over exploitation and murderous desire, part of what inspires Kurtz’s famous dying words, “The Horror! The Horror!”⁶ His mission, supposedly a convergence of efficiency and compassion seen in his effort to transform the Congolese into organized exporters of ivory, has converted him into a man of unimaginable brutality. He has become as incapable of pity as the Spaniards to whom Crusoe could not bear to compare himself, and his transformation has exposed imperialists’ pretensions to benevolence.

Examined together, these two stories trace an arc in British attitudes to colonization. They shift from horror at the savage other, to a pity that inspires efforts to convert the other into a version of the self, then finally to a horror that is as much of the self’s own behavior as of the other’s. In a way, they describe the rise and then the fall of an imperial rhetoric built on the claims of compassion. This book is a study of the pity that British people expressed for Indians in the years preceding the American Revolution. It focuses on the pity they expressed for Indians’ souls, which prompted declarations of hopes to convert them to Protestant Christianity. It explores what this emotion, as articulated in missionary writings, tells us about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British attitudes to Indians, to the British themselves, and to the ethical value of feeling.

“Pitty to Mens Soules”: Protestant Structures of Feeling

The history of British mission in North America was one in which words outweighed deeds and textual production exceeded conversions. From the time they began to explore America, the British talked a great deal about their desire to convert the continent’s indigenous peoples to Christianity. These intentions did translate into efforts, but they were few and feeble, especially in comparison with the work of the Spanish and the French. When missions did not fail through the resistance of Indians or the indifference of the British, war and disease rendered the work tragically redundant, destroying those native peoples who had accepted their invaders’ religion.

This failure was an eloquent one, however. Although they did not create widespread conversions among Indians, the British people devoted much paper and ink to expressing their evangelical aspirations and seeking funds for missions. They produced many sermons, journals, letters, tracts, and even a few poems. Ironically, these writings are the primary accomplishment of British mission in the American colonies, as their influence often exceeded the effectiveness of the projects they were written to promote.

British missionary efforts among American Indians have received much attention from historians, but the documents produced in connection with these projects rarely have been examined as works of rhetorical complexity and depth.⁷ In the past decade literary scholars such as Thomas Scanlan and Gordon Sayre have incorporated these texts into studies of colonial travel writings, ethnographies, and literature.⁸ Others, such as Joshua Bellin, Sandra Gustafson, and Hilary Wyss, have examined some of them for evidence of the active but erased role Indians played in shaping colonial America or in maintaining their own culture in the face of conquest.⁹ Together these projects show us much about the responses indigenous peoples had to the colonizing force of Christianity, as well as the ways in which the British portrayed Indians.

Rather than asking what missionary writings tell us about Indians and their responses to a colonial presence, this book asks how these texts encouraged their readers to think about their own emotional responses. I have taken this approach in an effort to untangle the knot of ambivalent benevolence that is at the center of many British and American attitudes to Indians and that still influences portrayals of Indians. In taking this approach I have been inspired by Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Morrison describes her book as a study of “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it,” as part of an effort to break a “pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequence on the victim—of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes.”¹⁰ While attending to the differences between race and religion as rationales for categorization, I have tried to translate Morrison’s approach into the complex attitudes that produced and followed from missionary projects. I have considered the ways in which the tenor of Britain’s imperialism developed through reference to Indians in the same way that Morrison suggests figures such as the American “frontier gentleman” were “backgrounded by slavery.”¹¹

Many missionary writings were basically advertisements for a charitable cause. As advertisements, they encouraged their readers to desire something they may not have known they wanted: the conversion of America’s natives. Sometimes they persuaded their readers to support this work by stressing the practical benefits of Indian conversion, such as the promotion of trade. What they sold most often, though, was pity. While the British expressed pity for all non-Christians and non-Europeans, Indians offered a uniquely poignant object for the expression of this sentiment. Unknown to Europe until recent times, absent from and unaware of the Bible, impoverished in countless ways but rich with the potential to be remade in the image of their invaders, they promised the British all sorts of fulfillment as by-products of their effort to fill the Indians’ need.

As soon as they encountered the native peoples of the New World, Europeans expressed their intentions to convert and “civilize” them. The propagation of the gospel was a traditional duty based on Jesus’ command, “Go ye … and teach all nations.”¹² Europe had an obligation to extend the benefits of Christianity to heathen lands, just as it had been Christianized centuries before. When he asked the Archbishop of York to oversee collections for a school for Indians at Jamestown’s Henrico College in 1615, King James I did so by writing, “Wee doubt not but that yow, and all others, who wishe well to the increase of Christian Religion, wilbe willing to give all assistance and furtherance yow maie.”¹³ His logic was clear: to be Christian was to support the increase of Christianity. Millenarian beliefs that the conversion of heathens and Jews must precede the Final Judgment enhanced this obligation, as did many theories that Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel.¹⁴

While it drew upon traditional Christian duties, early modern missionary discourse acquired distinct characteristics from its development in the context of the Reformation and the rise of the nation-state. With the exception of the Jesuit Andrew White’s attempts to convert Algonquians in Maryland in the 1630s and 1640s, British projects were emphatically Protestant.¹⁵ Their characterization in fund-raising texts reflected the erratic and violent response of the British Isles to the Reformation in the Tudor years, as well as ongoing conflicts with Catholic powers. Defensive about the hundred-year head start Spain had acquired in the Americas, the English and Scots condemned Catholic missionary accomplishments as the result of tyranny. Claims about the deceptions of French Jesuits, who along with other missionary orders had made enviable progress among native groups in Canada, followed. As they contrasted the quantity of Catholic conversions with the quality of English and Scottish concern for Indian souls, they made benevolence central to an ideology of Englishness or Scottishness, and later of Britishness. The writings acknowledged a Christian mission to America as their duty, but they described it as a fervent desire generated from pity for a people who had never heard the gospel. This pity marked England, Scotland, and then Britain as the antidote to Catholic cruelty and proof that its people were the true people of God.¹⁶

In 1641 William Castell, a minister of Northamptonshire, published a petition to Parliament “for the Propagating of the Gospel in America.”¹⁷ In this petition, which was signed by more than seventy English and Scottish ministers, Castell asked Parliament to fund a settlement, just south of the Virginia colony, which would be focused on the conversion of Indians. He argued that England must compete with Spain, and he stressed the benefits of transplanting England’s excess population abroad. At the core of his petition, though, was a basic complaint that the colonization of the Americas had “never beene generally undertaken in pitty to mens soules.”¹⁸

To illustrate this absence of pity, Castell attacked Spanish “boasts” to have converted the natives of their colonies by describing the “monstrous cruelties” that the missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas had said his own countrymen committed in America: “[T]hey cut downe men as they did corne without any compassion…. They lodged them like bruite beasts under the planks of their ships, till their flesh rotted from their backs: And if any failed in the full performance of his daily taske, hee was sure to bee whipped till his body distilled with goar blood.” Castell delivered this gruesome vignette not only to prove that the Spanish were “without any compassion,” but also to provoke compensatory pity in his readers for Spain’s victims. He defined a religious mandate as an emotional response, “compassion to mens soules.”¹⁹ This pamphlet precedes by at least twenty years an era often described as one of sensibility, in which philosophers argued that humans were inherently good because they felt sorrow at the sight of suffering.²⁰ His petition, one of the first attempts to muster English and Scottish support for the conversion of Indians through the printed word, suggests an earlier starting date for an era of preoccupation with benevolent feeling. It also shows how the tendency to mark compassion as a sign of goodness found expression through Europeans’ efforts to understand their relation to the natives of foreign lands.

English missionary writings did not have the popularity of sentimental novels such as Richardson’s Pamela, nor did they have the lasting intellectual influence of philosophical tracts such as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. But as they linked Britain’s imperial self-image to the compassion its people felt for heathens and used that emotion to encourage donations, they anticipated many of the ideas and gestures that would constitute the culture of sensibility. Early missionary writings described the support of distant conversion efforts as an activity of national importance and a point of national pride. That is, they insisted that missions to Indians were crucial to securing English and then British interests abroad, while at the same time describing the concern that residents in Britain felt for Indians as a quality that demonstrated the country’s moral superiority over powers such as France and Spain. While early missionary writings seem to have stressed their readers’ pity in order to elicit financial support, the texts’ discussions of shared feeling came to have an importance that overshadowed missionary work. They influenced debates about emotion, and they helped foster the idea—commonplace in the present day—that voluntary participation in a large-scale charitable enterprise is in and of itself a virtuous and pleasing thing, making oneself feel part of a collective endeavor while maximizing one’s own potential to do good. Such notions had important implications for the development of British national feeling and for the culture of sensibility.

Perhaps the most significant contribution they made to this culture was to supply a mental framework for extending the emotional connections and obligations Britons felt they should feel. Asking why the British abolished the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, Thomas Haskell has argued that one cause of a widespread humanitarian sensibility was the rise of a capitalist market, which “inculcate[d] altered perceptions of causation in human affairs.” The vast networks of investment and trade that the market made possible also propelled “an enhancement of causal perception,” which “extend[ed] moral responsibility beyond its former limits.”²¹ This book suggests that if the market was the primary cause of this cognitive and ethical shift, the rhetoric of Protestant mission provided crucial preconditions for it.

Missionary writings often equated financial transactions with spiritual ones, and the spiritual links they envisioned among humans offered precursors to the webs of economic interdependence that would develop with colonial trade. Through the evangelical mandate of Christianity they linked pity metaphorically with profit, making possible stronger connections between economic and emotional discourse. By insisting on the effects that pity for Indians would have when translated into prayers and funds, they encouraged readers to understand emotion not just as something felt or expressed, but also as something that circulates, transacts, and connects. In this way missionary writings reinforced a transatlantic British consciousness, teaching their readers to imagine themselves connected to distant compatriots as they shared feeling for a pitied object. While they elevated the importance of emotion to ethics, these texts also called attention to the problems that an emotionally centered morality produced. In many ways, then, missionary writings can help us understand the complex status that emotion held in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies.

Between Christians: Pity, Sympathy, Proximity, and Distance

I tend to use the words pity and compassion in this book, rather than empathy, sympathy, sensibility, or sentimentality, to describe British attitudes toward unconverted Indians. All of these words connote an emotional response to scenes of suffering, but there are important differences among them. Missionary writings were more likely to ask for readers’ pity than their sympathy for Indians, and for good reason. Sympathy—which comes from the Greek word pathos, meaning feeling or suffering, and a prefix meaning like or the same—has to do, of course, with an imagined or authentic experience of shared feeling. Empathy—which combines pathos with the Greek prefix en or in—also suggests intimacy between one who witnesses and one who feels an emotion.

Pity comes from the Latin word pietas, or piety, which in turn comes from the word pius, meaning duty. In its most literal form this word does not describe an emotion born of sameness, but rather the mercy born of religious devotion. The King James Bible, the translation that would have been familiar to most English readers after its publication in 1611, only uses the term sympathy a few times in the Epistles (Phil. 2:1; 1 Pet. 3:8), but it uses pity (or the lack of it) to describe how God treats sinners and Israel treats its enemies (Deut. 7:16, Hos. 1:6, 2:23). Sympathy has narrow use, applying only to relationships within the Christian community, while pity applies to a broad spectrum of relations among humans or between humans and God. Pity also tends to describe relationships marked by an imbalance of power between those feeling and those provoking this emotion, suggesting in particular the omnipotence of God. The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560 and in print until 1644, does not even use the word sympathy when the King James does, translating pity in Philippians and compassion in 1 Peter.²² The terms the King James Bible uses most often to describe a reaction to the sight of suffering are mercy, derived from the Latin word for “reward,” and compassion, meaning “to suffer with,” a term that suggests imagined identification but not sameness.²³ The missionaries often referred to “compassion,” and I sometimes use it interchangeably with “pity.”

Milton also distinguished between sympathy and pity in Paradise Lost (1667). When the Son of God decides to clothe the fallen Adam and Eve, he does so because he is “pitying how they stood / Before him naked to the air.”²⁴ At the same moment, Satan’s monstrous daughter Sin is able to sense, from her place at the gates of Hell, that the Fall has occurred in Eden. She attributes this awareness to

… sympathy, or some connatural force

Powerful greatest distance to unite

With secret amity things of like kind

By secretest conveyance.²⁵

“Sympathy,” as Milton uses it here, is a morally neutral term that conveys an awareness of shared feeling. “Pity,” on the other hand, suggests the benevolence bestowed by an all-powerful God.

In the seventeenth century pity usually was understood as an emotion that emerged from an acknowledgment of obligation, suggesting the goodness of the one who feels it. When expressed for one deprived of salvation, therefore, “pity” can suggest a gap of morality and entitlement between those feeling and those receiving it. An address by Cotton Mather to the Indians of New England configured “pity” in this way: “[I]t is God that has caused us to desire his glory in your salvation; and our hearts have bled with pity over you, when we have seen how horribly the devil oppressed you in this, and destroyed you in another world.”²⁶ In this text the bleeding hearts of the English distinguish them from the Indians, evidencing their blessing as much as it suggests the Indians’ damnation.

While earlier usage gave “pity” a connotation quite different from the similarity suggested by “sympathy,” these terms began to overlap in the eighteenth century. Many writers and speakers in this era came to connect “sympathy” with sorrow for another creature’s suffering by rooting that sorrow in the ability to imagine oneself in the situation of the sufferer. This connection, established by moral philosophers and popular novelists alike, fostered a popular culture of “sensibility,” a term Janet Todd has defined as “the capacity for refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering.”²⁷

Missionary writings intersected pity with sympathy, although in a less direct manner. This intersection was the result of the writers’ attempts to answer a difficult question: Why should British readers contribute to the assistance of a foreign people when there were dire needs at their own doors? However commendable and however useful for competition with France and Spain, missions in America were not obviously connected to most readers’ immediate concerns. The proponents of mission had to develop ways of linking their readers conceptually to this distant work.

Some missionary texts simply relied on the boundless compassion of their audience. When he delivered the sermon of 1763 before the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), Thomas Randall, a minister of Inchture, titled his text Christian Benevolence. Throughout this sermon, delivered just as “so many Indian tribes ha[d] fallen under the dominion of Great Britain” at the end of the Seven Years’ War, Randall encouraged his listeners to support missions to Indians as an expression of their “desir[e for] the happiness of others.”²⁸ He rehearsed pragmatic arguments for missionary projects, such as “the unceasing activity of the priests of Rome … to pervert more of these Heathen tribes,” but his focus was on the pleasure his audience would feel at “a happy opportunity for exerting our Christian benevolence.”²⁹ As a reward for their charity he offered only “an elevation in their minds,” while they imagined the joy brought to converts, and an enhanced closeness with others: “[B]y … communication with the knowledge of others, their love, and their attainments, we enter into their joys, and make them all our own.”³⁰ If they extended their sympathy throughout Britain’s empire, donors in Scotland would enrich their own sense of self.

Randall’s assumption of his audience’s boundless compassion reflected a tradition of optimistic moral philosophy that extended from the Cambridge Platonists of the Restoration through early eighteenth-century deists to the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Reacting against cynical visions of an egoistic human nature developed by Thomas Hobbes and then by Bernard Mandeville, many British intellectuals had come to rely on emotion, particularly a tendency to feel sorrow at the sight of suffering, as proof of humans’ natural selflessness.³¹ Early in the century the third Earl of Shaftesbury linked the moral sense to taste, suggesting that most humans would find what was good also to be pleasing. Francis Hutcheson extended this view by “reducing reason to an ancillary role in ethics,” as Norman Fiering has noted, and by asserting the universal range of human compassion.³² Randall’s sermon emerged from the efforts of orthodox Scottish Presbyterians to integrate secular enlightened principles with evangelical Calvinist ones after the transatlantic revivals of the mid-eighteenth century.³³

Writing at a moment of imperial optimism and in the midst of a culture steeped in ideals of benevolence, Randall alluded to his audience’s limitless compassion as an obvious matter. Yet few authors of missionary tracts, especially earlier ones, so casually assumed that their readers would be able or willing to extend their compassion across an ocean to a foreign recipient.³⁴ While some philosophers argued for the limitless range of pity, others denied that humans could feel compassion across a distance. David Hume insisted in 1739 that “pity depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity, and even the sight of the object.”³⁵ Although he granted pity a wider range, Adam Smith insisted that humans were not obliged to extend it into distant quarters. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he berated “those whining and melancholy moralists” who suggest that no one should feel pleasure while a single person in the world suffers.³⁶ Rather than arguing that one might feel joy by expressing compassion, Smith described boundless pity as an obstacle to pleasure. Even as he made intelligible the complex global systems that make distant suffering discernable, he denied the emotional tug of that suffering.³⁷

Smith suggested that when compassion is stretched too far, it depletes the spectator without benefit to the sufferer. This distaste for the “artificial commiseration”³⁸ the sentimental spectator feels for distant sufferers became more pronounced as Smith revised this text. When he added a discussion of benevolence to the sixth edition in 1790, he juxtaposed the infinite scope of benevolent feeling with its limited effectiveness: “Though our effectual good offices can very seldom be extended to any wider society than that of our own country; our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe.”³⁹ While they feel sorrow at the most distant distress, humans should help those nearest themselves and leave the rest to God’s care: “The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department … the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department” (VI.ii.3.6, p. 237). This commentary expanded on Smith’s theory that sympathy, which he defined as a sense of shared feeling and situation, directs one’s pity, which he defined as “fellow-feeling with the sorrow of others.”⁴⁰ Benevolent feeling may be universal, but benevolent action should be local. Echoing classical definitions of pity, such as Aristotle’s, but incorporating aspects of the egoistic philosophy forwarded by Mandeville, he argued that selfishness guides selflessness.⁴¹

When they asked readers in Britain to assist in alleviating the spiritual plight of Indians, missionaries would seem to have fit within Smith’s category of “whining and melancholy moralists.” If it were even possible for them to extend their readers’ sympathetic capacity across a great distance and a vast cultural gap, their depictions of Indians threatened to ruin the happiness of British readers and distract them from more appropriate objects of their care. But it is clear that whatever their motivations, many Britons expressed interest in the spiritual fate of Indians. If the most obvious aspect of British missionary projects in America was their failure to convert many Indians, one of the most surprising was their success in raising funds for those endeavors. The New England Company gathered £15,000 between 1649 and 1660, the Mohegan and Presbyterian minister Samson Occom raised more than £10,000 during his preaching tour of Britain in 1766–68, and several times the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) supplemented its annual subscriptions with lucrative nation wide parish collections.⁴² Missionary charity dried up during Anglo-Indian wars, but it persistently returned, even amid domestic unrest. The New England Company’s collection began weeks after the execution of Charles I, while Occom’s tour occurred shortly after the Seven Years’ War. The SPG and the SSPCK continued to collect funds in the wake of the South Sea Bubble, during riots and Jacobite invasions, and in spite of glaring local poverty.

We may well wonder how such projects could have made sense to those donors who had never left Britain. What could have made them care enough to contribute? It is one thing to assemble a discourse of imperial validation through claims to be saving heathen souls, but giving funds to carry out this claim is another matter. What gains did donors think they were getting for their generosity? Was it the case that, as Smith’s work might suggest, they were “occupied in contemplating the more sublime” cases of need, while neglecting their own humble department? Should we attribute these donations to a basic sense of duty, to millenarian apprehension, to fear of Catholics, to self-promotional displays of generosity, to guilt?

I believe all these motivations applied, in varying degrees, to donors, but we still need to account for the complex discursive process by which the promoters of missions in America made readers in Britain care about distant projects and feel empowered to assist them. Ann Jessie Van Sant has described the widely held eighteenth-century view that “sympathetic feelings, which require vividness and proximity, arise through an act of the imagination largely dependent on sight.”⁴³ This visually oriented understanding of pity underlay the fund-raising strategies that charities such as the Magdalen House for reformed prostitutes deployed, especially ceremonies that placed objects of charity before the gaze of their benefactors. She writes, “Contemplation of the fortunes of others, with the actual eye or the mind’s eye, allows an imaginative exchange of place that ‘makes real’ and ‘brings near’ experience not one’s own.”⁴⁴ Compassion is enabled by a visual aid, especially when it is propelled by the evangelical fantasy of making the other spiritually similar.

The desire to make Indians visible did govern much of the discourse of mission. Promoters were well aware of the boosts their projects were likely to receive when they presented living Indians to a metropolitan audience. The widely celebrated visit to London in 1710 of “the four Indian kings,” representatives of the Iroquois nations, inspired much British interest in missions, as did Occom’s visit in 1766–68.⁴⁵ Because they rarely could present living Indian converts to benefactors in Britain, however, fund-raising tracts often fabricated such spectacles by presenting detailed portrayals of Indians complete with evocative descriptions of emotional turmoil.

But in spite of efforts to include affecting portraits of Indians, few missionary texts truly asked readers to feel sympathy for them. Even if the figure of the Indian had not had to compete in British minds with images of murderous savages from captivity narratives, the writers of these texts seem to have anticipated, and perhaps themselves felt, an inability to express sympathy for a people so distant—culturally or geographically—from themselves. British depictions of Indians often elicited less emotional connection than spectatorial objectification from their audience. This is always a hazard of such portrayals, but it was especially likely with Indians, whose depictions had been overdetermined by their displays as “New World artifacts and curiosities placed in ‘Raree Shows’ near Bible-thumping chapels,” as Polly Stevens Fields has noted, as well as in travel writings.⁴⁶ Occom demonstrated his painful awareness of the function his visit to Britain had served when he reminded his teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, “[I]f you had not this Indian Buck you would not [have] Collected a quarter of the Money you did, one gentleman in Particular in England said to me, if he hadn’t Seen my face he woudnt have given a tuppence but now I have 50 pounds freely.”⁴⁷ Much of the money Occom raised seems to have emerged more from fascination at his racial difference than from a sense of shared situation.

Instead of eliciting sympathy, many missionary writings asked readers to feel pity for the Indians presented to them, but then encouraged readers to feel sympathy for other British people, and sometimes for non-British Protestants, who were trying to save the Indians. Through a variety of strategies that I will explore in this book, these writings operated within an understanding of “sympathy” that anticipated and transcended Smith’s dichotomy between global and local. For although missionary texts beckoned their readers’ compassionate gazes to faraway lands, they often marked that imagined connection as a self-referential one to other British people. The readers of these texts were encouraged to think of Christian mission as a duty placed within their inner circles of obligation. This duty emerged from self-interest, as it would help secure Britain’s interests abroad, its safety at home, its moral purity, and—for some audiences—the second coming of Christ. To assist missionary projects was also, however, to help English or Scottish people in the colonies, and to prove the compassion that all Britons felt for the spiritually needy. Even while stressing the Indians’ foreignness, missionary writings thus presented Indians as the focal point for a triangulated expression of closeness between other English, Scots, or Europeans.

While eliciting pity, and while stressing the profits of promoting the gospel, the writers of these texts at once evoked and peddled a transatlantic sense of togetherness. That is, they insisted that everyone must help in this endeavor if it was to succeed, but they also suggested that one reward of such charity would be an enhanced collective identity. English people would feel themselves to be part of a great and divinely blessed endeavor if they all helped their compatriots in the colonies spread the gospel among America’s Indians. In the preface to an account of Puritan New England missions, the Independent preacher Joseph Caryl proclaimed in 1655, “Beloved Brethren, Yee may now see and taste the fruit of those Prophecies, which ye have been helping to birth.”⁴⁸ Suggesting the tangible rewards of mission through the medium of the text, Caryl also marked his readers as “Brethren” connected by their midwifery to a spiritual birth. As he sought funds in 1650 for the conversion of the Indians he thought were the lost tribes of Israel, Thomas Thorowgood insisted, “[S]urely the poore natives will not be a little encouraged to looke after the glorious Gospel of Christ, when they shall understand that not onely the English among them, but wee all here are daily sutors for them at the throne of grace.”⁴⁹ Thorowgood described two triangles of affection: the first between the English, their counterparts in America, and the Indians, and the second between the English, the Indians, and God.

Collective acts of giving, Thorowgood suggested, are mutually enriching because they strengthen these triangulated relations. By pooling their resources for Indians, the English can connect with their brethren abroad: “And let these words be understood as awakenings to those of our nation there and our selves also that wee all labour mutually and from our hearts, to propagate the Gospell there because wee, who eate every man of his owne vine, and of his owne figtree and drinke every man water out of his owne cisterne (Esa 36.16) should witnesse our thankfulnesse unto God, for these favours, by sympathizing affections toward our brethren there, and the natives.”⁵⁰ Sealing transatlantic ties, mission also promises reciprocal profit: “Honour will redound to this England, not onely from ours there, who professe truly, if they prosper, we shall be the more glorious, but the Natives enlightened by us will return hither the tribute of their abundant thankfulness.”⁵¹ The text argues that advocacy for Indians will enhance England’s own case for salvation, just as underwriting mission will increase trade. Money becomes the medium of, and a metaphor for, mutual redemption. It provides the channel through which networks of sympathy are extended to include others by remaining focused on those closest to oneself. Collective missionary endeavor promotes profit, but collective identity also is the profit.

This economically articulated triangle of compassion between colonial missionaries, their metropolitan readers, and the Indians they were trying to save shares much with the erotic triangles studied by Eve Sedgwick and Rene Girard.⁵² Just as men often are portrayed in literature as manifesting attraction to each other through romantic rivalry for a feminine object, the writers of missionary texts expressed affinity and sought mutual benefit through their pity for Indians. In terms of the rhetorical categories developed by Aristotle, missionary writings rooted their pathos in their ethos, and they defined ethos largely as a matter of shared pathos.⁵³ That is, these texts generated emotion (pathos) for their cause by establishing the character of the text’s author (ethos), and they established the author’s character by stressing his closeness—in situation, nationality, affect, and belief—to the audience. The pity for Indians that the audience was asked to feel was generated through affinity with the texts’ authors. Shared pity for Indians, in turn, fostered ties between British people on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to affectionate correspondences between individuals, collaborations between groups, and suggestions that the effort to save Indians souls united all Britons, in Britain and America, in a shared endeavor. Several marginal groups also claimed that missionary projects generated from shared pity for Indians would contribute to national solidarity and strength in order to assert their affective membership in a developing national community that might otherwise have ignored them. Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and other denominations each described missions in ways that made their work seem central to Britain, even as they described the multidenominational and transatlantic unity that assisted and followed from such work.

It will not be lost on many readers that this description of collectivity draws on the work of Benedict Anderson and others on nationalism. Anderson has outlined the ways in which novels and newspapers reconfigured the cognitive boundaries of their readers, prompting them to understand themselves as engaged in shared acts of readership and connected with distant horizons of activity.⁵⁴ In the last decade much scholarship has charted a causal trajectory from discourse to discursive community, showing how the reading of new types of texts generated modern forms of social feeling. These sentiments crossed the gaps of geography and urban anonymity, affectively linking disparate people.⁵⁵

Missionary writings served purposes similar to an effect often attributed to the newspaper, periodical, or novel: the enhancement of collective identities and norms of civility. Like newspapers (and, to some degree, novels), they conveyed a sense of things happening all over the world, at one time, which the reader could read about and imagine.⁵⁶ Like essay periodicals and sentimental novels they presented various affective responses as signs of internal inclinations and beliefs, modeling reactions that their readers could imitate if they wanted to feel included in communities of the civilized or genteel. The contribution that missionary texts made to this process, though, was more complicated than those made by secular genres. For they helped construct a modern vision of civil society, of a nation, and sometimes of a supra-national collective by alluding to what we might consider one of the earliest geographically dispersed and imagined communities, the early Christian Church.⁵⁷ As articulated in the New Testament, this community defined itself by a set of religious beliefs and in the enactment of a compassion most vividly expressed in efforts to expand the community’s membership through the propagation of its creed. The great differences between the early Christian Church and modern nations do not eclipse the consistent phenomenon of a group in which people are made to feel membership through shared emotions and beliefs that find expression through circulating texts.

Whether such rhetoric actually helped to create a transatlantic nationalism felt throughout Britain and the colonies is hard to say, but it is clear that such claims were used to develop transoceanic networks among members of the same religious communities, such as seventeenth-century Puritans and eighteenth-century evangelicals. The notion of a nation characterized by benevolent feeling certainly became a component of the ideology of both Britain and the United States, and arguably is still an important aspect of both nations’ self-images. Studying the ways in which these texts sought to expand their readers’ capacity for sympathetic engagement and charity, by triangulating pity for Indians with empathy for the Indians’ missionaries and British neighbors, helps us see how these texts provided a religious template for increasingly secular forms of collective sentiment. Linking group identity to emotion and emphasizing the ability of spectators to assist in distant work, these writings prompted their readers to see themselves not just as part of an imagined community but also as participants in a vicariously enacted one.⁵⁸

“Poor Indians” and the Ethics of Emotion

As it influenced depictions of Indians, pity became a crucial component of the British people’s developing sense of themselves as a people whose boundaries would extend as far as their ability to feel sorrow for suffering did. It presented a simple way to govern ethical obligations amid enlarged webs of human relations, especially those resulting from colonialism, slavery, and intercontinental trade. It proved to be a problematic basis for moral judgment, however, so that in the late eighteenth century the philosopher Immanuel Kant excluded emotions from the arena of morality.⁵⁹ While Indians offered useful occasions for the expression of pity, attempts to convert them compelled the British to contemplate the implications of equating pity with goodness. These writings thus provide a focal point for examining some of the questions and debates that developed around the use of emotion as a moral touchstone.

An immediate question was the trustworthiness of expressions of pity. One of the most obvious statements one can make about Europe’s colonial projects is that they often caused great suffering in the name of alleviating suffering. It is tempting to interpret this paradox entirely as the result of dishonesty. Conrad seemed to reach this conclusion when he wrote about Heart of Darkness, “All the bitterness of those days …—all my indignation at masquerading philanthropy—have been with me again, while I wrote…. I have divested myself of everything but pity—and some scorn—while putting down the insignificant events that bring on the catastrophe.”⁶⁰ Conrad suggested that as he stripped a veneer of benevolence from the reality of imperial exploitation, he was motivated by pity. True sorrow at the sight of suffering prompted him to attack an insincere pity that caused suffering.

It is important, however, to see that pity can be morally problematic even when authentically felt. The moral implications of pity become especially complex when it is expressed as a desire to save another’s soul. As they elicited compassion arising less from sensory data than religious conviction, missionary writings encouraged readers to pity a people who did not necessarily feel that they were in pain. They prompted readers to feel compassion for another precisely because of his or her spiritual otherness. Yet they exhorted their readers to channel that emotion toward adopting that foreign other into their own religion. They enunciated the distance between self and other and then sought to bridge that distance through an intensive process of spiritual transformation and rigorous acculturation.

Because distance—both cultural and geographical—is such a prominent aspect of missionary writings, these texts provide a useful site for examining the ethical dilemmas that arose from the detachment inherent in texts evoking sympathy or pity. As Karen Halttunen has observed, “Although spectatorial sympathy claimed to demolish social distance, it actually rested on social distance—a distance reinforced, in sentimental art, by the interposition of written text, stage, or canvas between the virtuous spectator and the (imaginary) suffering victim.”⁶¹ This problem became prominent in the sentimental culture of the mid-eighteenth century. It was in this era that many literary texts were devoted to eliciting intense feeling for the sufferings of their main characters to convey moral lessons, but also to entertain. “The literary scenario of suffering, which made ethics a matter of viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive kind of voyeurism.”⁶² Pushed to its logical conclusion, this voyeurism led to the “pornography of pain” that Halttunen has analyzed in humanitarian, sensationalist, and erotic publications of the nineteenth century. Along with concerns about the inauthenticity of vicarious feeling, these worries about voyeurism also led to a pejorative connotation of “sentimentality” in the late eighteenth century.⁶³ Whether it excited its viewers or not, the spectacle of pain could end up inspiring more emotion than action.

The complex role that pity played in missionary writings is suggested by the shifting meaning of the adjective missionaries most often used to describe Indians: “the poor Indians,” or sometimes “the poor heathens.”⁶⁴ As Joseph Caryl wrote, “The poor, naked, ignorant Indians, who lately knew no civill Order, now beg to be brought into Church Order, to live under the Government, and enjoy the holy ordinances of our Lord Jesus Christ.”⁶⁵ The word poor was used often in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe any figure worthy of pity. In Puritan context it also connoted a soul in need of salvation, but it appeared with unusual frequency in relation to Indians. In missionary writings the word poor conveys several meanings at once: it indicates material need, a lack of civilization, spiritual impoverishment, and brutal treatment by Catholic colonists. Central to missionary writings, the figure of the “poor Indian” also appeared in texts such as Pope’s Essay on Man:

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;

His soul proud Science never taught to stray

Far as the solar walk, or milky way;

Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n,

Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav’n;

Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d,

Some happier island in the watry waste,

Where slaves once more their native lands behold,

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!

To Be, contents his natural desire,

He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire;

But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company.⁶⁶

In this passage Pope links the scientist’s hubris with the Indian’s naïveté, chiding both for reducing God’s power to a finite scope. Better off than the scientist, the Indian still merits our pity and perhaps our amusement for his simplistic faith. Our pity takes many forms as several meanings of the word poor coincide. Deprived of civilization and abstract thought, the Indian also is oppressed by brutal colonists who pretend to embody the word Christian. Most of all, he is spiritually bereft. Replacing angels with dogs and heaven with happy hunting grounds, he misses out on the blessings of a rational yet revealed religion. Unlike in missionary writings, his poverty does not demand action from the reader. Rather, his marking as “poor” helps construct a consensus between Pope and his readers, unifying them through their reaction to the Indian as he illustrates what they should not believe. Between a missionary tract of 1655 and this poem of 1733–34, the “poor Indian” has changed from an image impelling charitable action to a vehicle of erudite discussion and moral education.

As Pope’s reference to the tormenting “Christians” suggests, the figure of the poor Indian borrowed much from the noble savage, whose moral simplicity was used to set off Europeans’ contrasting hypocrisy. Ultimately, though, these figures oppose each other. Poor Indians are defined through their need for the very things that noble savages do not need, Christianity and European civilization. This trope was not unique to English texts, as the French, the Spanish, and other colonizers also were inclined to describe Indians as pitiable. The English phrase, “the poor Indians,” shares much with the Spanish word miserable, which was a legal term for Indians that at least theoretically granted them protections under Spanish rule.⁶⁷ This resemblance is ironic, because what often makes Indians “poor” in English writings is their mistreatment by the Spanish. It also is ironic because in English the term poor invoked no legal privileges, only emotion.

Along with moral philosophers, many authors of missionary writings were aware of the problems suggested by the reactions they sought from readers. Even as they generated an emotional response to raise funds and convert heathen souls, they worried that such emotion could be alienating and ineffectual. They debated whether pity involved identification with the sufferer and led to alleviating that suffering, or whether it simply became a source of pleasure at the cost of another’s pain. These writings thus offer a case study for examining not only how the British generated connections with each other through their shared feeling for the victims of suffering, but also how and why they came to feel conflicted over such feeling.

The ways in which Indian converts interpreted this term also suggest the variable status of pity in a colonial framework. In A further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel (1659), the missionary John Eliot recorded the speeches of several “praying Indians” to display their preparedness for admission to full communion. One of these Indians, Piumbubbon, tailored the beatitude “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:1) to his Massachusett audience: “For poverty of spirit, we are the most poor, feeble, despicable people in the world, but let us look in what case our spirits be, for if our hearts be answerably poor, and low, as our outward condition is, then we are in the way to be made truly rich, for the Kingdome of heaven is promised to such as are poor in spirit.”⁶⁸ To the degree that we can acknowledge these lines fully as Piumbubbon’s, they reveal a Christian convert transforming the word poor from a signifier of humility and destitution to a path toward salvation. Piumbubbon essentially accepted a pejorative portrayal of Indians by English colonists, but he used the logic and the language of Christianity to eradicate the negative implications of that portrayal.

The faith that Piumbubbon expressed in the salvific and leveling connotations of “poor,” an optimistic outlook that best fits the earlier stages of missionary work, was belied over a century later by Samson Occom’s use of the same word at the end of his autobiography. After detailing the many ways in which the ministerial establishment of the colonies had insulted him, Occom compared his own status to that of a “Poor Indian Boy” who was beaten by the master to whom he was indentured. Noting that when asked why his master beat him so much, the boy replied, ‘“because I am an Indian,’” Occom applied this conclusion to his own situation: “So I am ready to Say, they have used me thus, because I Can’t Instruct the Indians so well as other missionaries; but I can assure them I have endeavoured to teach them as well as I know how;—but I must Say, ‘I believe it is because I am a poor Indian.’ I Can’t help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so.”⁶⁹ Occom expressed his anger at the racial discrimination he suffered by resorting to an ironic use of the very term that helped inspire missionary projects. In so doing he detached this term from the compassion that originally produced it, revealing the abysmal treatment that such pity rationalized.

One of the greatest factors separating Piumbubbon’s and Occom’s uses of “poor” is the action that they saw connected to this word. Piumbubbon felt that Indians’ poverty—which he marked as a depletion of material wealth and status—accelerated their admission to a Christian community within which they found salvation and spiritual wealth. He did not focus on the actions of the English people who pitied Indians; rather, he attended to the action of the Indians as they sought a Christian god. Poverty was for Piumbubbon a spiritual opportunity. While he shared Piumbubbon’s faith in the salvation “poor” Indians could receive, Occom saw the insidious potential of this term as he described the discrimination it could obscure. He also played with the word’s various meanings, shifting from a general connotation of piteousness to a focus on financial dearth. Occom was poor because he was paid less than white missionaries and received less respect. His poverty was the result of British behavior, not the motivating force behind it.

As he revised the trope of the “poor Indian” to expose the hypocrisy of his would-be benefactors, Occom revealed the processes by which pity, under the auspices of the word poor, can be linked to the very sorts of treatment that would seem to inspire it in the first place. While I argue that missionary writings often were more about their readers than their Indian subjects, the understandings of benevolence that they developed had an immense impact on the indigenous peoples of America. The U.S. policy of Indian removal could not have been established as easily as it was without the conflicted sentiment with which the British came to regard Indians. Although this sentiment eventually shed its religious origins, it could not have developed as quickly as it did outside of a missionary context, with its concern for the fate of heathen souls. When, in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe passively witnessed and then mourned the death of Friday, he was imitating the missionaries as much as he had done when he first converted his fantastically loyal servant.⁷⁰

The final chapter of this book comments on the history of American Indians’ erasure—in British minds if not in reality—through religious pity and ineffectual benevolence. One of my goals in writing this book has been to prevent the continued repetition of this sentimental erasure in our contemporary culture. I have worked from the conviction that we will never be able truly to hear Indians within texts authored by colonizers until we understand how it is that colonial discourse silenced them. Precisely because they often expressed sincere pity for Indians, and because they protested their own culture’s treatment of Indians even as they gave their culture the rhetorical tools to support that treatment, missionary writings present an important area for analysis. My hope is that studies like this one will complement the work of other scholars to illuminate imperial history from the perspective of Indians and other conquered peoples. Only by understanding the mechanics by which benevolence can erase its object, especially in a sentimental and a colonial framework, can we then see those pitied objects more accurately as real people who actively sought to resist or mitigate the effects of colonization on their own cultures.

What Is a Missionary Writing?

Because I am more concerned with portrayals of mission than with the events of missionary work, I use the term missionary writing loosely. It denotes the journals, letters, and reports written by ministers trying to covert American Indians and other non-Christian peoples, but it also includes sermons, letters, and genres usually marked as literary, written by people raising money for, or merely thinking about, missionary work. My concerns with transatlantic reception and the culture of sensibility as well as my footing in literary study often steer me to focus on the latter group of texts. I make some references to the earliest Indian converts in English colonies and to the first organized English attempt to convert Indians, the establishment of Henrico College in Jamestown from 1620 until the Powhatan massacre of 1622. I also occasionally draw upon promotional writings of the Virginia Company.⁷¹ For the most part, however, my study ranges from the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642 to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776.

I chose these dates because they coincide roughly with the beginnings and ends of sustained, as opposed to extremely short-lived, missionary efforts in the parts of America that would become the United States. I also chose them because they bracket an era when missionaries would rely on the transatlantic circulation of print to generate an English and then British identity through shared feeling for America’s Indians. The parish collection authorized by James I in 1616 would seem to provide the only English missionary writings that precede this era.⁷² While the few letters printed for this project may have provided a model for later writings, they did not have to demand their audience’s attention within the larger and less regulated print culture that developed during the English Civil War.⁷³ They also did not have to construct English cohesion against the background of domestic conflict, a factor that enhanced the unifying force of later missionary projects. While sharing much with their predecessors, English-language missionary writings produced after the American Revolution were markedly different in their imaginative range, their audience, and their tone. Emerging from evangelical movements and from the dynamic leadership of figures such as William Carey, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionary writings reflected a new global consciousness, an altered sense of national and imperial identity, and an enlarged audience that openly included women.⁷⁴

Although most of the texts I study were composed in English and for a transatlantic British audience, it is important also to understand their place within an international framework. Many writers of English missionary texts were aware of missions launched from other European countries. Sometimes these dealt with Protestant projects, such as August Hermann Francke’s Missionsnachrichten, an account of Danish and German efforts in India and then in other lands that he began to publish serially in 1710.⁷⁵ More often British missionaries worked under the shadow of Roman Catholic missionary orders, especially the Jesuits, whose Relations had been distributed throughout Europe since the early seventeenth century. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, John Dryden dedicated his translation of Dominick Bohours’s Life of St. Francis Xavier to Queen Mary of Modena shortly after the birth of her son. This text constituted a celebration of a Catholic successor to the throne as well as an implicit critique of the Church of England’s failure to show substantial concern for heathen souls.⁷⁶ English writings displayed defensiveness about Protestant projects, which revealed some acquaintance with Catholic successes. In their refutation of Catholic mission, these texts were central to the forging of a modern Protestant and British identity against the foil of Catholicism.

The missionary writings divide into five basic groups connected with the main denominations active in North America before the American Revolution.⁷⁷ The first group includes texts connected with The President and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Established by the Long Parliament in 1649 and rechartered after the Restoration as the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent in America, the New England Company (as it was commonly called and as I shall refer to it) was at first a corporation of sixteen persons, merchants and Independent or Presbyterian clergymen, who publicized the cause of converting Indians, collected funds in England, and sent money across the Atlantic to be distributed by the Commissioners of the United Colonies.⁷⁸ Robert Boyle, better known for his scientific work, became the company’s president after the Restoration. From the Restoration until Boyle’s death in 1691 the group’s membership covered a moderately wide range of religious and class positions.⁷⁹ On the whole, however, the group retained a Dissenting majority. The missionaries it supported emphasized a Calvinist, mostly Congregational creed.

These missionaries included John Eliot, who established the praying Indian towns that housed more than one thousand Massachusett and Narragansett converts in New England, several generations of the Mayhew family (who converted the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket), and a handful of ministers scattered throughout the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. In the eighteenth century this group helped fund Jonathan Sergeant’s work with the Housatonic Indians of Stockbridge, the work of Gideon Hawley among the Mashpees of Cape Cod, and Joseph Fish’s efforts among the Narragansetts of Rhode Island.⁸⁰ When the American Revolution began, the company abandoned its efforts in New England to focus on Canada. Although several figures were connected with both groups, the New England Company is different from the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge among the Indians in North America, which was established by the Massachusetts General Assembly in 1762. This organization failed to obtain royal confirmation for its founding, but it was reestablished in 1787 as the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and others in North America.⁸¹

The New England Company printed some of the eleven “Indian tracts” during the seventeenth century, which contain reports from missionaries, testimonials from Indian converts, letters from supporters, and pleas for money, prayers, and supplies.⁸² It also subsidized the publishing of Algonquian translations of the Bible, an Indian primer, and several religious tracts, which John Eliot completed with the help of Nesuton and James Printer, two native assistants.⁸³ Eliot published other texts relating to his work, such as the Indian dialogues (1671) and The Dying Speeches of several Indians (1685). Eighteenth-century publications connected with projects funded by the New England Company included Cotton Mather’s India Christiana (1721), Experience Mayhew’s Indian converts (1727), and Samuel Hopkins’s Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuk Indians (1753). Texts including Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America, or, Probabilities That the Americans are of that Race (1650) were not officially connected with the company but promoted its work. Although Roger Williams was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resisted active missionary work on theological grounds, I also include some of his writings, especially his Key into the Language of America (1643), here.

The second collection includes the texts produced by the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which was founded in 1701.⁸⁴ Made up mostly of high-ranking churchmen and affluent laymen interested in the establishment of Anglican churches in America, the SPG devoted much textual attention to the spiritual state of Indians. Of British missionary organizations, the SPG was the least involved in actual missionary operations, but it did have some success with the Mohawks. Individual SPG missionaries made occasional attempts to convert Indians, including John Wesley, who along with his brother Charles briefly collaborated with Moravians to convert a group of Yamacraw Indians in the Georgia colony.⁸⁵

The central SPG publications were the anniversary sermons. Every February throughout the eighteenth century the society invited a bishop or dean to deliver a sermon at London’s Mary-le-Bow parish church amid some fanfare, advertising in the London Gazette and inviting the city’s leading citizens to attend. The society then distributed the sermon to its missionaries, members, and correspondents in Britain, Europe, and America. These usually were printed with “Abstracts,” which included descriptions of the society’s accomplishments, reports from ministers in the colonies, financial accounts, membership lists, and template forms for donations and bequests. From time to time it published broadsides, including requests for parish collections authorized by the monarch, requests for missionaries, and instructions to its ministers. As with the New England Company there are associated texts that promoted the SPG’s work, such as An Essay Towards an Instruction For the Indians (1740), by Thomas Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, and A Pindaric Poem on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711) by Elkanah Settle, the laureate poet of the City of London.

The third group involves texts published in connection with the Presbyterian Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in the Highlands and Islands and the Foreign Parts of the World (SSPCK), which was chartered in 1709. The original mission of this group was to establish schools and distribute ministers throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. In 1717, however, the Dissenting clergyman Daniel Williams left the SSPCK a generous bequest on the condition that it send at least three ministers to preach among non-Christian peoples of foreign lands.⁸⁶ After thirteen years the society began to dispatch missionaries to Indians in Connecticut and Long Island. Throughout the century it subsidized several projects through its colonial Boards of Correspondents. Among these were David Brainerd’s mission to the Delawares (which was taken over by his brother John after his death) and Eleazar Wheelock’s establishment of Moor’s Indian Charity School and then of Dartmouth College.⁸⁷ The SSPCK also organized part of the visit to Britain in 1766–68 by Nathaniel Whitaker and Samson Occom.⁸⁸ Most of the ministers supported by the SSPCK adhered to a Presbyterian creed, and some of them supported the transatlantic revivals of the mid-eighteenth century.⁸⁹ The membership of its Boards of Commissioners in New York, Boston, and Connecticut overlapped with the membership of the New England Company’s board, and missionaries employed by these groups sometimes worked together.⁹⁰

Like the SPG, the SSPCK published anniversary sermons, accounts, and histories of its work. The missionaries employed by this society produced a variety of texts, such as David Brainerd’s famous journal and the Narrative[s] of the Indian Charity-School (1766–75) published by Wheelock. Occom also wrote the first English publication to be authored by an American Indian, A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772).

The fourth group is a small and diffuse collection of texts relating to the missionary efforts of the Quakers, or the Society of Friends. Although the Quakers developed close relations with many indigenous groups, and although some individual Friends preached to Indians, they did not undertake organized missions until 1794.⁹¹ The Friends published few missionary writings during this era. I do, however, draw on George Fox’s Journal along with a few texts suggesting Quaker efforts, such as John Cripps’s A True Account of the Dying Words of Ockanickon, an Indian King (1682).

The fifth group includes texts relating to the work of the United Brethren, or Moravians. They were descended from Hussites, named after John Hus, a Roman Catholic priest of Prague who was burned at the stake in 1415 for preaching against church corruption. His followers built a reformist movement and in 1467 established their own ministry. Almost eradicated during the Counter-Reformation, the Moravians remained largely in hiding until 1722, when they migrated to Saxony and settled on the lands of Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, a Lutheran pietist who became their bishop. Evangelical concerns, especially a desire to convert Indians and African slaves, motivated Moravian emigration to the new colony of Georgia, via a small settlement in England, in 1735. Establishing Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as their central settlement, they launched successful missions throughout the British colonies. Although they and their Indian converts suffered persecution from other colonists for their radical theology, Zinzendorf was able to establish some legitimacy for his church in England, so that in 1749 Parliament formally declared the United Brethren to be an ancient Episcopal Church.⁹² The Church of England remained supportive of the Moravians throughout the eighteenth century, and in 1765 it hired the Moravian Christian Frederick Post, who had lived among the Mohegans for seventeen years, to preach to the Moskito Indians of present-day Honduras.⁹³

In spite of their success in converting Indians, the Moravians occupy a minor position in my book because they produced few missionary writings for a British audience. Many Moravians did keep journals and write letters about their work, however. Most of these accounts were circulated within the Moravian community, and they may have encouraged contributions from Moravians in Europe. Except for the Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, which existed from 1745 to 1764 and sought external support, the Moravians did not publicize their work with a British audience for quite a while.⁹⁴ John Heckewelder’s journal was not published in English until 1820, and it was not until 1769 that a fund-raising tract for the Moravians’ work, Heckewelder’s A Letter to a Friend, appeared in London.⁹⁵

Linguistic barriers and tensions with British colonists account partly for the dearth of published texts. Primarily, however, the Moravians neglected to publish many texts because their intense dedication and their communal ethos led them to fund their missions through a socialist economy supported by a variety of industries in Bethlehem. Moravians also were willing to live in poorer conditions than many British ministers were.⁹⁶ This group illustrates a central irony of my project: there often seems to have been an inversely proportional relation between the degree to which early modern Europeans talked about their desires to convert Indians and the degree to which they actually labored toward this end.

Alongside these publications I read documents written for private audiences. These texts include the correspondence of John Eliot and Richard Baxter, the minutes of the SPG’s Standing Committee, the journals and letters of missionaries, and the Moravian papers. Besides providing additional information about the missionary work, these writings serve as a counterpoint to the published ones. They suggest how the carefully crafted portrayals of missionary projects related to the ways in which Indians, missionaries, and their supporters in Britain evaluated those efforts when they were removed from a public gaze.

These texts make up a vast and diverse corpus, especially because they include denominations that waged fierce disagreements with each other and underwent significant changes in the century and a half that this book covers. Any one of these collections would provide sufficient material for a book-length study of missionary discourse, as would any twenty or thirty years within the study. A book encompassing all of this data must overlook topics that would inform more specialized studies, such as the nuances of the Great Awakening or the finer points of debate between Calvinists and Arminians over salvation. From the earliest stages of this project I elected to examine the writings of all Protestant missions connected with Britain because I wanted to see the full range of representational strategies that developed through efforts to convert Indians. As I read more of these texts I became struck less with the range than with the rhetorical uniformity of these writings, which in spite of conflicting theological stances display a remarkably stable approach to the tasks of describing Indians and raising readers’ interest in their conversion. My approach throughout most of this book thus has been to focus on the common discursive features of Protestant missionary writings, leaving doctrinal variety in the background except for those points where it produced significant rhetorical differences. The result, I hope, is a study that emphasizes similarity without ignoring important differences in various denominations’ portrayals of Indians.

If I could have expanded my project without making it too cumbersome for a single book, I would have examined missionaries’ depictions of both African slaves and Indians. Certainly any study would have to examine depictions of both groups if it were to provide a comprehensive account of the British encounter, both textual and actual, with “heathens” in America. Such a study also would reflect the parallel status Indians and Africans held in many missionary projects and texts. Groups such as the Moravians and the SPG simultaneously undertook missions to Indians and Africans, and discussions of both peoples often appeared alongside each other in fund-raising tracts. The enslavement of Indians as well as intermarriage between Indians and Africans also led to some blurring of categories in British or colonial writings, especially in an era before race was identified primarily through skin color.⁹⁷

In spite of these overlaps, British missionaries tended to treat Africans and Indians as separate groups whose conversion required different strategies and whose existence, as “heathen” or Christian, provoked distinct emotions and debates. As Chapter 4 will show, the complete isolation of Indians from the Christian world until the fifteenth century produced a theological quandary that Africans, who at least theoretically had had access to the gospel, did not. The noble savage produced forms of pathos related to but still distinct from the emotions that met images of African slaves, and slaveholders’ concerns about the legality of owning Christians created particular obstacles for missionaries that were different from the difficulties they encountered preaching to Indians. The complex differences between these two missionary efforts, as well as the sheer quantity of material produced in connection with them, proved too vast for this study. A comparative examination of British missionaries’ depictions of Africans and Indians, especially a close analysis of the subtle affective differences between them, surely would yield important information, and it would be a worthwhile topic for future work.

How Widely Read Were Missionary Writings?

As with any question about early modern reader reception, there is no easy answer. Data on the distribution of the published writings are limited, but in general it seems that while few people read many missionary writings, many people were aware of a few of them. The three main organizations printed most of their texts with an eye toward distributing them to members and to associates who might contribute to their cause.⁹⁸ The Journal of the SPG’s Standing Committee reveals that the society published its sermons in numbers ranging from 500 to more than 3,000, basing their decision sometimes on the reputation of the preacher.⁹⁹ William Kellaway has noted that the New England Company’s members had trouble distributing more than 1,500 copies of their tracts.¹⁰⁰ With the exception of blockbusters such as Jonathan Edward’s Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, the readership of these texts seems to have ranged into, but not past, the low thousands.¹⁰¹ Many of these texts were distributed in the American colonies and Europe as well as Britain, but the anticipated audience usually was a British metropolitan one. Having encountered copies of SPG sermons in rare-book rooms with the pages still uncut, I also suspect that some texts were received but not read. Certainly this reaction would fit with the response many of us today have to fund-raising texts.

When estimating the impact of these texts on British culture, though, it is important that we consider the multiple paths by which readers and listeners would have become aware of them. Although most of these texts had a select audience, fragments of them reached much of England, Wales, and Scotland in written or spoken form. Announcements of collections were often read aloud during church services, and newspapers occasionally published letters from missionaries or extracts from fund-raising sermons.¹⁰² Events such as the “four Indian kings’” visit and Occom’s tour heightened the public’s awareness of missionary projects, as did calls for nationwide or citywide collections by the monarch. These events were publicized through broadsides and pamphlets. We should also consider the symbolic importance attached to missionary images, such as charters, seals, and portraits of the “four Indian kings,” and we might consider texts presented for their iconic rather than textual value. After all, much was made of the presentation of Eliot’s “Indian Bible” to King Charles II, the Lord Chancellor, and other public officials in 1664, although none of these recipients could read the Massachusett translation.¹⁰³ Such icons symbolized the ongoing salvation of foreigners through the rendering of well-known texts into dramatically illegible signs. If the vision of collective evangelical endeavor usually assumed a select core of gentlemen with financial means and feelings for “heathen” peoples, the references to national endeavor and the varying patterns of text distribution imply a series of concentric circles of emotionally invested citizens surrounding the missionary groups.

Chapter Outline

Missionary writings were only one subset of the many texts that early modern Europeans wrote about the Americas. Chapter 1 describes missionary tracts in relation to this broader context by surveying two prominent tropes of colonial endeavor. These are the images of husbandry—meaning the tending of the domestic sphere through farming, accounting, or housekeeping—and trade. They provided a religious validation for the plantation-style colonialism propagated by the British, and they enhanced anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric. As they persuaded readers through these images to save Indians, the missionary writings depicted British pity as an exportable commodity and an instrument of husbandry, the spiritual profits of which benefited Indians more than colonialism impoverished them. Ironically, these writings helped transform a symbol of exploitation, the exchange of American gold for European trinkets or glass, into an image of the priceless spiritual “gold” with which the British purchased America’s wealth.

Chapter 2 examines the importance of epistolarity to seventeenth-century English missionary writings. It shows how the letters that missionaries and their supporters wrote to each other, and often published for the consumption of a wider audience, constructed a transatlantic community through a shared desire to save America’s Indians. The boundaries and tenor of these communities shifted with the concerns of different writers and times. The New England Company’s publications, for example, stressed the importance of England’s links with Puritan colonists in New England, while Henry Jessey, a London Baptist, used accounts of missions in Taiwan and New England to strengthen Anglo-Dutch ties. Late seventeenth-century writings stressed interdenominational cooperation in a way that mid-century writings did not, reflecting the political changes England underwent in this era. If the qualities of the community described in these texts altered, the basic idea of a transatlantic connection did not.

Chapter 3 continues to examine the sympathetic network described in Chapter 2 by showing how the publications of two missionary societies founded in the early eighteenth century presented a voluntary society as the unifying center and active agent of Britain’s compassion. The Anglican SPG and the Presbyterian SSPCK drew on earlier models of cooperative endeavor for a worthy cause, but they refined those models to stress the utility of a central organization that maximized widespread benevolence. The publications set these groups apart from the public while making their operations trustworthy and admirable. They also configured prayer and financial donations as forms of active but displaced involvement that made readers feel included in the groups’ endeavors. Through their emphasis on collective pity for heathen souls they provided a religious template for what would become a secular model of imperial sentiment constructed as emotional involvement.

The missionaries’ emphasis on shared emotion enhanced Britain’s benevolent self-image, but it also introduced concerns about the moral status of pity. Chapter 4 shows how the anniversary sermons of the SPG grappled with the ethics of pity while debating the necessity of Indian conversion. As they encouraged contributions to support Anglican ministers in America, the authors of these sermons used descriptions of Indians to defend Christianity from challenges posed by heterodox thinkers, especially the idea that God had been cruel in denying Indians earlier access to the gospel. By arguing that the savage behavior of Indians proved the necessity of Christian conversion for salvation, and asserting that God had delayed revealing himself to heathens so that Christians would save them, most of the sermons’ authors sought to recuperate the compassionate character of God as they insisted on the necessity of their faith. These texts illustrate some of the ways in which the idea of Indians provoked debates about the capacity and moral consequences of pity.

Producing concerns about the ethics of compassion, Indians also propelled developments in the portrayal of emotion. Chapter 5 shows how mid-eighteenth-century missionary writings intersected with a broader culture increasingly interested in the depiction of feeling. I contrast the framing of emotion and human relations in two edited memoirs: Jonathan Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd, which describes how Brainerd evangelized several groups of Indians over a four-year period until his death in 1747, and Samuel Hopkins’s Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuck Indians, which describes the work of John Sergeant at the Stockbridge mission of western Massachusetts from 1734 until his death in 1749. Unlike earlier tracts, these memoirs present a missionary not only as an extension of collective feeling but also as an object of emulation. While Edwards’s text focuses on the solipsistic emotions of an isolated missionary and inscribes a transatlantic community through collective spectatorship of Brainerd’s spiritual experience, Hopkins’s account positions Sergeant within a network of transatlantic feeling. Together these texts suggest the effects that the culture of sensibility and the Great Awakening had on the representation of Christian mission, even as they imply the importance of Indians to eighteenth-century accounts of emotion. They also show how missionaries began to supersede Indians as the central figures of promotional writings, paralleling a developing British fascination with vanishing Indians.

Chapter 6 illustrates some of the ethical problems that emerged from depictions of Indians in missionary writings, as it argues that missionaries unwittingly helped create the dying Indians that were so useful to Romantic literature and the claims of manifest destiny. It shows that while they evoked pity for the wasteful deaths of unconverted Indians, especially through violence, missionaries also surrounded the exemplary deaths of Indian converts with abundant detail and emotional response. The texts thus encouraged their readers to mourn the deaths of Christian Indians but also to feel pleasure at the recuperation of lost souls, which they saw as the outcome of British benevolence. Missionary writings prepared their readers to expect the disappearance of the Indians from America, associating the death of their bodies with the cultivation of their souls.

British missionary writings had a limited influence on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers. Their impact did not equal that of genres such as captivity narratives or travel writings, and the piteous figures presented in these texts received less attention than the noble savages and incorrigibly cruel brutes that filled more popular publications. Nonetheless, they exerted a subtle influence on Euro-American culture. They helped shape attitudes to Indians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributing in particular to notions that Indians should be pitied, saved, and mourned, sometimes all at once. They played a major role in the development of a benevolent imperialist rhetoric, the impact of which is still felt in the United States and Britain, indeed throughout the world. Finally, as they assisted in the construction of an optimistic moral philosophy intertwined with a culture of sensibility, they presented especially vivid examples of the dramatic transformations that emotion could provoke. What exactly those changes were, and whether they occurred for the better, were questions with answers that did not always match the expectations of the texts’ authors and audience. This book explores some of those answers, and their implications, for the twenty-first century as well as for the era of Britain’s colonization of America.