Читать книгу The Poor Indians - Laura M. Stevens - Страница 9

Chapter 1

Gold for Glass, Seeds to Fruit: Husbandry and Trade in Missionary Writings

“Your Spiritual Factory in New England”

In July 1649, a few months after the execution of King Charles I, Parliament established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to subsidize the efforts of John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew, and other Puritan ministers to convert the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard.¹ By 1655, the society had received several thousand pounds from a nationwide parish collection commanded by Parliament.² It used those funds to purchase land throughout England, some of which had just been confiscated by Parliament from loyalists to the king.³ Besides subsidizing a few missionaries and sending supplies abroad, the rents from these lands funded the printing of several tracts, among them A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel. Joseph Caryl, an Independent preacher of London, introduced this tract with a letter endorsing the organization’s work:

Read this short discourse, and it will tell you that the Lord hath blesed the labours of the Messengers of Sion in New-England, with the Conversion of some (I may say, of a considerable number) of the Indians, to be a kind of first fruits of his (new) Creatures there. O let old England rejoyce in this, that our brethren who with extream difficulties and expences have Planted themselves in the Indian Wildernesses, have also laboured night and day with prayers and teares and Exhortations to Plant the Indians as a spirituall Garden, into which Christ might come and eat his pleasant fruits. Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver. This gaine of soules is a Merchandize worth the glorying in upon all the Exchanges, or rather in all the Churches throughout the world. This Merchandize is Holinesse to the Lord: And of this the ensuing Discourse presents you with a Bill of many particulars, from your spiritual Factory in New England.⁴

Figure 1. An Act for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England established the first voluntary missionary organization in England. It founded a corporation of sixteen men in England for the collection of donations, named the Commissioners of the United Colonies as agent for the disbursement of funds, ordered that the act be read in every parish of England and Wales, asked that ministers “exhort the people to a chearful and liberal contribution,” and commanded parish officials to undertake a door-to-door collection. The act linked England’s piety and charity to emotion both felt and observed, as it “rejoyce[d]” that “the heathen Natives” of New England “give great testimony of the power of God drawing them from death and darkness … which appeareth by their diligent attending on the Word so preached unto them, with tears lamenting their mis-spent lives.” (The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)

As the exuberant tone and elaborate conceits of this passage suggest, English missionary projects sometimes enjoyed a richer existence in print than in reality. For many people in England, texts such as Caryl’s may have been the only outcome they would witness of their contributions to missionary work. As they offered a visible return on generosity and then sought more funds, descriptions like his superseded the activities of mission, and in this excess of representation re-created the worlds they described. Caryl himself never went to America, never encountered its natives, never experienced the difficulties of persuading them to abandon their own customs for alien beliefs. Unlike the writers of countless travel narratives, who claimed the authority of experience, he invented a land and its people from what he read, heard, and believed. While he presented a textually fabricated world to his readers, he compelled them to will a dramatic transformation of it.

These lines replicated England’s early colonial aspirations in miniature, linking the pursuit of material prosperity to spiritual growth and presenting Indian converts as the symbolic profits of both endeavors. Thomas Scanlon has noted, “In his characterization of the missionary enterprise as a mercantile adventure, Caryl accentuates the fact that the Indian discourse functioned as a commodity for England.”⁵ I would add that this depiction is positioned within a frame of agriculture and manufacture. Mission takes place first through metaphors of plantation, so that America is transformed into an orchard. Wild inhabitants of an uncultivated land, Indians become a “spirituall Garden,” the fruits of cultivation. The text then replaces gardens with gold, placing plantation within commerce. As Christ eats the garden’s “pleasant fruits,” images of these spiritual products are returned across the Atlantic, circulated among readers, and accepted as imported goods. The tone of the last sentence resembles a report to stockholders, promising a “Bill of many particulars,” as if it were a list of assets and expenses. Mission in America is made to suggest the accrual of English wealth.

Churches become orchards and factories, while mission becomes inseparable from commerce. The figure of the heathen, then Christian, Indian—cultivated, transported, and consumed—stands for the settlement and trade already undertaken by England. By focusing on the Indian, Caryl’s readers could visualize colonial settlement, follow paths of trade, and feel themselves to be benefactors and beneficiaries in this enterprise. The idea of the converted Indian made colonialism imaginatively possible. With a coyness worthy of modern advertising strategies, Caryl allured readers with a secular object that he then proclaimed they really did not want. He also offered them a spiritual object that he assumed their virtue must make them desire. This apparent disowning of greed merely brackets the real object he was selling: a sense of belonging, through shared desire and emotional response, to a transatlantic community.

Caryl was able to accomplish this rhetorical feat because of the way in which he drew on two of the tropes, or figures of speech, used most frequently in English missionary writings. These were the metaphors of husbandry—which described agriculture, thrift, and the careful management of the household—and trade. Both images have ample scriptural precursors, especially gospel parables about the talents, the sower, the vineyard, and the mustard seed. The combination of these images stressed the profitability of promoting Christian mission, even as it insisted that the English really cared about Indian souls. The vision of budding Indian converts in the newly cultivated wilderness must have been an appealing one to an audience that was emerging from a civil war and that had recently witnessed the execution of their king.

It also offered an important counter to the bloody images of Spanish conquest in America, with which anti-Spanish propaganda had made the English familiar.⁶ When he wrote, “Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver,” Caryl did not just contrast two objects of desire. He also alluded to the violence that made possible the wealth of the Spanish Empire. Gold leaves a trail of blood, he suggested, that orchard groves do not. If they valued Indian souls over gold, the English would prove their superiority to the Spanish. His comment was a moral caution against greed, but it was more emphatically a boast about English virtue.

One of the ironies of missionary writings, however, is that by adopting scriptural images to the scene of colonial encounter, these texts altered the point of those images, validating the same acquisitiveness they seemed to shun. This tension emerges in Caryl’s letter as he sells the idea of saving Indian souls through images of agricultural abundance and intercontinental trade. In particular, many missionary texts played a pivotal role in the development of a British imperial rhetoric by borrowing, and then rereading through the lens of scripture, a prominent scene of early modern travel writings. This scene was that of American gold traded for the glass and other trinkets offered to Indians by European travelers. First symbolizing the exploitation of colonized peoples, and then more generally the bilking of the powerless, this image came to signify the opposite of its original connotation. This change took place as the trope was combined with images of husbandry and applied to Christian conversion. It was this rhetorical shift that made possible the catastrophe wryly summarized by Vine Deloria: “It has been said of missionaries that when they arrived they had only the Book and we had the land; now we have the Book and they have the land.”⁷

Several scholars have commented on the tendency of British missionaries to characterize their project as a mutually beneficial trade.⁸ This chapter charts a rhetorical history of this tendency, placing the missionaries’ descriptions in a broader discourse that begins with the Bible. Through their biblical allusions missionary writings transformed the trope of gold exchanged for glass into a sign, first, of Britain’s obligations to its colonies and, then, of the intangible but eternal rewards that conquest would bring to the conquered. Focusing on Paul’s comment in Romans 15:27 that “if the Gentiles have been made partakers of [the Jews’] spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things,” along with his rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 9:11, “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?” these texts presented colonialism as a reciprocal circum-Atlantic exchange involving an endlessly replenished and exportable commodity: the prayers and pity of the British people. The piteous spectacle of Indians being cheated by Europeans, refracted through Paul’s description of a charitable collection and framed by images of husbandry, reconfigured the idea of intercontinental commerce. Seeking to convert the “poor Indians” of America, these texts inverted an image that had been used to condemn the exploitation of those Indians. On a rhetorical level, then, selling the idea of saving souls helped make possible the idea of selling Europe’s glass for America’s gold.

“They Bartered Like Idiots”: Early Modern Images of Indian Trade

It is well known that the missionary and imperial aspirations of early modern Europe were intertwined. Whether European desires to save the souls of America’s indigenous peoples were sincere or not, the public expression of those desires rationalized efforts to conquer those peoples and own the resources of their land. Columbus’s first descriptions of the islands upon which he had stumbled made this point clear. Emphasizing that the Taino Indians there “do not carry arms and do not know of them,” he suggested simultaneously that they would be easy to conquer and convert. “They ought to make good slaves,” he wrote, “for they are of quick intelligence since I notice that they are quick to repeat what is said to them, and I believe that they could very easily become Christians, for it seemed to me that they had no religion of their own.”⁹ Besides their mimicry, paltry weaponry, and apparent lack of religion, one of the strongest signs of their pliability was their inability to negotiate a profitable trade. As Columbus noted in the same letter, the poignancy of the Indians’ overly generous bartering proved the ease with which Europe could rob or redeem these people: “They … give objects of great value for trifles, and content themselves with very little or nothing in return…. It even happened that a sailor received for a leather strap as much gold as was worth three golden nobles, and for things of more trifling value offered by our men,… the Indians would give whatever the seller required…. Thus they bartered, like idiots, cotton and gold for fragments of bows, glasses, bottles, and jars.”¹⁰ In describing this exchange Columbus failed to recognize the expectations of reciprocity and the nuances of status-determination that surrounded indigenous American systems of gift giving.¹¹ He also neglected the possibility that the Taino found gold to be as inconsequential as the sailors considered their own “trifles,” or that they attached a metaphorical and ceremonial importance to the glass.¹² With stunning confidence in his interpretive ability, he was quick to see this exchange as evidence of economic innocence. Showing that “Columbus reads the Indian system of valuation (whatever it was) as an empty prefiguration of his own,” Joshua Bellin has observed, “a glass bead is worthless and a pearl precious only in systems of exchange value.”¹³ Echoing Stephen Greenblatt’s comment that this letter epitomizes the European fantasy of “the grossly unequal gift exchange: I give you a glass bead and you give me a pearl worth half your tribe,” Bellin has pointed out that Columbus describes the Indians as “naive consumers beyond Europe’s wildest dreams.”¹⁴ The profits of a few sailors suggest the effortless gain of future treasures.

Moral self-congratulation accompanied the coy assessment of potential wealth in this letter. Columbus juxtaposed his sailors’ eagerness to exploit the Indians with his own insistence that they be treated favorably: “I forbad [these trades] as being unjust, and myself gave them many beautiful and acceptable articles which I had brought with me, taking nothing from them in return; I did this in order that I might more easily conciliate them, that they might be led to become Christians, and be inclined to entertain a regard for the King and Queen, our Princes and all Spaniards, and that I might induce them to take an interest in seeking out, and collecting, and delivering to us such things as they possessed in abundance, but which we greatly needed.”¹⁵ With this narrative Columbus set in place a vision of intercontinental contact that would unite diverse expressions of European desire.¹⁶ Wonder at the Indians’ financial naïveté, concern to save them from injustice and divine wrath, fervent hopes to win their “regard” and hence receive their wealth—all these reactions became central to the discourse of colonialism. Underlining the contrast between unjust sailors and the just admiral who commands them is a distinction between shortsightedness and foresight that is more intellectual than moral. Columbus’s initial insistence on fair trade will, he hopes, encourage the Indians’ excessive reciprocity. It is an investment, promising a payoff in gold and labor. Christian conversion plays a dual role in a vision of reciprocal exchange: fair trade by Columbus will help lead the Indians to Christianity, and Christianity will keep the trade fair. For what except the gospel can match the wealth that the Indians “abundantly possess” but Spain “greatly need[s]”? Christianity is the only commodity that can balance the intercontinental books for Columbus, offering compensation for conquest.

At the core of Columbus’s formulation is this vision of “gold for glasse,” of true wealth bartered for its shiny imitation. This trope of trade became central to descriptions of global exploration. It also acquired a broad metaphorical register in the early modern period, suggesting many forms of poor judgment. After killing his wife Desdemona out of ill-founded suspicions of infidelity, for example, Shakespeare’s Othello referred to himself as

[O]ne whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe. (5.2.344–46)

Shakespeare’s choice of metaphor, if he did refer to an American Indian here, emphasizes Othello’s gullibility in the face of Iago’s manipulation.¹⁷ Stressing his tendency to trust appearance over deeper truth, these lines also link prodigality to naïveté. Othello does not really trade; rather, he throws his treasure away. Instead of focusing on a desire for what glitters, this reference emphasizes a prerequisite eagerness to discard what is more valuable than it seems. Indians toss away pearls because they do not understand their value. Othello, likewise, has tossed away the love of his wife because he was made to distrust its authenticity. The absence of any trade, even for glass, heightens his suicidal sense of loss.

More than a century later Eliza Haywood echoed Shakespeare’s romantic inflection of this trope in The City Jilt (1726), a narrative of love betrayed by greed. Near the end of this story the callous Melladore, who had seduced and then abandoned the heroine Glicera so that he could marry a wealthier woman, finds that Glicera has obtained ownership of the deed to his now bankrupt estate. Throwing himself on her mercy, Melladore writes, “Like the foolish Indians, I have barter’d Gold for Glass, exchang’d the best for one of the vilest that ever disgraced the name of Woman.”¹⁸ Although Melladore describes himself as bartering rather than discarding a treasure, the emphasis on poor discernment echoes Othello’s use of this trope. Like Othello, he has judged badly in matters of love, failing to see the value of true gold.

Besides asserting the cost of ignorance, the trope of trade also could suggest the exploitation of innocence. This meaning applied especially when intangible resources were balanced against material ones. John Milton used this image at the beginning of the Civil War in The Reason of Church Government Urg’d against Prelaty (1642). In an autobiographical interlude he pondered the moral burdens that accompany the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, justifying his criticism of England’s bishops as a duty placed on him by the privilege of his education. Those who have received gifts of knowledge should share them, he argued, not hoard them while they sell false treasures at a high price. This autobiographical defense enhanced his attack on the Church of England, because he then contrasted his own generosity with episcopal greed. England’s church hierarchy had failed to meet its duty to the intellectually impoverished, exploiting the common people just as merchants cheat “poor Indians” with cheap trinkets. Expanding on the “burden” of the educated, Milton wrote:

And that which aggravates the burden more is that (having received amongst his allotted parcels certain precious truths of such an orient lustre as no diamond can equal, which nevertheless he has in charge to put off at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will) the great merchants of this world, fearing that this course would soon discover and disgrace the false glitter of their deceitful wares wherewith they abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses, practise by all means how they may suppress the venting of such rarities, and such a cheapness as would undo them, and turn their trash upon their hands. Therefore by gratifying the corrupt desires of men in fleshly doctrines, they stir them up to persecute with hatred and contempt all those that seek to bear themselves uprightly in this their spiritual factory.¹⁹

Overlapping images of global commerce become a vehicle of Puritan attack in Milton’s text. While cheating “poor Indians” by selling them glittering trash, England’s bishops have hoarded the treasures entrusted to them by God, those truths of “orient lustre” that they were supposed to give away. Europe’s exploitation of other lands becomes a symbol of England’s exploitation by its church.

As he applied this trope to the domestic realm, Milton added a spiritual dimension. The suggestion of simony, the selling of religious benefits for material gain, created an intersection between axes of spiritual and material worth. Through this accusation Milton made explicit Columbus’s implied vision of an intercontinental reciprocity involving a payment of Christianity for gold, compensating for the false currency of glass. The “spiritual factory,” the same term Joseph Caryl used thirteen years later to advertise America as the place where the English convert Indians, here condemned England’s ecclesiastical corruption through analogy with the cheating of Indians.²⁰

Other seventeenth-century writers used the trope in similar ways. Robert Boyle, best known for his scientific work, invoked this image in his moral writings. “The Aretology” (1645) one of his (until recently) unpublished essays, notes that “Vertu by an aduantagious Exchange for vs, serves her followers as the [silly] Indians do our Mariners, giuing them for Beads and Whistles and Gugaws, precious wares and substantiall meat.”²¹ Rather than taking the perspective of the cheated Indians, Boyle focused on the “aduantagious Exchange” that the virtuous enjoy for their avoidance of vice, just as European sailors gain from trades with Indians. The essay “Of Felicity” (1646), by the Interregnum writer John Hall, also used the trope of gold for glass to mourn the abandonment of spiritual happiness for material gain: “We have [felicity] brought home to our own doores; … [T]hose happy soules that claspe hold of it…. They can set a true estimation of those sublunarie things, that others are contented so to overbuy, more Sottish then the Barbarous Indians to exchange Gold for Glasse.”²² As with Othello and The City Jilt, Hall’s reference to Indians signifies a poor bargain prompted by the duplicity of appearance. Like Boyle and Milton, he harnessed a moral prescription to the image of the duped Indian, warning his readers not to make an equally poor bargain.

Clearly a variety of seventeenth-century writings replicated Columbus’s depiction of naive Indians exchanging their treasures for the trash of those who would become their conquerors. In their appropriation of this trope they took for granted the distinction between real and apparent worth suggested by exchange. That is, the allusion to Indians and trade conveyed the supremacy not only of reality over appearance, but also of the intangible—whether romantic or moral—over the quantifiable. These texts also took for granted the idea that exchange was to the detriment of Indians.

Ironically, this interpretation did not apply to the texts that claimed to be most interested in the welfare of Indians: missionary writings. While they also adopted the trope of gold for glass, they realigned the meanings Columbus had assigned to it by diminishing the real worth of gold in the face of spiritual goods. This change makes sense when we consider the delicate task these writers faced: raising funds to convert Indians by soliciting many of the very people gaining wealth from the exploitation of Indians. This adjustment made it possible to invoke a sense of moral obligation while presenting a model of fair exchange that would not alienate an English or British audience. Understandable though their motives were, the writers of these texts played an important role in developing a rhetorical justification for colonialism. What Columbus took as an example of exploitation that he had rectified to make possible the Indians’ acceptance of Christianity, British missionaries later presented as an emblem of salvation.

“First Fruits”: The Husbandry of Souls

Because it conveyed that the British were giving something valuable to America, the trope of husbandry was crucial to the interpretation of gold traded for glass in missionary writings. Husbandry already was a central Christian metaphor, and it became especially prominent in the seventeenth century. Besides suggesting the spread of the gospel, it conveyed the ordering and tending of the self. Both ideas were attractive ones in Protestant thought, with its emphasis on individual faith and moral accountability unmediated by priests. The pragmatic connotations of this trope also fit into the increasingly secular and financially saturated perspective of early modern Europe. As Richard Allestree noted in The Whole Duty of Man, a popular book of Anglican practical piety, “There is a husbandry of the soul, as well as of the estate.”²³ Teaching its practitioners to tend the estate along with the soul, the notion of husbandry helped individuals operate virtuously within the world rather than separate from it.

This trope occupied a prominent position in the rhetoric of colonization because it validated the plantation model that English and Scottish settlers practiced. As Samuel Sewall wrote in the history of Puritan missionary work that prefaced his Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica (1697), “They who remove from one Land to another, there to dwell; that settlement of theirs is call’d a Plantation. Especially, when a Land, before rude and unfurnish’d, is by the New-comers replenished with usefull Arts, Vegetables, Animals.”²⁴ The British applied this trope with ease to the topic of Indian conversion. Except for a tendency to depict the spread of the gospel through a contrast between pagan darkness and Christian light, the missionary texts seem most often to describe the conversion of Indians through images of trade or cultivation. Metaphors of husbandry were most prominent in Puritan writings, even in titles such as New Englands First Fruits (1643). In The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England (1649), the writer J. D., or John Dury, prayed “that those sometimes poor, now precious Indians … may be as the first fruits of the glorious harvest.”²⁵ In The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day (1651), Thomas Mayhew, Jr., asked his readers to pray “that the Indians in this small begining [sic], being Gods husbandry, and Gods building, may be a fruitful glorious spreading Vine, and building together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”²⁶ Urging for more missionary efforts several decades later, Cotton Mather warned his readers, “Verily, our GOD will not look on us as a Thankful People, if we are not also a Fruitful People.”²⁷

Although used most vividly in Puritan writings, the rhetoric of husbandry pervaded missionary texts of all denominations. John Wynne, Bishop of Asaph, concluded his sermon of 1725 before the SPG by saying, “Let us then beseech Him, who alone, whatever pains we may take in planting and watering the Gospel, is able to give the Increase.”²⁸ In his History of the Propagation of Christianity, Robert Millar, an affiliate of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), said of America, “The blessing of God, and the pouring out of his spirit from on high, are necessary to turn this wilderness into a fruitful field.”²⁹ In a sermon of 1766 before the SSPCK, George Muir described Indians as “Ignorant of God,—unacquainted with themselves,—their reason, like their fields, quite uncultivated.”³⁰ Whether the earth in which the gospel is seeded or the harvest of that earth, Indians appear in these texts as the objects of cultivation.

The real husbandry that missionaries taught underscored this rhetoric. Most promoters of mission assumed that “culture” or “civilization” – by which they usually meant the acquisition of British clothing and behavior – must accompany conversion.³¹ The practice of husbandry was crucial to both goals. As Claire Jowitt has explained, “From the end of the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century the main sense of ‘culture’ was to mean ‘human development’, especially in relation to an earlier connotation of husbandry.”³² The New England minister Solomon Stoddard saw conversion occurring along with training in husbandry and trade: “Many Nations, when they were in their Heathenism, lived miserably as to this World…. But since their imbracing the Gospel, they are got into a flourishing condition. God leads them in ways of wisdom, to follow Husbandry, Trades and Merchandize, and to live honourably and plentifully.”³³

Of course the Indians of the eastern seaboard did farm and in fact had taught the English to cultivate indigenous crops. This escaped the notice of most proponents of mission, however. Cotton Mather took the Indians’ initial resistance to adopting English husbandry as the greatest sign of their depravity. Describing the first interactions between New England’s colonists and natives, he wrote, “Tho’ [they]…. saw this People Replenishing their Fields, with Trees and with Grains, and useful Animals, which until now they had been wholly Strangers to; yet they did not seem touch’d in the least, with any Ambition to come at such Desireable Circumstances, or with any Curiosity to enquire after the Religion that was attended with them.”³⁴ Although there were ample reasons why the Indians did not accept English-style agriculture, their refusal only enhanced their “barbarous” qualities in his eyes.³⁵ A group of Boston ministers signing a preface to Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727) acknowledged one of their greatest failures to be that “We cannot get the Indians to improve so far in English Ingenuity, and Industry, and Husbandry, as we would wish for.”³⁶ More optimistically, John Sergeant reported in 1736 that the Stockbridge Indians “‘gave very much into Husbandry,… planted more this Year than ever they did before.’”³⁷ The degree to which Indians settled into houses and plantations thus often directed how successful the British felt their missions were.

This rhetoric, along with the economy that supported it, was so pervasive that it shaped how Christian Indians talked about themselves. In Indian Converts Experience Mayhew quotes one Mary Coshomon, who “declared, that she look’d on the Officers of the Church of Christ, as Dressers of the Trees planted in God’s Vineyard; and that she greatly needed to be under such Cultivations,… as Members of Churches might expect to enjoy.”³⁸ Clearly the trope of husbandry served multiple purposes for the missionaries. First, it was useful for fund-raising. As authoritative and accessible as the parables they imitate, these images were appealing to their audience, suggesting a link between initial contributions and long-term results. As the last example indicates, this rhetoric also seems to have offered at least some Indians a way of reconciling themselves to the rigors of conversion. More broadly, it presented Indians as unrealized organic potential. They are described as waiting for the British to save them, not only from the pains of hell but also from a limbo of sterility and waste.

This understanding of the Indians as a people who did not cultivate their land’s resources and did not allow themselves to be “cultivated” was central to the justifications the British developed for their usurpation of American territory. John Locke’s famous comment on America summarizes this perspective: “[I]t is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything…. There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything than several nations of the Americas are of this, who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life…. [L]and that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste.”³⁹ Because they derived rightful ownership from the maximal “improvement” of available resources and acknowledged only narrow definitions of improvement, such formulations allowed the British to define themselves as the caretakers of the American continent. Missionaries added to this understanding even as their projects benefited from it.

This claim becomes especially potent if we consider “husbandry” to connote not just farming but also frugality and the management of a household. As the prefatory letter to The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel (1648) proclaims, “An account is here given to thee, of the conquest of the Lord Jesus upon these poor out-casts, who have thus long been estranged from him, spilt like water upon the ground and none to gather them.”⁴⁰ The image of spilt water transforms colonial conquest into miraculous recovery. That they conceived of their work in these terms may help explain why many found it so easy to believe that Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. Gathering and cultivating scattered souls, missionaries saw themselves engaged in spiritual husbandry.

Images of husbandry also suggest a Protestant distaste for what were perceived to be the baroque excesses of all things Catholic. The Black Legend, the collection of stories that marked Spain as the center of Catholic tyranny and cruelty, assisted in the propagation of this assertion.⁴¹ Early modern anti-Spanish propaganda, especially translations of Bartolome de Las Casas’s Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, linked the cruelty of the conquistadores in America to their prodigality and greed.⁴² In these translations, references to English harvests sometimes were contrasted with images of Mexico’s blood-soaked land. As The Tears of the Indians, a translation of Las Casas’s Brevissima relacion, said of the conquest of Jamaica, “So lavish were the swords of the bloud of these poor souls, scarce two hundred more remaining; the rest perished without the least knowledge of God.”⁴³ The text juxtaposed the abundance of America’s population and agricultural production before the conquest with the destruction perpetrated by the Spanish. Mexico had been “a pleasant Country, now swarming with multitudes of People, but immediately all depopulated, and drown’d in a Deluge of Bloud.” The translator’s preface quoted from scripture to emphasize the countless souls who could have been saved from hell:

Never had we so just cause to exclaim in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah; O that our heads were waters, and our eyes fountains of tears, that we might weep for the Effusion of so much Innocent Blood which provok’d these sad Relations of devout CASAUS, by reason of the cruel Slaughters and Butcheries of the Jesuitical Spaniards, perpetrated upon so many Millions of poor innocent Heathens, who having onely the light of Nature, not knowing their Saviour Jesus Christ, were sacrificed to the Politick Interest and Avarice of the wicked Spaniards.⁴⁴

The Spanish are cruel, and they are poor managers of wealth. Greedy for gold, they have destroyed a fortune in agricultural revenues and a rich harvest in souls. The only product of their venture has been an “Effusion of … Innocent Blood.” As they weep the English offer a compensatory outpouring of emotion to the sight of extravagant slaughter. They juxtapose Protestant pity with Catholic coldness, matching both affects to the contrasted tropes of conservation and waste.

David Humphries, the secretary of the SPG, summarized this anti-Catholic perspective in his history of the society (1730). Distinguishing between Spanish and English colonies, he wrote, “All the Riches drawn from these Lands now by the English, is owing chiefly to their own honest Labour, scarce any Thing to that of the Natives; whereas the Wealth of the Spaniards, is to this Day dug out of the Mines, at the Expense and Sweat and Blood of the miserable Natives and Negroes.”⁴⁵ Humphries set English settlement apart from Indian indolence and Spanish violence, both of which waste land. The English deserve America, he suggested, because they are good caretakers, matching agricultural toil with spiritual labor.

Allusions to husbandry or trade often accompanied literary appropriations of the Black Legend such as John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1667), a heroic tragedy based on the conquest of Mexico. In the final act of this play a priest and several Spanish soldiers torture Montezuma, who heroically refuses to abandon his gods or his gold. Frustrated by Montezuma’s resistance, the priest says:

Mark how this impious Heathen justifies

His own false gods, and our true God denies;

How wickedly he has refus’d his wealth,

And hid his Gold, from Christian hands, by stealth:

Down with him, Kill him, merit heaven thereby.⁴⁶

In a gruesome parody of the trope of gold for glass, the priest attempts at once to force Christianity upon, and extort gold from, Montezuma. The promise to the soldiers that they should “merit” heaven by killing Montezuma marks the priest’s economic paradigm of redemption as perverse. The Aztec king’s ensuing death becomes the only reward for their violent exertion, suggesting the inefficiency as well as the cruelty of the Spanish.

In contrast, British missionaries stressed their role as caretakers. In The Day-Breaking, if not the Sun-Rising of the Gospell (1647), John Eliot’s colleague Thomas Shepard juxtaposed English and Spanish missions in exactly this way. Defending the Massachusetts Bay colonists against accusations that they had not converted enough Indians, he stressed “the vast distance of Natives from common civility” and contrasted the quantity of false Catholic converts with the quality of Puritan ones: “[W]ee have not learnt as yet that art of coyning Christians, or putting Christs name and Image upon copper mettle.”⁴⁷ The description of “coyn[ed]” Christians suggests spiritual counterfeit, and it alludes to the mines that were known to have helped the Spanish build their empire with the blood of indigenous Americans. In contrast, Shepard described New England’s missionary project through analogy to its agricultural one:

[M]e thinkes now that it is with the Indians as it was with our New-English ground when we first came over, there was scarce any man that could beleeve that English graine would grow, or that the Plow could doe any good in this woody and rocky soile. And thus they continued in this supine unbeliefe for some yeares, till experience taught them otherwise, and now all see it to bee scarce inferior to Old English tillage, but beares very good burdens; for wee have thought of our Indian people, and therefore have beene discouraged to put plow to such dry and rocky ground, but God having begun thus with some few it may bee they are better soile for the Gospel than wee can thinke.⁴⁸

This comparison helped Shepard stress the difficulty of civilizing Indians, even as it contrasted a true return with the false profits created by Catholic counterfeiting.

Shepard presented other images of husbandry and organic growth that proved central to the developing discourse of Protestant mission. His insistence that “it must certainly be a spirit of life from God … which must put flesh and sinewes unto these dry bones” implied a promise fulfilled in later New England Company tracts.⁴⁹ Listing the questions Indians asked missionaries four years later, John Eliot told his readers, “You might perceive how these dry bones begin to gather flesh and sinnews.”⁵⁰ As he implied the presence of a divine spirit at work, Eliot sounded like an anxious parent fretting over a sickly child. He emphasized this parent-child relationship in letters to Robert Boyle, president of the New England Company from 1662 until his death in 1691. Eliot began a letter of 1684 by addressing Boyle as “Right honorable nursing Father” and then wrote, “Your hungry Indians doe still cry unto your honor for the milk of the word in the whole book of God, & for the bread of life.”⁵¹ The description of Boyle as a “nursing Father,” a term traditionally applied to monarchs in allusion to Isaiah’s prophecy, “Thou … shalt suck the breast of kings” (60:16), also echoes references to nursing from the biblical epistles. These references stress spiritual immaturity, as when the epistle to the Hebrews notes, “[E]very one who useth milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness” (Heb. 5:12), even as they assert a desire for spiritual nurturance in response to 1 Peter’s advice, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word” (2:2). In both private correspondence and published fund-raising texts, the heathen soul was described as an emaciated or infantile body nurtured by the English.

As poet laureate for the City of London, Elkanah Settle also discriminated between a nurturing British mission and the cruel incursions of Catholics. In the preface to his Pindaric Poem on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1711), he praised Queen Anne for supporting the SPG’s plans to establish a mission among the Mohawks by distinguishing her “bloodless Crosade” from medieval crusades and Catholic missions: “Yes, Royal Christian Heroine, You send Your Deputed Champions over to those pitied Infidels, on a more sacred Expedition; whilst by thus truly performing the Vicegerency [sic] of God in so shining and so merciful a Charity to so many Thousand wandring Souls, You set up the Standart of Your own British Cross amongst them, not like the Romish nor Spanish Cruelty, for the sacrificing of so many innocent Lives; but laying them the Foundation of your own Eternal One.”⁵² British mission is described here as a curative endeavor. While the Spanish sacrifice America’s innocents, the British minister to them. Under the guidance of their benevolent queen they express their pity through charity, alleviating the effects of Spain’s empire.

Settle relied on Anne’s gender as well as her domestic initiatives to create an image of British benevolence. Howard Weinbrot has shown that in their efforts to imitate but morally supersede classical poetic models, many eighteenth-century odes supplanted the glory of Rome’s military empire with a British empire of peaceful commerce. “Many [odes] celebrate not Marlborough’s victory at, say, Ramillies or Blenheim, but Queen Anne’s arms as extended by Marlborough on behalf of the nation.”⁵³ Settle exemplified this effort as he praised Anne for building new churches throughout London and supporting the SPG, describing her as a nursing mother to British and foreign Christians: “What a Glorious Aera of Christianity shall this Age commence … when turning our Eyes into our Holy Temples, we find not only so many Trebble Voices added to the Hallelujah Song, in the Religious Infant Nurseries now spread around the Kingdom: But not content with bounding so tender a Compassion to her own Native Sphere alone, we see the Royal Piety laying those yet greater Plans of Glory, resolv’d to make her Britannia, with such expanded Arms and flowing Breasts, a more Universal Nursing Mother in so extensive a Filial Adoption.”⁵⁴ The references to motherhood, painfully ironic when considered alongside Anne’s ill-fated attempts to bear children, translate physical into spiritual fertility and personal into national maternity. They echo Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem as a mother suckling her children (Isa. 66:10–11). Britain becomes a boundless, compassionate body engaged in the nurturing of foreign souls, all of whom will rejoice with the new Jerusalem.

All these images valorize British mission by linking it to the tending of the domestic sphere. This spacial association echoes an ancient Greek distinction between the oikos, the private household space of agriculture and economics, and the polis, the arena of war and public affairs. The rhetoric of husbandry, when understood in its broadest sense, thus insists on the domestic and peaceful character of British mission. It let the British think of themselves as giving more to the Indians than they took from them.

“To Barter Gold for Brass, and Pearl for Trifles”: Missionaries and the Trope of Trade

When British missionaries and their supporters raised funds to convert Indians, they often did so by invoking their readers’ sense of Christian duty even as they evoked their acquisitive desire. Sometimes they attempted this twofold task directly, arguing that contributions to missions would enhance Britain’s colonial wealth. Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, insisted in his SPG sermon, “For were we but wise enough to consider only the Advantage of our Trade in America … we should take care to propagate the Christian Revelation which … enjoins all those Virtues that make Commerce gainful, and prohibits all those Vices that bring Poverty in their Rear.”⁵⁵ Nathaniel Eells, a minister involved with Wheelock’s Indian school, paired a commercial mission with a Christian one: “[T]he vast Consumption of british Manufactures among ym,” he claimed, “would teach the Nation how to make a Gain by promoting Godliness.”⁵⁶ Although they would lose short-term profits through their charity, contributors to mission would enhance colonial wealth in the long run, turning savages into consumers as well as Christians.

Most missionary texts did not make so direct a link between charity and trade. Rather, they spoke through a metaphorical language that imitated the Gospels’ treatment of riches. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus emphasizes the importance of giving up wealth, because ‘“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’” (19:24). But he also relied on the language of wealth to emphasize the value of this kingdom: “[T]he kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it’” (13: 44–46). Such images allowed Jesus to use material acquisition as a metaphor for spiritual gain, even as he demeaned riches in the face of spiritual reward. These images also can be seen to equate material with spiritual value. The Kingdom of God may be greater than all one’s wealth, but there is a suggestion of equivalence in the parables, brought about by references to purchase. The Kingdom of God is costly and more valuable than all earthly treasure. Although it is priceless, it is like something that can be bought. Whether it is meant by its writers to do so, the Gospels’ adoption of a metaphorical economy can lend itself to an economic vision of religion.

In his epistle to the Romans, Paul also juxtaposes material with spiritual wealth. At the end of his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote, “But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints. For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things” (15.25–27). Paul’s formulation suggests not just the virtue of charity but also the imperative of spiritual and material exchange. Unlike the gospel parables, Paul asks his readers to take literally the exchangeability of money with spiritual wealth. Describing the gentiles’ charity as a debt for the Jewish church’s communication of the good news has the effect of placing a fulcrum between the balanced values of material and spiritual wealth. Generosity is there, but it is prompted by obligation. As Paul would have it, the conversion of the gentiles has merited material compensation to the Christian Jews.

Drawing on these references, many writers of missionary texts evoked images of wealth to make two claims. First, they communicated that the conversion of heathens was as valuable as it was costly, meriting donations and superseding in importance any wealth the British would gain from colonial trade. Second, they suggested that Christianity was a compensation Indians deserved for the wealth they had lost. Taken together, and read through Paul’s formulation, these claims could be (and eventually were) made to suggest a fair payment of Christian conversion for colonial wealth. A survey of the missionaries’ references to exchange suggests a gradual shift from stressing the debt owed to America’s natives for their loss of material gold to emphasizing the spiritual gold that England or Britain brought to America.⁵⁷

John Dury stressed the expense and importance of conversion in one of the earliest missionary texts, The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New England. He exhorted his readers, “Come forth ye Masters of money, part with your Gold to promote the Gospel; let the gift of God in temporal things make way, for the Indian receipt of spirituals.”⁵⁸ Rather than suggesting a transatlantic reciprocity, he pinned his appeal on Christian obligation: “If you give any thing yearly,” he concluded, “Remember Christ will be your Pensioner.” The main compensation suggested for these contributions was spiritual. For parting with their gold the English would underwrite the Indians’ reception of spiritual wealth and receive the blessing of God.

Dury’s preface was written in the early, optimistic stages of Christian missions in America. By the end of the seventeenth century, especially after King Philip’s War had destroyed most of New England’s praying Indians, missionaries began to acquire a tone of pessimism and urgency.⁵⁹ While they adapted images of exchange to their projects, they did so less to emphasize the value of Indian conversion than to stress the debt England owed America’s natives for what they had suffered. This shift may have reflected a growing familiarity with the language of debt, especially after the founding of the Bank of England in 1690.⁶⁰ It also, however, was a response to glaring evidence of colonial exploitation, Indian demise, and evangelical failure.

In 1693 Patrick Gordon, a Scottish Episcopalian minister, appended a proposal for spreading the gospel in pagan countries to his Geography Anatomized, a cultural survey of the globe.⁶¹ Of North America Gordon wrote of the great embarrassment to England, “That those very Indians who inhabit near on the English Pale … should still continue in most wretched ignorance…. O Christians. Shall we covet and thirst after their Talents of Gold? and yet keep hid in a Napkin that Talent entrusted to us. Shall we greedily bereave them of their Precious Pearls? And not declare unto them the knowledge of the Pearl of Price. No! No! Let us not act as others have done in making Gold our God, and Gain the sole design of our Trading.”⁶² Focused on what he saw as the theft of America by the English, Gordon did not even mention trade. Citing parables about the Kingdom of God, he stressed the kingdom’s value and reminded his readers of their duty not to hoard its blessings. He sharpened this reminder by pairing the allusion to the spiritual gold of God’s kingdom with a reference to the Indians’ material gold. Rather than selling the idea of supporting missions by alluding to the riches of America, he suggested that those who have acquired wealth from the Americas owe some return.

Gordon drafted part of this proposal in a letter to the SPG, and it was transcribed into the society’s journal in 1701.⁶³ The next year the SPG sent Gordon to Jamaica, Long Island, as one of its first missionaries.⁶⁴ Although Gordon’s death shortly after his arrival prevented any sustained contribution to the SPG’s efforts, his publication may have influenced the society’s preachers. In 1704 Gilbert Burnet, the well-known Latitudinarian and chronicler of the Civil War, appealed to merchants, noting, “You great Dealers in Trade, who have had so plentiful a Harvest in Temporal things, from the Productions of those Countries, and from the Industry of our Colonies settled among them, are, in a more especial manner, bound to minister to them in Spiritual things.”⁶⁵ As he alluded to Paul’s formulation Burnet told his audience they owed America a spiritual debt that could be repaid through the contribution of funds. He thus suggested that financing missionary work translated into a spiritual expiation for material gain.

Other SPG preachers, like George Stanhope, the Dean of Canterbury, emphasized the idea of spiritual debt by comparing merchants to sailors acquiring Indian gold with European glass. Presenting this image with reference to Paul’s vision of spiritual-material exchange in 1714, however, he reversed the usual description of transatlantic trade. Emphasizing the “obligation” of all Christians to spread the word of God, he wrote:

But this Obligation seems to be drawn yet closer, upon All, whose Fortunes are owing to any Commerce with those Ignorants and Unbelievers. For, may I not be allowed to turn to St. Paul’s Argument, and affirm upon this Occasion, that to Them, whose Strength and Toil is consumed in the Service of your Carnal Things, Some Debt is contracted, Some Title thereby convey’d, to the Spiritual Advantages, they might receive from you? This were to act like generous Traders indeed; To barter Gold for Brass, and Pearl for Trifles; in returning the noblest and most useful Treasure, for Riches, which they knew not either the Use, or the Value of.⁶⁶

While gentile Christians of the early church offered material help to Jewish ones in return for sharing the spiritual wealth of Christ, Stanhope suggested that the British owed a spiritual debt to those who had given them material wealth. The change was subtle but significant. Material acquisition preceded spiritual generosity. The order and the origin of exchange were overturned. This reversal allowed Stanhope to validate the very trade that the image of gold for glass condemned. The Indians gave away gold because they did not understand the use of it. By taking their gold and repaying them with spiritual wealth, the British were donating spiritual pearls for material trinkets.

Rather than badgering his audience into charity, Stanhope tried to prompt their generosity by offering a pleasing image of mutually profitable trade. A few years later Edward Chandler, Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield, expanded on Stanhope’s strategy by presenting a moral vision based on reciprocity: “Natural Justice guides Men to be kind to that People, and Benefactors to those Places, by whom, and where they live, thrive, and prosper…. The moral sense whereof is this, that we return good, wherever we receive good: Return it not in Beads and Baubles, but in a Species, which may indeed cost us little, but to them, that are without Christ, and without God in the World, is of inestimable Value.”⁶⁷ Although he cited “natural Justice,” Chandler echoed Paul’s description of exchange when he stressed the importance of repaying goodness. His goal may have been the gathering of money for mission, but he approached it by describing colonialism as an exchange of gifts rather than exploitation. Describing America as England’s “benefactor,” Chandler called his audience to express thanks by offering America a gift of “inestimable value,” the knowledge of Christ.

The idea of mission allowed Chandler to reverse the usual vision of gold traded for glass. Britain would give true gold instead of the “beads and baubles” other colonists offered for the wealth of America. At first cheated of their treasure, the Indians would now receive something more lasting and useful. Their gain did not required Britain’s loss but in fact enabled its continued enrichment.

“We are more poor, they more rich by this”

The idea of spiritual wealth flowing to America in exchange for temporal riches became a cliche in missionary writings, especially Anglican ones, through the mid-eighteenth century. In 1709 William Dawes, Bishop of Chester, said in a sermon before the SPG, “[W]e cannot make them a more rich amends, for all these Advantages, for all these their carnal Things, than by letting them reap our spiritual ones.”⁶⁸ Several decades later Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, proclaimed, “We abundantly reap temporal things thence, and it is just therefore that we should sow spiritual things there.”⁶⁹ Reminding his readers of their Christian duty as he alluded to their profits, Benson drew simultaneously on images of husbandry and trade, combining the Gospels’ evocations of God’s vineyard with Paul’s juxtaposition of spiritual and material wealth. Perhaps John Waugh, the Dean of Gloucester, made the point most persuasively in 1722 when he wrote,

Nor can we otherwise do Justice, or express our Gratitude to those poor Infidels, from whose Countries we have drawn such immense Wealth … than by repaying them spiritual for temporal Riches. This, as it is an easie Expence to the Contributors, for so great Gains, so will it be a Means of procuring to those that receive the Advantage of it, a Treasure of inestimable Value, The Knowledge of the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. A Treasure, which St. Paul set so great a Value upon, that he looked upon the most pretious things as nothing worth, as Dung and Dross.⁷⁰

By referring to Paul’s epistle, Waugh was able to suggest the worthlessness of worldly goods even as he stressed the bargain that his readers would enjoy by funding missions. The British suffer only an “easie Expence,” in exchange for which they receive both material wealth and the awareness of Indian conversion. The “Infidels” of foreign lands lose wealth they hardly knew existed, and in return they receive the invaluable word of God. Everyone gains and nobody loses in this vision of intercontinental exchange.

The trope of trade allowed the British in their most optimistic moments to imagine an inexhaustible circulation of wealth around the Atlantic basin, enriching every participant and saving every soul. As Philip Bisse, the Bishop of Hereford, said, “All Zeal naturally spreadeth, without spending its Force; and rather increaseth its Fervour, the farther it goes.”⁷¹ Long before Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations, missionary texts taught their readers to transcend the zero-sum game of a mercantilist vision, seeing piles of wealth made endlessly expandable through global circulation. While raising money for the salvation of the Indians, they transformed a symbol of the Indians’ exploitation into one of their spiritual compensation.

Later missionaries were focused far less on tropes of exchange. In his fund-raising narratives of the Indian Charity School, written in the 1760s and 1770s, Eleazar Wheelock rarely described his work as part of a trade with or a debt owed to Indians. When he discussed his school in financial terms he was more likely to stress the comparative bargain Indian conversion presented in comparison with the price of waging war. Near the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War he speculated, “[I]f one half which has been, for so many Years past expended in building Forts … had been prudently laid out in supporting faithful Missionaries … the instructed and civilized Party would have been a fair better Defence than all our expensive Fortresses, and prevented the laying waste so many Towns and Villages.”⁷² After he announced his intention to focus on the education of Anglo-American missionaries rather than Indians, his focus shifted altogether.⁷³

Factors including the Seven Years’ War, a growing sense of British entitlement, and a weakening of transatlantic ties between Britain and the colonies probably influenced this rhetorical shift in missionary writings.⁷⁴ Another important factor no doubt was the growing poverty of those Indians who remained in areas now filled with European colonists. In his SPG sermon of 1766 William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, juxtaposed spiritual with material wealth, but with an important change. He wrote, “[T]he Aborigines of the Country, Savages without Law or Religion, are the principal Objects of our Charity. Their temporal, as well as spiritual, condition calls loudly for our assistance.”⁷⁵ Unlike his predecessors, Warburton did not refer to an exchange, reciprocal or not, but rather stressed the Indians’ temporal and spiritual needs. A sense of specific obligation disappeared under the general rubric of charity.

In 1633, George Herbert’s “Church Militant,” the penultimate poem of his collection The Temple, included a prophecy of true religion moving westward from its seat in England to a new home in America. Prompting this transfer was an eastward flow of wealth from America to Europe, which it was corrupting. Of America Herbert wrote,

My God, thou dost prepare for them a way,

By carrying first their gold from them away,

For gold and grace did never yet agree;

Religion always sides with poverty.

We think we rob them, but we think amiss:

We are more poor—they are more rich by this.⁷⁶

Celebrating the arrival of Protestants in the New World, Herbert portrayed the church on the brink of transition, about to abandon a corrupt Europe for an innocent America from which the Spanish already had taken much wealth.⁷⁷ He transformed the impoverishment of America into enrichment, toying with the term as he linked colonialism to divine will. By having the Spanish take their gold, God prepares Indians for Christianity. The English also help the natives by making them financially poor, while transforming that poverty into spiritual wealth.

Writing when the only English attempt to convert America’s indigenous peoples had been the abortive establishment of Henrico College near Jamestown, Herbert reversed Paul’s description of financial generosity repaying spiritual, by seeing spiritual conversion as a compensation for theft. That his vision influenced at least some missionaries is suggested by the fact that these lines appeared forty years later in Daniel Gookin’s Historical Collections of the Indians in New England. Gookin, who was the superintendent of Indian affairs in Massachusetts during King Philip’s War and a supporter of Eliot, quoted this poem as he described the piety of the praying Indians, mourned their treatment during the war, and called for more missionary efforts.⁷⁸ Two of Herbert’s lines also appeared in Thomas Randall’s SSPCK sermon of 1763. Randall suggested that his audience could prevent the flight of religion from Britain by returning some of their wealth to the society’s mission in America.⁷⁹

Many poems of the Restoration and the eighteenth century expanded on this vision of riches flowing eastward from America in exchange for intangible forms of wealth. Herbert’s poem also influenced British understandings of empire, although the alterations made to his vision of exchange are as telling as its appropriations. After Herbert, English and then British visions of empire rarely saw gold and grace flowing in opposite directions. Rather, they imagined an organic expansion of grace both prompted and proved by the wealth that the world brought to Europe. In Annus Mirabilis (1667), John Dryden adapted Isaiah’s prophecy of gentiles worshipping Yahweh (Isa. 60) to a future in which merchants flock toward a glorious, gold-paved London like “suppliants” before a beautiful woman.⁸⁰ Christopher Smart’s “On the Goodness of the Supreme Being” (1756) envisions a scene of worldwide thanksgiving, in which peoples across the globe converge to offer their wealth to God and a well-armed “Europa” guards the loot. After describing caravans of elephants bearing “frankincense and myrh” from Araby and trains of camels bearing gold ingots from Africa, Smart addresses an American Indian maiden:

And thou, fair Indian, whose immense domain

To counterpoise the Hemisphere extends,

Haste from the West, and with thy fruits and flow’rs,

Thy mines and med’cines, wealthy maid, attend.

More than the plenteousness so fam’d to flow

By fabling bards from Amalthea’s horn

Is thine; thine therefore be a portion due

Of thanks and praise: come with thy brilliant crown

And vest of furr; and from thy fragrant lap

Pomegranates and the rich ananas pour.⁸¹

Identified with organic abundance rather than the luxury of the east, the “fair Indian” also mirrors and belies the bodies of upper-class British women who displayed the wealth of colonial commerce.⁸² Described as Amalthea, who nourished the infant Jupiter with goat’s milk, she is termed “wealthy” because of the “fruits and flow’rs … mines and med’cines” with which she can enrich others. Identified with the products of a fertile and generous land, she becomes inseparable from them.

Although both America and Europe are female, Smart deploys their gender in different ways, illustrating the power dynamics between the continents. America is a nurturing Amalthea, but “Europa” is a fierce Athena, “Clad in the armour of the living God,” whom the poet beckons:

Approach, unsheath the spirit’s flaming sword;

Faith’s shield, 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.