Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire
Author(s): Alfred A. Cave
Source: American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 277-297
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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CANAANITES IN A PROMISED LAND:
The American Indian
and the
Providential Theory of Empire
Alfred A. Cave
OWARD THE END OF HIS LONG CAREER as a colonial promoter, Captain
John Smith declared professions of concern for Indian salvation
in Virginia promotional literature hypocritical. The founders of the
colony, he wrote, made "religion their colour, when all their aim was
present profit."' The absence, in the early years of colonization, of
any sustained effort to send missionaries to the Indian tribes, as well
as the ruthlessness which often characterized interactions with Indians
on the colonial frontier, would appear to offer ample confirmation for
Smith's cynical conclusion. But the role of religion as a motivating
force in English empire building in the early seventeenth century
cannot be dismissed out of hand. In the ideology of early English
colonialism, North America was portrayed as England's Canaan. The
providential theory of Empire, fully developed after the settlement
of Jamestown in 1607, invoked Old Testament precedents and analogies
to cast the English in the role of God's new Chosen People. It also
appealed to the New Testament to represent England's occupation of
the continent as a crucial and preordained event in God's struggle
against Satan. But the advocates of Christian imperialism were uncertain and divided in their assessments of the place of the Indian in
God's plan for an English America. While some were serenely confident
that the English would be the instruments of Indian redemption,
others found in the scriptural accounts of the Almighty's use of the
Israelites to exterminate the idolators of Canaan a probable key to
God's plan for those Indians whom the Devil would no doubt impel
to resist the coming of the New Elect. The ideology of colonialism
provided a rationale for righteous violence which would later color
inter-racial interaction on the North American frontier.
The providential theory of Empire evolved slowly and unsystematically. The earliest English commentary on the right of Christians
to colonize savage lands antedated the founding of the first permanent
English colony in North America by nearly a century. In 1519, John
Rastell, lawyer, printer, playwright and brother-in-law of Sir Thomas
More, Lord Chancellor of England, published an "interlude" containing
a brief characterization of the inhabitants of North America. Rastell's
277
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Indians were exceedingly primitive creatures, living like animals,
without religion, government, or culture. They draped themselves in
animal skins in the cold regions of the north, but went naked in the
warmer south. Despite an abundance of timber, they built no houses,
but lived in rude shelters or caves. They were, Rastell emphasized,
in desperate need of instruction in both worldly and spiritual matters,
being so benighted that "they nother knowe God nor the diuill, nor
never harde tell of wrytynge nor other scripture." Implicit in Rastell's
disquisition on Indian life as he imagined it was the assumption that
the peoples of the New World were so backward that European occupation and rule in America was not only justifiable, but absolutely
essential to Indian well-being. He declared that it would be "a great
meritoryouse dede" to teach such creatures to live as human beings.2
Wild men in need of civilizing also lurked in the pages of Sir
Thomas More's Utopia. Although he postulated the existence of civilized
states beyond the Atlantic, More declared some of the inhabitants of
his imaginary America "no less savage, wild, and noisome than the
very beasts themselves." His fictional description of the customs of
Utopia contains a few passages which are strikingly prophetic of later
English conceptions of the moral and legal relationships between
"civilized" and "savage" peoples. It is noteworthy that the founder
of Utopia was a colonizer, probably of Greek origin, who in the third
century B.C. had subdued and enlightened a less advanced indigenous
population. King Utopus, wrote More, "brought the rude and wild
people to that excellent perfection of all good fashion, humanity, and
gentleness, wherein they now go beyond all the peoples of the world."
The contemporary Utopians, emulating their founder, were also colonizers who claimed the right to occupy territories whose "inhabitants
have much waste and unoccupied ground." Upon deciding to establish
a new settlement in a primitive and sparsely populated region, they
first invited the natives to grant them land and embrace civilization
by accepting the superior Utopian laws. But if that invitation were
refused, the Utopian army then invaded and drove out the backward
and recalcitrant inhabitants. More explained that, while the Utopians
generally abhorred warfare, "they count this the most just cause of
war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to
no good nor profitable use, keeping others from the use and possession
of it." Failure to exploit the land they deemed contrary to "the law
of nature." In their wars, the Utopians employed as mercenaries the
Zapolites, a "hideous, savage, and fierce people" who had proven
unreceptive to their civilizing influence. They were untroubled by
Zapolite casualties, for, as More explained, the Utopians "believe that
they should do a very good deed for all mankind if they could rid out
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CANAANITESIN A PROMISEDLAND
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of the world all the foul stinking den of that most wicked people."
More's Utopians thus not only espoused and enforced the doctrine of
vacuum domicilium (literally, vacant land, but meaning the right to
occupy under-utilized territories) which would later be of enormous
significance in the justification of English settlement in regions inhabited by "primitive" peoples, but also anticipated future attitudes
towards those who refused to abandon their "savage" ways.3
More than three decades passed before another English writer
addressed the question of the legitimacy of European occupation of
lands claimed by "savage" peoples. In 1555, Richard Eden, a Cambridge
graduate and royal official, prefaced his translation of Peter Martyr's
De Novo Orbe with a brief commentary on the controversy in Spain
regarding the legality of the conquest of the Indies.4 Eden followed
Gines de Septilveda in declaring the Indians unfit for freedom, and
regarded their forcible subjugation to the Catholic Church and Spanish
state as not only justifiable but essential to their own well being.
Translator of a number of accounts of the New World and its peoples,
Eden was unable to distinguish between the more accurate portrayals
of Indian life and the more fanciful.5 He found some Indians to be
blood-thirsty cannibals and devil worshippers to whom liberty meant
a "horrible licentiousness." Others, free of those vices, he portrayed
as lazy, improvident, sexually abandoned children of nature who abused
their freedom by "a fearful idleness" which rendered them vulnerable
to the more ferocious man-eaters. Drawing upon Spanish reports
which declared that the Indians, being both ignorant and slothful,
violated God's commandment to earn their bread by the sweat of
their brow, Eden argued that they could reasonably be expected to
surrender their lands to Christians, who would teach them how to
cultivate the soil properly. He defended Spanish coercion of Indian
labor on the ground that as "bondsmen" to Christians Indians enjoyed
a freedom from want unknown in their untamed state.6
Fundamental to Eden's appeal to the English to occupy North
America was his assumption that a Christian nation had not only the
right but also the obligation to take possession whenever possible of
any lands not already occupied by another Christian people. He attached
a special urgency to the occupation of America, as his Spanish texts
alleged that the Indians were in bondage to the devil, and in some
cases even immolated their own children in human sacrifices. To
Eden, it was self-evident that their conquest by Christians was essential
to liberate them from Satan's tyranny. He therefore declared that
those who quibbled about the right to use force to establish Christian
control of the New World were to be compared to irresponsible physicians who let their patients die while they debated the proper cure
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for their maladies.' Eden reproached his countrymen for their lack
of interest in the colonization of North America.
The English, preoccupied with domestic problems and lacking
the resources for aggressive American Empire building, ignored his
appeal. No other commentaries on the question of Indian rights and
Christian prerogatives were published in England for several decades.
In 1583, however, growing anti-Spanish sentiment, along with heightened interest in the New World, prompted the publication of The
Spanish Colonie, an English translation of Bartholome de Las Casas'
Brevissima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias. Appended to the
text was a short commentary on the Spanish controversy which dismissed Septilveda's denial of Indian rights as "pernicious blindnes"
and endorsed Las Casas' contention that Christians could not lawfully
invade the New World by force but must restrict themselves to "a
peaceable, loving and gentle preaching of the Gospel." In his preface,
the translator used Las Casas' estimate that millions of Indians had
been deliberately and sadistically slain by the Spaniards as the basis
for an indictment of both Spain and the Papacy. He also pondered
the role of divine providence in the slaughter of Indians in Spanish
America. He noted that the Old Testament revealed that the Lord had
ordered the extirpation of the Canaanites in punishment for their
"abominations" but denied that the Indians were equally deserving
of His wrath. The judgments of God, he declared, "were bottomlesse
pites" beyond human comprehension, but the butchery of the Indians
by the Spaniards appeared to be an example, not of God's punishment
of heathens, but rather of His will that, on occasion, "the good be
chastised by the cruel and bloodthirstie." The English could rest assured
that their Spanish foes, being "through avarice, and ambition, degenerate from all humanitie," would not escape divine judgment, for
"although the wicked for a time doe triumph, yet doth not God leave
their abominable cruelties unpunished.''8
Although sometimes quoted by anti-Spanish propagandists, Las
Casas's influence on the development of Indian policy in England was
negligible. English writers in the sixteenth century gave no credence
to his contention that European rule in America could not legitimately
be imposed by force. A memorandum found among the papers of Sir
Walter Raleigh suggests though that the issue was debated by the
advocates of colonization. That memorandum is exceptional in its
endorsement of Las Casas' claim that Christians must seek Indian
consent before establishing New World colonies. The writer, whose
identity is unknown, maintained that while the Israelites were directed
by God to invade the land of Canaan, "God hath giuen no Christians
Christians are commaunded to doo good vnto
any such warrant...
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CANAANITESIN A PROMISEDLAND
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all men, and to haue peace with all men, to doo as thei would be
donn vnto; to giue none offense ... Therefor no christian Prince under
pretence of Christianity only, and of forcing men to recieue the ghospell,
or to renounce their impietyes, may attempt the inuasion of any free
people not vnder their vassalage. For Christ gaue not that power to
Christians as Christians which he himselfe as soveraigne of all Christians
neither had, nor would take." Endorsing Raleigh's Guinea venture,
he declared that the English should aid and encourage those Indians
who wished to rebel against the Spaniards, and should also seek by
friendly persuasion to deliver them from cannibalism, human sacrifice,
and devil worship. But if their overtures to the Indians were rebuffed,
the English must withdraw peaceably, for "no Christians may lawfully
invade with hostility any heathenish people not under their allegiance
to kill, spoile and conquer them, only upon pretence of their fidelity."9
The Raleigh memorandum was not published until the nineteenth
century. The treatises on colonization which did appear in print in
England in the sixteenth century often deplored Spanish brutality
and challenged Spain's moral and legal right to claim the New World,
but rejected Las Casas' prohibition of the use of force in the occupation
of America. In 1582, Richard Hakluyt, the foremost advocate of overseas
expansion, stated simply that since the "temperate and fertile" regions
of North America were "as yet unpossessed by any Christians," England
could lay claim to a great expanse of American territory. He offered
a lengthy refutation of Spain's claim that the Papal grant excluded
other Christian nations from North America, but did not acknowledge
the possibility that Indian rights might be violated by English occupation.10 In 1587, in the "Epistle Dedicatory" of his Latin edition
of Peter Martyr, Hakluyt reminded Sir Walter Raleigh that "to posterity
no greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian,"
and declared that England had a mission in the New World "to recall
the savage and the pagan to civilitie, to draw the ignorant within the
orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and
the ungodly."" He saw no moral or legal obstacle to the use of force
to subdue those "savages" who might prove unappreciative of that
mission. In 1609, Hakluyt wrote of the native inhabitants of England's
future colonies: "To handle them gently, while gentle courses may be
found to serve, it will be without comparison the best: but if gentle
polishing will not serve, then we shall not want hammerours and
rough masons enow, I mean our old soldiours trained up in the Netherlands, to square and prepare them to our preachers hands."12
The most comprehensive sixteenth century treatise on England's
rights in America appeared in London in 1583. Hakluyt, who reprinted
that work in his Principal Navigations in 1589, attributed authorship
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to Sir George Peckham, a prominent Catholic nobleman who had
obtained under Sir Humphrey Gilbert's patent a substantial land
grant in New England which he proposed to use as a refuge for English
Catholics." Peckham expressed distress over assertions that Christians
had no right under any circumstances to seize Indian lands or depose
their rulers. In refutation of that belief, he appealed to the Old Testament
to claim for England prerogatives in North America comparable to
those granted by God to the Israelites in Canaan. Christians, Peckham
argued, were God's new Chosen People, and thus possessed a divine
mandate to "plant, possess and subdue" those regions of the world
still inhabited by heathens and savages. The invasion of Canaan by
the Hosts of Israel, the extermination of Canaanite resisters, and the
subsequent use of those who submitted as "drudges to hewe wood
and carie water" for God's Elect, in Peckham's mind, afforded ample
precedent for the English successors to God's favor in their dealings
with the "heathens" and "idolaters" who dwelt in the New World
Canaan. He also offered the example of the Emperor Constantine's
destruction of pagan idols and his armed subjugation of the inhabitants
of heathen lands as further evidence of the right of the English to use
the sword to claim their God-given rights in North America. Peckham
was hopeful, however, that the Indians, despite their depravity, would
be sufficiently rational to welcome and accommodate the English,
and thus render an armed conquest unnecessary. The Indians, he
argued, would benefit greatly from colonization. Not only would they
learn English "arts and sciences" and thereby raise their standard of
living, but under Christian tutelage they would also be led "from
superstitious idolatrie to sincere Christianity, from the divell to Christ,
from hell to heaven." In exchange for those blessings, Peckham maintained that it would be only reasonable for the Indians to give to the
English "all the commodities they can yeelde us," as "these heavenly
tidings which those labourers our countrymen, as messenger's of God's
great goodness and mercy, will voluntarily present unto them, do far
exceed their earthly riches." In response to the possible objection that
the Gospel should be England's free gift to the New World, Peckham
quoted St. Paul: "The workman is worthy of his hire."'4
Peckham's treatise also contained a secular, legal case for English
colonization. In an exposition closely resembling the teachings of the
Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria, Peckham held that, since the
"Law of Nations" guaranteed the right of "mutuall societie and fellowshippe between man and man," the Indians could not lawfully
refuse to trade with the English, or commit violence against those
who settled within their territories. Indians were, moreover, obligated
to allow the English to claim land, as they reportedly had a "great
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CANAANITESIN A PROMISEDLAND
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abundance" of territory of which they made "small account ... taking
no other fruites thereby then such as the ground of it selfe doth naturally
yielde." The English, facing desperate economic problems as a result
of overpopulation at home, were in need of New World land. The
Indians, being savage, had, in Peckham's view, no real right to ownership.
He held that if the "savages" were to resist "barbarously" English
demands for trade and land, it would be "no breach of equitie for
Christians to defend themselves" and "pursue revenge with force."'15
Peckham and other commentators on the English voyages to North
America in the 1570s and 1580s maintained that English colonization
of the "unoccupied" regions of the continent was divinely ordained.
Edward Hayes, writing in 1582, pointed to the failure of the Spanish
and French efforts to establish permanent colonies north of Florida
as proof that God had reserved those lands for England.16 However,
the providential theory of Empire was not fully developed until after
the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Its most strident advocate was
an obscure Anglican divine, Robert Gray, whose widely circulated
sermon tract A Good Speed to Virginia (1609) took as its text Joshua
17:14, a passage wherein the Lord assured the children of Israel that
they would "cast out the Canaanites." Gray declared that the English,
like the Old Testament Israelites, had become a "great people" unnaturally confined in a "narrow land." God, recognizing both England's
greatness and her economic need for more territory, had offered her
Virginia as the English Canaan. Countering the possible objection
that North America properly belonged to the Indians, Gray declared
that while God "had given the earth to the children of men" the native
Virginians could not rightfully share in that gift, as they partook of
"the nature of beasts." Indeed, given "their godles ignorance and
blasphemous idolatry," Gray held that the Indians were "worse than
those beasts which are of most wild and savage nature."" The Reverend
William Symonds, in a sermon also published in 1609, struck the
same note. God, he declared, had given to the English, who "doe
swarm in the land, as young bees in a hive in June," a promised land
in the New World. Indians who resisted English occupation Symonds
compared to the foes of ancient Israel, and he argued that they should
be treated accordingly. In keeping with their status as God's new
Chosen People, Symonds urged that the English in America preserve
their sanctity and their purity by scrupulously avoiding intermarriage
with savages.'8
The providential theory of Empire invoked as justification of English occupation of Virginia merged the Biblical Canaan analogy, which
represented English colonization as the will of God, and the secular
principle of vacuum domicilium, which upheld the legal right of the
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civilized to seize underutilized lands from savages. The effect was to
confer upon England's pursuit of her economic interests overseas both
a divine and a legal sanction. An excellent example of this fusion of
the Promised Land and Vacant Land motifs may be found in a tract
published in 1609 by Robert Johnson. One of the more prominent
investors in the Jamestown venture, Johnson declared that since the
Indians were "a wild and savage people," who made "no Christian
nor civil use of anything" but rather lived in a "beastly, brutish manner,"
they were obligated to accept English occupation and allow Christians
to make them "tame and civil." He argued that those who questioned
England's claim to land in Virginia had been misled by the devil, and
added that there could be no question of the English right to subject
to "just conquest by the sword" those savages who might behave as
"unbridled beasts" and "obstinately refuse to vnite themselves with
us.""9 Gray, who shared Johnson's ignorance of the actual nature of
Indian culture, also maintained that since the natives of Virginia did
not honor God's instruction that man cultivate the soil and earn his
bread by the sweat of his brow but rather "like the beasts in the forest
... range and wander up and downe the countrey, without any law
or government," they should have no legitimate cause for complaint
"if the whole land should be taken from them."'20 Other spokesmen
for colonialism, better informed, conceded that the Indians did cultivate
some small plots of land, and therefore proposed to exempt Indian
fields and villages from confiscation. In a promotional tract published
in 1610, the Virginia Company assured the public that "there is roome
in the land for them and us."21 But advocates of colonialism denied
that the Indians had any right to prohibit English settlement in their
hunting territories, as God presumably did not intend man to remain
a hunter and had therefore decreed that the economic needs of those
who conformed to His will should take precedence over the convenience
of "savages."22
All of those arguments had been anticipated by Peckham and
others in the preceding century. But none of the earlier formulations
of a religious rationale for colonialism had defined the Indians' place
in God's plan for North America with any precision or clarity. Several
years after the founding of Jamestown, two participants in that venture,
by identifying the Biblical ancestors of the Virginia Indians, related
the event more concretely to the grand pattern of sacred history revealed
in the scriptures. Rather than relying upon the customary crude analogies between Indians and Canaanites, Robert Johnson and William
Strachey incorporated the Indians into the Biblical epic itself. The
natives of Virginia, Johnson announced, were direct descendants of
those members of "the race and progeny of Noah" who three thousand
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CANAANITESIN A PROMISEDLAND
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years earlier at Babel had "highly provoked the Majestie of God"
through their pride and willfulness and in consequence had been cast
out "like unprofitable seed upon the dust of the earth." Having lived
for three millenia under the Almighty's "heavie curse and punishment,"
the Indians had fallen into brutishness and depravity and thus, Johnson
asserted, "sacrifice their children to serve the devil, as those heathens
did their sonnes and daughters to Moloch." However, with the passage
of years, the Lord's wrath had cooled, and He was now prepared to
"remove that heavie yoke of bondage" from those New World savages
who would agree to accept the Gospel. Accordingly, He had chosen
the English as His instruments to "reskue the brand from the burning
and the prey from the Lion's teeth," and "bring those infidell people
from worship of Divils to the service of God." England's colonization
of Virginia, Johnson reiterated, was ordained by God.23
The belief that the American Indians were descendants of a people
once cursed by God who were now to be offered redemption through
the English was more fully developed by William Strachey, Secretary
of the Virginia colony. Strachey's Historie of Travellinto Virginia Britania
(written in 1612 but not published until 1849) contained an exceedingly
imaginative reconstruction of pre-contact Indian history. He traced
the beginnings of Indian degradation and redemption to the sin of
Ham, who, according to the Book of Genesis, had provoked the wrath
of the Lord by exposing and mocking the nakedness of his drunken
father, Noah. Driven into exile and condemned to wander the earth
under God's curse, Ham taught his children to worship devils. In
consequence the Indian descendants of Ham were "so grosse and
barbarous" that they resembled "the brute beasts," although closer
scrutiny revealed that they still retained some faint remnants of "the
impression of the divine nature." God, Strachey declared, had summoned the English to Virginia to "informe them of the true God, and
the waie to their salvation." In order to carry out that divinely appointed
task, the colonists must replace the degenerate Indian religion and
government with the English church and state. Strachey believed
that the chief obstacle to the reduction of the Virginia Indians to
"civilitie" was the Indian priesthood. He falsely accused the medicine
men of persuading their misguided followers to sacrifice their children
to the devil, and described them as hard core opponents of English
rule. Furthermore, Strachey called for the extermination of Indian
religious leaders.24
Other commentators on the place of the Indian in an English
America were inclined to believe that a much broader policy of extermination of unregenerate and rebellious savages might prove to
be necessary to carry out God's will. William Symonds argued that
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the Almighty "putteth away all the ungodly of the earth like drosse.
... It is God's ordinance to bring a curse upon them and to kill them
as the children of Israel did Balam." After expressing some guarded
optimism about the prospects for the conversion of at least some
Indians, Robert Gray invoked images of righteous violence, and declared
the founding of Virginia a providential event comparable to the "subduing of the Canaanites by David and his sonnes" and "the stamping
of the Dragon (the Heathen Empire) into pieces by Constantine."25
Gray was somewhat uncertain about God's intentions toward the New
World Canaanites, but warned that Christians must not tolerate idolaters. He found the reports from Virginia contradictory in their assessment of Indian character. The native Virginians were said to be
devil worshippers, but, despite their depravity, some settlers found
them "by nature, loving and gentle, and desirous to embrace a better
condition." Gray therefore concluded that the English must make
some effort to convert them. "It is far more commendable," he declared,
"and out of doubt more acceptable to God, to reclaim an Idolator,
unless we have a speciall commandement from God to the contrary."
But what should be done if the Indians declined to embrace civilization
and Christianity? In that event, Gray warned, the English must emulate
the Israelites who executed God's wrath against the Canaanites of old,
for "euerie example in the scripture is a precept." The Bible, in Gray's
exegesis, stated unequivocally that devil worshippers and idolaters
are "odious ... in the sight of God." The English, he exhorted, must
always remember that "Saul had his kingdome rent from him and
his posteritie because he spared Agog, that idolatrous king of the
Amelichite, whom God would not have spared; so acceptable a service
it is to destroy Idolaters whom God hateth." The colonists in Virginia,
Gray thundered, must fulfill God's will by exterminating "Idolaters,
rather than let them live," should the Indians prove resistant to the
uplifting presence and influence of Christians.26
Gray and Symonds did not, however, speak for all of the clerical
defenders of colonialism; some found their militant and violent images
inappropriate. One proponent of England's New World mission opposed
any use of the Canaan analogy in discussions of English policy toward
the Indians. In a sermon preached to the Virginia Company in 1610,
the Puritan divine William Crashaw held that while the Israelites
were indeed "commaunded to kill ... the cursed Canaanites, we have
no such commaundement touching the Virginians." Crashaw insisted
that God had summoned the English to Virginia, not to destroy idolaters, but to save Indian souls. "The Israelites had a commandment
from God to dwell in Canaan; we have leave to dwell in Virginia; they
were commanded to kill the heathen; we are forbidden to kill them,
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CANAANITESIN A PROMISEDLAND
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but are commanded to convert them." Crashaw was confident that
the Indians would be "inclinable ... first to civilitie and so to religion."
Indian converts, he declared, would direct "vs to a land where is want
of inhabitants, and consequently roome both for them and us." The
founding of Virginia, Crashaw concluded, would soon lead to "the
destruction of the divill's kingdome" through the peaceable defection
of his Indian subjects.27
Crashaw was not alone in his rejection of the call to righteous
violence implicit in some of the early religious apologia for colonialism.
Most commonly, advocates of Christian imperialism in early seventeenth century England endeavored to avoid the issue altogether by
minimizing or denying the possibility of inter-racial conflict. Instead,
they stressed the presumed tractability of the Indians and their receptivity to the Gospel. In a sermon published in 1609 Daniel Price
predicted that the Virginians would quickly embrace both the Christian
religion and English civilization, thereby making Virginia "a sanctified
country" and enlarging, not only "the bounds of this kingdome," but
also "the bounds of heaven."28 In the same year, the Reverend Richard
Crakanthorpe made novel use of the Canaan analogy, predicting that
"the speech and language of Canaan" would soon be mastered by
"these as yet Heathen, Barbarous, and Brutish people," who were
destined to share with the English the bounty of God's new Promised
Land.29 In a vehemently anti-Catholic sermon, George Benson drew
upon Las Casas to castigate the Spanish for their cruel treatment of
the "poore and naked" Indians. He declared that whereas the Spaniard
had made "the name of Christianity...
odious" to the lost peoples
of the Americas, the English, as true followers of Christ, would "make
way for the Gospel" by their "gentle and humane dealings."30 The
Reverend Robert Tynley was persuaded that God would guarantee
both spiritual success and worldly prosperity to a colony founded in
compliance with God's mandate to civilize and Christianize the Indians.
"Wee may," Tynley declared, "with God's blessing assuredly expect
the fruits which usually accompany such Godly enterprises." Those
"fruits," he promised, would include "the plentiful enriching of our
selues and our Country."31Fifteen years later, the Reverend Richard
Eburne declared the conversion of the Indians by the English preordained by God as an essential stage in the world's preparation for
the second coming of Christ.32
Colonial promoters anticipated that the Devil would seek to incite
his Indian subjects against the English. Persuaded that England's
New World mission was providentially ordained, they assured their
readers that the Devil's efforts would be thwarted, and included in
their reports evidence of the Almighty's protection of His people in
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the American wilderness. John Smith, Thomas Studley, and George
Percy all reported from Jamestown that God had intervened to impel
Powhatan to send food in 1608 to the starving colonists. "If it had
not pleased God to have put a terrour into the savages hearts," Percy
wrote, "we had all perished by those wild and cruell pagans."33Thomas
Dale declared that, in their occasional altercations with the Indians,
"the God of battailes" had sustained the English, and impelled the
savages to seek peace.34 The Reverend Alexander Whitaker of Henrico,
Virginia, in 1613 wrote that "this plantation, which the divill hath
so often troden down, is by the miraculous blessing of God, revived
... God first shewed us the place, God first called us hither, and here
God by his special providence hath maintained us."35In 1622, Patrick
Copland preached in London a sermon of "Thanksgiving for the Hapie
Success of the Affayres in Virginia the Last Year,"wherein he rejoiced
that, while a few of the first settlers had been killed by the Indians,
God had quickly intervened to "mollifie the hearts of the Salvages"
and had "staid the fire that it doe not burne, and the hungry Lyons
that they doe not devore."36
Twenty-seven days before Copland delivered that sermon, unbeknownst to the preacher, one-third of the English inhabitants of
Virginia had died in a massive Indian uprising. In his analysis of that
tragedy, Samuel Purchas, the leading contemporary commentator on
the progress of English expansionism, recognized that Indian fear of
the total loss of their land and sovereignty played some role in
prompting Opechacanough to plot the extermination of the English
in Virginia. But Purchas gave no credence to the realities underlying
Indian anxieties, nor did he comprehend the deep resentments engendered by English cultural and religious arrogance. Instead, Purchas
declared that "the true cause of this surprize ... [was] the instigation
of the devil." God's protection of His Elect against the wiles of Satan
and his Indian subjects might seem to have faltered, but Purchas
found in the ultimate failure of the rebellion evidence of the Almighty's
continued intention that Virginia should belong to the English. He
faulted the colonists for their lack of vigilance, and invoked the old
formulas to explain the interaction of Englishmen and Indians on the
colonial frontier. The English remained the divinely appointed bearers
of civilization and salvation. Purchas declared the Indians a "bad
people, having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of
Arts, of Religion, more brutish then the beasts they hunt, more wild
and unmanly then that unmaned Countrey, which they range rather
then inhabite ... captivated also to Satan's tyranny in foolish pieties,
mad impieties, busie and bloudy wickedness." Echoing the sermons
and tracts of the previous generation, he declared them "fit objects
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of zeal and pietie, to deliver from the power of darkness," and called
once again on Englishmen to bring the Indians "if it be possible ...
from the power of Sathan to God." Purchas added, however, that the
"extirpation" of those who had been led by the Devil to attempt the
destruction of the English colony would not only be expedient, but
lawful, arguing that the participants in the massacre, by their defiance
of God's will, had nullified whatever natural title they might once
have had in Virginia.37
Purchas' continued emphasis upon the colonists' mission to convert
the Indians was no longer shared by the Virginia Company. Upon
receiving news of the massacre, the Company advised the Colony to
counterattack until the Indians were "no longer a people upon the
face of the earth."38 Governor Francis Wright concurred, declaring
that "it is infinitely better to have no heathens among us.""39The
company's spokesman, Edward Waterhouse rejoiced that "we, who
hitherto have had possession of no more ground than their waste ...
may now by right of warre and the Law of Nations, invade the Country,
and destroy them who sought to destroy us."40 Embracing the image
of the Israelites rooting out the Canaanites, the colony embarked upon
an unremitting war against the independent Indian tribes.41
New England's Puritans added very little to the religious rationale
for colonialism developed and expounded in earlier decades by Anglican
preachers and publicists. The Puritan conception of American history
revised the view of North America as England's Promised Land by
claiming for the Saints a unique and divinely appointed mission to
restore and maintain in the wilderness the pure mode of Christian
worship. Aboard the Arbella in 1630, John Winthrop proclaimed the
Puritan "City on a Hill" a beacon of redemption of the Old World as
well as the New.42 The Reverend John Cotton on the eve of embarkation
preached to the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony a sermon
which took as its text Samuel 11:7:10,wherein God assures the Israelites
that He has appointed a place where the "children of wickedness"
will no longer "afflict" His chosen.43
Winthrop, Cotton and other Puritan leaders invoked the principle
of vacuum domicilium to justify their occupation of lands not actually
cultivated by Indians. Winthrop asked rhetorically "why may not
Christians have liberty to go and dwell among them in their wastelands
and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their
corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites?"44 A tract
published in 1630 to promote the settlement of Massachusetts Bay
declared that "the Indians are not able to make use of one fourth part
of the land."45 Roger Williams stood alone, among the founders of the
New England colonies, in rejecting that premise, holding that since
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the Indians "hunted all the country over, and for the expedition of
their hunting voyages .., .burnt up all the underwoods in the country,
once or twice a year," it followed that "as noble men in England
possessed great parks, and the King great forests in England only for
their game, and no man might lawfully invade their property: so
might the natives challenge the like propriety" of English settlement.46
His unorthodox attitude toward Indian land rights was a major factor
in Williams' banishment from the Bay Colony.
As to their relationship with their Indian neighbors, Puritan commentators held, with Edward Winslow, that had God not acted to fill
"the hearts of the savages with astonishment of us," the Saints would
have perished in the wilderness, hapless victims of "their many plots
and treacheries."47 Despite their generally unfavorable assessment of
Indian character, the Puritan leaders rejected the premise that as
Christians they possessed the right to dispose of New England's heathens, agreeing with Cotton that "no nation is to drive out another
without special commission from heaven, such as the Israelites had,
unless the natives do unjustly wrong them."48 They held, however,
that shortly before the founding of Plymouth God had expressed His
will that New England be theirs by killing "the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left void
of inhabitants."'49 The first Puritan historian of the Bay Colony rejoiced
"at this wondrous work of the great Jehovah" in "wasting the natural
inhabitants with death's stroke" in order to make room for His Elect.S0
Winthrop, in responding to Roger Williams' questioning of the right
of the King to grant to the Puritans political dominion over lands
long ruled by Indians, brusquely dismissed Williams' objections on
the ground that God had settled the issue by emptying much of the
land of Indian inhabitants through the plague. King James had expressed the same sentiment in his patent to the Plymouth colony in
1620 which declared that "within these late years there hath by God's
visitation raigned a Wonderful Plague ... to the utter Destruction,
Devastation, and Depopulation of the whole Territorye ... Whereby
We in our judgment are persuaded and satisfied that the appointed
Time is come in which Almighty God in his great Goodnes and Bountie
towards Us and our People hath thought fitt and determined that
those large and goodly Territoryes, deserted as it were by their naturall
inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed."51
The Puritans, like their Anglican counterparts, expressed hope
for the salvation of those Indians who survived that divine visitation.
The English, Edward Johnson declared, "more thirsted after their
conversion than [their] destruction."'52 Puritan promotional literature
stressed the need to populate the New World with people of sober
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291
and godly deportment who would set a proper example for the "savages."53 But the New England colonists made little effort in the early
years of settlement to send missionaries to the Indian tribes, apparently
expecting that those Indians who might be among God's Elect would
of their own accord emulate the English. While the Puritans sought
Indian friendship and, in the early years, were dependent upon Indian
cooperation for their survival, they were from the outset acutely sensitive to rumors of Indian treachery, regarding all unregenerate peoples
as potential instruments of the Devil. Plymouth reacted to stories of
a Massachusett plot spread by the leader of a rival tribe by massacring
Indian suspects at Wessagusett in 1623.54Pequot refusal to apprehend
and surrender the murderers of English traders led the Bay Colony,
fearful of a Pequot conspiracy, to launch a punitive expedition in 1637.
The Reverend Thomas Hooker justified the war which ensued by
citing God's command to "execute vengeance upon the Heathen.""55
One of the Puritan commanders dismissed objections to the slaughter
of Pequot noncombatants at Fort Mystic on the ground that "sometimes
the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their
parents." He added that "sometimes the case alters, but we will not
dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our
proceedings."'56
The Word of God had long been used by advocates of colonization
in support of the premise that God had mandated English settlement
in North America. The conviction that the founding of the colonies
represented a "leap from secular into sacred history"57 was basic to
the ideological justification of all English colonialism, and antedated
the founding of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay by half a century.
To those who embraced the "sacral view of America," the triumph of
English civilization and the Protestant faith in the wilderness was
ordained by Providence. But the fate of the Indians in a "sanctified
America" they regarded as problematic. While many proponents of
England's New World mission foretold their redemption, others pondered the Biblical lessons of God's "vengeance against the heathen."
The affirmation of England's God-given mission in North America
was not without its dark side, for it included the possibility that God
might be served not only through the conversion of savages but also
through their extermination. Even those who explicitly denied England's right to conduct a religious war against the American Canaanites
generally accepted uncritically the premise underlying King James'
claim that the Almighty had sent "a Wonderful Plague ... to the utter
Destruction, Devastation, and Depopulation" of vast regions of England's New World Canaan. If the English were God's Chosen people,
the Indians might well be accursed Canaanites, pitiful objects of His
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special wrath. The religious ideology underlying the English defense
of colonialism offered hope only to those Indians who conformed to
the ways of God's new Elect.
The failure of the colonists in the early years to engage in extensive
missionary work among the Indians reflected not the irrelevance of
the providential theory of empire, but rather a complacent acceptance
of its underlying premise that the Indians were obligated either to
emulate the English without undue persuasion, or face God's wrath.
In the ideology of colonialism, Indians were consistently regarded as
passive objects in God's great design. Colonial advocates not only
lacked understanding of the complexity and resilience of Indian culture,
but would have regarded the argument that it possessed its own
integrity as incomprehensible. Indian resistance to the English presence
was interpreted not as evidence of a legitimate conflict of cultures,
but as a feeble and foredoomed manifestation of Satan's opposition
to England's holy mission. The fulfillment of that mission could conceivably require the extermination of "savages" who made common
cause with the devil. Hence, those who slaughtered non-combatants
in Virginia after Opechacanough's rebellion and in New England during
the Pequot War may well have acted in the firm conviction that they
were faithfully following God's command to "execute vengeance upon
the heathen."
FOOTNOTES
1. Edward Arber, ed., Travelsand Works of Captain John Smith (Edinburgh, 1910),
II, 927-928.
2. The passages in Rastell's Interlude of the Four Elements which describe the
native inhabitants of the New World may be most conveniently consulted in Edward
Arber, ed., The First ThreeEnglish Books on America (Birmingham, 1885), xx-xxi. Rastell's
interest in North America was not a casual one. In 1517, he organized and led an
expedition bound for Newfoundland, which ended prematurely in a sailors' mutiny
off the coast of Ireland. George B. Parks, in "The Geography of The Interlude of the
Four Elements," Philological Quarterly, XVII (July, 1938), 251-262, held that Rastell was
ill informed about the New World, relied on hearsay, and probably had not read any
of the contemporary writers on the Spanish and Portuguese voyages. But Johnstone
Parr, in "More Sources of Rastell's Interlude," PMLA, CX (March, 1945), 45-48, and
"Rastell's Geographical Knowledge of America," Philological Quarterly, XXVII (July,
1948), 229-240, argued that Rastell's descriptions of native Americans paralleled those
found in the writings of Johann Schoner and Peter Martyr. However, to this writer
Rastell's conceptions of savage life seem to owe their greatest debt to medieval conceptions
as ably explicated in Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
1952).
3. Thomas More, Utopia (London, 1955), 17, 56, 95, 111. This is Warrington's
edition of Robinson's 1555 translation, published in Everyman's Library. For an able
summary of the scholarly controversy regarding More's intentions in describing Utopian
colonial and military policy, see Shlomo Avineri, "War and Slavery in More's Utopia,"
International Review of Social History, 7 (1962), 260-290. "Avineri describes More's
statements on the Zapolites as "the nearest any political theorist ever came to conscious
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CANAANITES IN A PROMISED LAND
293
genocide." But R.W. Chambers, in Thomas More (London, 1935), and H.W. Donnor, in
Introduction to Utopia (London, 1945), make a persuasive case that More was not an
uncritical admirer of all the customs and practices of his imaginary commonwealth.
George W. Logan, in The Meaning of More's Utopia (Princeton, 1983), 238-248, argues
that evidence of More's personal disapproval of Utopian military policy may be found
in the fact that he prefaced his description of trade wars against the Apolitans with
some phrases which questioned the motives of the conflict, and added some pointed
comments about its "appalling consequences." No definitive resolution of the controversy
over More's intention is likely, but regardless of whether More personally regarded the
armed enforcement of the principle of vacuum domicilium as morally defensible, advocates
of English colonization in the following centuries had few qualms about invoking that
principle in defense of their dispossession of savage peoples."
4. The literature on the Spanish controversy over the status of the Indian is
enormous, and cannot be summarized here. The most useful works in English on this
subject remain the articles and monographs of Lewis Hanke. See in particular "Pope
Paul III and the American Indians," Harvard Theological Review, 20 (1927), 65-68; The
Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949); Aristotle
and the American Indian: A Study of Race Prejudice in the Modern World(Chicago, 1949);
and All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomd de las Casas and
Juan Ginds de Septlveda on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American
Indians (New York, 1974). Also of great value are Silvio Zavala, The Political Philosophy
of the Conquest of America (Mexico, D.E, 1953); Jean Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds.,
Bartolomd de las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work
(DeKalb, Ill., 1974); and Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1971). For a very provocative introduction to the historiographic
controversy over the "Black Legend" see Benjamin Keen, "The Black Legend Revisited:
Assumptions and Realities," Hispanic American Historical Review, 49 (1969), 703-719;
and Lewis Hanke's rejoinder, "A Modest Proposal for a Moratorium on Grand Generalizations: Some Thoughts on the Black Legend," Ibid, 51 (1971), 112-127.
5. Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America, 1511-1599 (Birmingham, 1885), xxxvii-xlvi, 49-60. The literature on the evolution of the European
image of the Indian is far too extensive to review here. For an encyclopedic summary,
see H.C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage (London, 1979). Much very suggestive material
may be found in Fredi Chiapelli et al., eds., First Images of America: The Impact of the
New World on the Old (Berkeley, 1976); and in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E.
Novak, The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to
Romanticism (Pittsburgh, 1972). The most perceptive recent study of the evolution of
the concept of savagery in England is Bernard W Sheehan, Savagism and Civility:
Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (New York, 1980).
6. Las Casas, in his History of the Indies, commented at some length on the rank
dishonesty in the representations of Indian life in the writings of the historians of the
conquest whose accounts Eden accepted at face value. For example, Oviedo (one of
Eden's sources) asserted that the West Indians were "savages who lived in caves."
Actually, Las Casas declared, they "lived in a well organized communal existence suited
to the amenity of the land, which being like a garden does not yield itself to savagery.
There were no caves but rather generous fields and orchards with villages and cultivated
land. I often ate the natural products there." The Indians, Las Casas noted correctly,
were in fact agriculturalists who "lived by the sweat of their brow." He heaped scorn
upon those who claimed the Indians could not survive except under the discipline of
Spanish masters. "They say that without tutors, Indians would not work, and would
die of starvation; let them ask them, if Spain sent food to the Indians all of those years
people lived there, and if, when they got there, we found them wanting and thin?"
The propagandist historians of the Conquest, Las Casas continued, were equally dishonest
in portraying the Indians as lawless savages incapable of self-government, "when in
reality, they have kings and governors, villages, houses, and property rights, and communicate with one another on all levels of human, political, economical, and social
relations, living in peace and harmony." (Bartolome de las Casas, History of the Indies,
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New York, 1971: 80, 101, 105). As to the troublesome matter of cannibalism and human
sacrifice, Las Casas maintained that anti-Indian writers greatly exaggerated the prevalence of both practices, and he regarded the latter as an indication of fervid, though
misguided piety. Although inclined to idealize the Indian, Las Casas possessed far
greater insight into native American cultures than did the historians of the Conquest.
But Eden, and subsequent English writers on the Indian question, accepted the savage
sterotypes Las Casas rejected.
7. Eden, 56.
8. The Spanish Colonie (London, 1583), "Prologue," 0-R2. On the growth and
development of anti-Spanish sentiment in England, see Walter A. Maltby, The Black
Legend in England (Durham, 1971).
9. Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana,
ed. V.T. Harlow (London, 1928), 138-149. On the authorship of the memorandum,
printed in an appendix to Harlow's edition, see Porter, 175.
10. G.A. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard
Hakluyts (Liechtenstein, 1967), 176.
11. Taylor, 366.
12. "Epistle Dedicatory," Virginia Richly Valued (London, 1609). On Hakluyt's career,
see George Brunner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (London, 1946);
D.B. Quinn, ed., The Hakluyt Handbook (London, 1974); Alfred A. Cave, "Richard Hakluyt's
Savages: The Influence of 16th Century Travel Narratives on English Indian Policy in
North America," International Social Science Review, 60 (Winter, 1985), 3-24.
13. George B. Parks, "George Peele and His Friends as 'Ghost Poets,' " Journal of
English and Germanic Philology, XLIV (1942), 527-536, argues that Peckham's tract
was co-authored by the poet George Peele, then a student at Oxford, and maintains
that the section dealing with the question of Indian rights was Peele's work. Parks'
case is a plausible one, but since there is no doubt that Peckham subscribed to the
views contained in what may have been Peele's draft, this paper follows the accepted
convention of ascribing them to Peckham.
14. Richard Hakluyt, The Principle Navigations, Voyages Traffiquesand Discoveries
of the English Nation (Glasgow, 1904), VIII, 101-107, 119-120.
15. Ibid., VIII, 97-101.
16. Ibid., VIII, 36. Hakluyt's successor, Samuel Purchas, struck the same note four
decades later when he declared, in his tract "Virginia's Verger," published in Hakluytus
Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1905), XIX, 260, that the fact that "no
other Christian nation hath yet gotten and maintained possession in those parts, but
the English" was clear evidence that God intended that Virginia should be settled by
England. For other examples of the providential interpretation of English history, see
William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963).
17. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (New York, 1937), B1-C3.
18. William Symonds, Virginia. A Sermon Preached at White Chappel, in the Presence
of Many Honourable and Worshipful, the Adventurers and Planters for Virginia, 25 April
1609 (London, 1609), Al-A3.
19. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in
Virginia, in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin,
Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, (Gloucester, 1963) I, No. VI,
7, 11, 12, 13, 15.
20. Gray, C3.
21. A True declaration of the Estate of the Colonies in Virginia, with a confutation
of such scandalous reports as have been tendered to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise
(London, 1610), in Force, III, No. 4, 4-6.
22. Indicative of English acceptance of the principle of vacuum domicilium is Sir
Francis Bacon's comment that colonists should always settle in areas devoid of towns
and fields, arguing that to displace natives from their settlements would be "rather
an extirpation than a plantation" (Essays and New Atlantis [New York, 1924], 142). In
the same spirit, Richard Eburne in 1624 advocated the settlement of Newfoundland,
on grounds that there would be no conflict over legal rights in an area devoid of
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295
agriculture (A Plain Pathway to Plantation, Ed. Lewis B. Wright [Ithaca, 1962], 126-
128).
23. Robert Johnson, The New Life of Virginia: Declaring the Former Success and
Present Estate of that Plantation, Being the Second Part of Nova Brittania, in Force, I,
no. VII, 7-8. Europeans persistently misconstrued Indian religious practice as "devil
worship." For a succinct and insightful summary of recent scholarship on native American
religion, see Abe Hultkrantz, The Religions of the American Indians (Berkeley, 1980).
24. William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, ed. Lewis B.
Wright and Virginia Freeland (Liechtenstein, 1967), 53, 59, 91. The idea that the curse
of Ham accounted for racial distinctiveness is of some antiquity, but its exact origins
are uncertain. See William McKee Evans, "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of
Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the 'Sons of Ham,"' American Historical Review, 85
(1980), 15-43. The story was usually applied to the Negro. In the sixteenth century,
Richard Hakluyt published George Best's speculation that Ham had offended the Almighty
by having intercourse with his wife while on the ark, hoping thereby that his offspring
would "inherit ... all the dominion of the earth." In punishment, God willed that
Ham's son, born of that act, be "black and loathsome" and that the mark of the curse
be borne by "all his posteritie after him." (Principal Navigation, VII, 263-264). In the
early seventeenth century, the physician Thomas Browne, in his essay "Of the Blackness
of Negroes," in Charles Sayle, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Brown (London, 19061907), II, 368-385, reported that the attribution of Negro skin color to the curse of
Ham was widely accepted in England. Winthrop Jordan, in White over Black (Chapel
Hill, 1966), 18, suggests that the introduction into England of the racial version of the
curse, which is not contained in the Biblical account, may have been through the study
by English scholars in the late Middle Ages of certain Talmudic and Mithraic texts
which explicitly stated "that Noah told Ham 'your seed will be ugly and dark
skinned,' " but the early English writers (Johnson and Strachey) who suggested that
the curse may also have applied to the American Indians did not emphasize skin color,
but rather regarded Indian degradation as cultural and religious, not biological. Emphasis
upon Indian racial distinctiveness was a later phenomenon. See Alden T. Vaughan,
"From White Man to Red Skin," The American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 917-953.
25. Symonds, A1-A3.
26. Gray, B1-C3.
27. W Crashaw, A New Yeeres Gift to Virginia. (London, 1610), B3-D3.
28. Daniel Price, Sauls Prohibition staide ... With a reproofe of those that traduce
the Honourable Plantation of Virginia (London, 1609) F2-F3.
29. Richard Crakanthorpe, A Sermon ... Preached at Paules Crosse, the 24 of March
last (London, 1609), D2.
30. George Benson, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Seventh of May MDCIX
(London, 1609), 91-92.
31. Robert Tynley, Two Learned Sermons (London, 1609), 68.
32. Eburne, 27-29. Eburne was influenced in that view by the English preacher
Thomas Bastard and the Danish theologian Bartholomaeus Keckermann, whose writings
he cited.
33. Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, I, 144145; Edward Arber, ed., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith (Edinburgh, 1910), I,
80; Purchas, XVIII, 417-419.
34. Ralph Hamor, A TrueDiscourse of the Present State of Virginia, ed. A.L. Rowse
(Richmond, 1957), 54-55.
35. Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 23.
36. Patrick Copland, Virginia's God be Thanked: A Sermon of Thanksgiving for the
Hapie Successe of the Affayres in Virginia this Last Year (London, 1622), 9-10, 25-26.
37. Purchas, XIX, 231-233. Purchas' contemporary, Richard Eburne, remained
persuaded, despite the massacre, that the task of conversion would be an easy one,
writing that the "Indians do make no difficulty to prefer our religion before theirs and
to confess that it is God that we and the devil that they do worship" (Eburne, 27).
Eburne and others who anticipated effortless conversion underestimated the strength
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and tenacity of Indian commitment to native cultural values. An excellent comparative
analysis of missionary efforts in the French and English colonies is provided in James
T. Axtell, The Invasion Within (New York, 1985). Also of value are W Stitt Robinson,
Jr., "Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia," Journal of Southern History,
XVIII (1952), 152-168; Neal E. Salisbury, "Conquest of the 'Savage': Puritans, Puritan
Missionaries, and Indians, 1620-1680" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los
Angeles, 1972); "Red Puritans: The Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay and John
Eliot," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXXI (1974), 27-54; Gary B. Nash,
"Notes on the History of Seventeenth Century Missionization in Colonial America,"
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, II (1978); 3-8; James P Ronda, "'We
are Well as We Are': An Indian Critique of Seventeenth Century Christian Missions,"
William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXXIV (1977), 66-82; Kenneth B. Morrison,
"'That art of Coyning Christians': John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts,"
Ethnohistory, XXI (1974), 77-92; William S. Simmons, "Conversion from Indian to
Puritan," New England Quarterly, 52 (1979), 197-218.
38. Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C., 1905-1935), III, 672.
39. "Letters of Sir Francis Wyatt, Governor of Virginia, 1621-1626," William and
Mary Quarterly, Second Series, VI (1926), 118.
40. Kingsbury, III, 556-557.
41. On the aftermath of Opechacanough's rebellion, see Alden T Vaughan, "'Expulsion of the Salvages': English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622," William
and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXXV (1978), 56-84. The origins of the rebellion are
ably analyzed in T. Frederick Fausz, "The Powhatten Uprising of 1622: A Historical
Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict" (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William
and Mary, 1978). For an overview of early Virginia history, see Edmund S. Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975);
and Alden T. Vaughan, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of
Virginia (Boston, 1975). Wesley Frank Craven's "Indian Policy in Early Virginia," William
and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, I (1944), 62-85 remains useful. On the evolution of
white racial attitudes in the colony, Gary B. Nash's "The Image of the Indian in the
Southern Colonial Mind," William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXIX (1972), 197230 is indispensible.
42. Alan B. Forbes, ed., Winthrop Papers, 1623-1630 (Boston, 1931), II, 295.
43. John Cotton, God's Promise to His Plantations, Old South Leaflets, No. 53 (Boston,
1896).
44. Winthrop Papers, II, 91.
45. "New Englands Plantation," in Force, I, No. XII, 12. Most scholars now agree
that the New England Puritans recognized a legal obligation to respect the Indians'
right to their cultivated lands. See Charles E. Eisinger, "The Puritan Justification for
Taking the Land," Essex Institute Historical Collections, 84 (1948), 131-143; Ruth Barnes
Moynihan, "The Patent and the Indian: The Problem of Jurisdiction in Seventeenth
Century New England," American Indian Culture and Research Journal, II (1977), 8-18;
James Warren Springer, "American Indians and the Law of Real Property in Colonial'
New England, American Journal of Legal History, 30 (January, 1986), 25-58; Yasuhide
Kawashima, Puritan Justice and the Indian (Middletown, Connecticut 1986), 42-71.
But Francis Jennings, in The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant
of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975), 135, argues that while "morally and pragmatically
Winthrop's Puritans were obligated to leave individual Indians in possession of tracts
actually under tillage ... legally they recognized as real property only those lands
whose claimants could show deeds from grants made by the Massachusetts Bay Company."
Kawashima states that "in unoccupied and vacant regions, the Crown's charter established both jurisdiction and land ownership at once, but in the areas occupied and
controlled by Indian tribes, the charter simply established the claim to superiority, or
the right to control the Indians, a right that could only be established against other
European or neighboring English colonies" (Kawashima, 46-47).
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CANAANITES IN A PROMISED LAND
297
46. Williams destroyed the treatise containing his views on Indian land rights at
the request of the Massachusetts magistrates. His argument is summarized in "Master
John Cotton's Answer to Master Roger Williams," reprinted in The Complete Writings
of Roger Williams (New York, 1963), II, 44-47.
47. Edward Winslow, Good News from New England, in Edward Arber, The Story
of the Pilgrim Fathers (New York, 1969), 513-514.
48. Cotton, 6.
49. Winthrop Papers, II, 91.
50. J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence (New York,
1910), 48.
51. Quoted in Joel N. Eno, "The Puritans and the Indian Lands," Magazine of
History with Notes and Queries, 4 (1906), 274. Even Thomas Morton, a fierce critic of
the Puritans and a purported friend of the Indians, regarded the plague as a sign of
God's favor to the English, declaring in New England Canaan that through that means
"the place is made so much the more fitt, for the English Nation to inhabit in, and
erect in it Temples to the Glory of God" (Force, II, No. V, 19). As early as 1586, Thomas
Hariot had described Indian mortality from European diseases as "the speciall worke
of God for our sakes" (Hakluyt, VII, 382).
52. Johnson, 42.
53. Winslow, 515-516.
54. Ibid., 526-574; Morton, 70-76.
55. Johnson, 166. The Pequot war remains controversial. For a qualified defense
of the Puritans' conduct, see Alden T Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and
Indians, 1620-1675 (Revised Edition, New York, 1979), 122-154. Vaughan, who first
analyzed the war in "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," William
and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, XXI (1964), 256-269, stated in 1979 that "I am less
sure than I was fifteen years ago that the Pequots deserve the burden of blame. (New
England Frontier, xxiv). Francis Jennings, by contrast, is persuaded of Puritan war guilt
(Invasion of America, 177-227). Also highly critical of English conduct is Anna R.
Monguia, "The Pequot War Reexamined," American Indian Culture and Research Journal,
I (1975), 13-20. But P Richard Metcalf, "Who Should Rule at Home? Native American
Politics and Indian-White Relations," The Journal ofAmerican History, LXI (1974), 651665, regards the war as the outgrowth of an intra-tribal power struggle. Students of
early Indian relations in Colonial New England should also consult Neal Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans and the Making of New England, 15001693 (New York, 1982), as Salisbury has made brilliant use of the methods of ethnohistory
in order to shed light on the cultural interaction of native Americans and Englishmen.
56. John Underhill, Newes from America, in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Third Series, VI (1827), 15.
57. Sacvan Bercovitch, "Foreward," in Charles W Segal and David C. Stineback,
Puritans, Indians and Manifest Destiny (New York, 1977), 17. Bercovitch declares that
other European immigrants to America saw the Indians as a people with "an alien,
secular culture," while the Puritans regarded the history of colonization as the struggle
of God's People against the devil's. I believe he overstates Puritan distinctiveness.
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