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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1184402 Accessed: 09/05/2009 01:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=unp. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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CANAANITES IN A PROMISED LAND: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire Alfred A. Cave OWARDTHE END OF HIS LONGCAREERas 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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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 Sepulveda 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.7 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 Sepulveda'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 any such warrant ... Christians are commaunded to doo good vnto

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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."'2 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.13 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."14 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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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.'6 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."'7 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.18 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."19 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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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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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."39 The 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."40Embracing 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.42The 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 II: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.50 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."" 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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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 Three English 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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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 Mores 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 Modem World (Chicago, 1949); and All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gings de Sepulveda 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., Bartolomg 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, Foxes 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), A1-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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agriculture (A Plain Pathway to Plantation, Ed. Lewis B. Wright [Ithaca, 1962], 126128). 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 True Discourse 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, Gods 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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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 of American 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.