of these collections would provide sufficient material for a book-length study of missionary discourse, as would any twenty or thirty years within the study. A book encompassing all of this data must overlook topics that would inform more specialized studies, such as the nuances of the Great Awakening or the finer points of debate between Calvinists and Arminians over salvation. From the earliest stages of this project I elected to examine the writings of all Protestant missions connected with Britain because I wanted to see the full range of representational strategies that developed through efforts to convert Indians. As I read more of these texts I became struck less with the range than with the rhetorical uniformity of these writings, which in spite of conflicting theological stances display a remarkably stable approach to the tasks of describing Indians and raising readers’ interest in their conversion. My approach throughout most of this book thus has been to focus on the common discursive features of Protestant missionary writings, leaving doctrinal variety in the background except for those points where it produced significant rhetorical differences. The result, I hope, is a study that emphasizes similarity without ignoring important differences in various denominations’ portrayals of Indians.
If I could have expanded my project without making it too cumbersome for a single book, I would have examined missionaries’ depictions of both African slaves and Indians. Certainly any study would have to examine depictions of both groups if it were to provide a comprehensive account of the British encounter, both textual and actual, with “heathens” in America. Such a study also would reflect the parallel status Indians and Africans held in many missionary projects and texts. Groups such as the Moravians and the SPG simultaneously undertook missions to Indians and Africans, and discussions of both peoples often appeared alongside each other in fund-raising tracts. The enslavement of Indians as well as intermarriage between Indians and Africans also led to some blurring of categories in British or colonial writings, especially in an era before race was identified primarily through skin color.97
In spite of these overlaps, British missionaries tended to treat Africans and Indians as separate groups whose conversion required different strategies and whose existence, as “heathen” or Christian, provoked distinct emotions and debates. As Chapter 4 will show, the complete isolation of Indians from the Christian world until the fifteenth century produced a theological quandary that Africans, who at least theoretically had had access to the gospel, did not. The noble savage produced forms of pathos related to but still distinct from the emotions that met images of African slaves, and slaveholders’ concerns about the legality of owning Christians created particular obstacles for missionaries that were different from the difficulties they encountered preaching to Indians. The complex differences between these two missionary efforts, as well as the sheer quantity of material produced in connection with them, proved too vast for this study. A comparative examination of British missionaries’ depictions of Africans and Indians, especially a close analysis of the subtle affective differences between them, surely would yield important information, and it would be a worthwhile topic for future work.
How Widely Read Were Missionary Writings?
As with any question about early modern reader reception, there is no easy answer. Data on the distribution of the published writings are limited, but in general it seems that while few people read many missionary writings, many people were aware of a few of them. The three main organizations printed most of their texts with an eye toward distributing them to members and to associates who might contribute to their cause.98 The Journal of the SPG’s Standing Committee reveals that the society published its sermons in numbers ranging from 500 to more than 3,000, basing their decision sometimes on the reputation of the preacher.99 William Kellaway has noted that the New England Company’s members had trouble distributing more than 1,500 copies of their tracts.100 With the exception of blockbusters such as Jonathan Edward’s Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, the readership of these texts seems to have ranged into, but not past, the low thousands.101 Many of these texts were distributed in the American colonies and Europe as well as Britain, but the anticipated audience usually was a British metropolitan one. Having encountered copies of SPG sermons in rare-book rooms with the pages still uncut, I also suspect that some texts were received but not read. Certainly this reaction would fit with the response many of us today have to fund-raising texts.
When estimating the impact of these texts on British culture, though, it is important that we consider the multiple paths by which readers and listeners would have become aware of them. Although most of these texts had a select audience, fragments of them reached much of England, Wales, and Scotland in written or spoken form. Announcements of collections were often read aloud during church services, and newspapers occasionally published letters from missionaries or extracts from fund-raising sermons.102 Events such as the “four Indian kings’” visit and Occom’s tour heightened the public’s awareness of missionary projects, as did calls for nationwide or citywide collections by the monarch. These events were publicized through broadsides and pamphlets. We should also consider the symbolic importance attached to missionary images, such as charters, seals, and portraits of the “four Indian kings,” and we might consider texts presented for their iconic rather than textual value. After all, much was made of the presentation of Eliot’s “Indian Bible” to King Charles II, the Lord Chancellor, and other public officials in 1664, although none of these recipients could read the Massachusett translation.103 Such icons symbolized the ongoing salvation of foreigners through the rendering of well-known texts into dramatically illegible signs. If the vision of collective evangelical endeavor usually assumed a select core of gentlemen with financial means and feelings for “heathen” peoples, the references to national endeavor and the varying patterns of text distribution imply a series of concentric circles of emotionally invested citizens surrounding the missionary groups.
Chapter Outline
Missionary writings were only one subset of the many texts that early modern Europeans wrote about the Americas. Chapter 1 describes missionary tracts in relation to this broader context by surveying two prominent tropes of colonial endeavor. These are the images of husbandry—meaning the tending of the domestic sphere through farming, accounting, or housekeeping—and trade. They provided a religious validation for the plantation-style colonialism propagated by the British, and they enhanced anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric. As they persuaded readers through these images to save Indians, the missionary writings depicted British pity as an exportable commodity and an instrument of husbandry, the spiritual profits of which benefited Indians more than colonialism impoverished them. Ironically, these writings helped transform a symbol of exploitation, the exchange of American gold for European trinkets or glass, into an image of the priceless spiritual “gold” with which the British purchased America’s wealth.
Chapter 2 examines the importance of epistolarity to seventeenth-century English missionary writings. It shows how the letters that missionaries and their supporters wrote to each other, and often published for the consumption of a wider audience, constructed a transatlantic community through a shared desire to save America’s Indians. The boundaries and tenor of these communities shifted with the concerns of different writers and times. The New England Company’s publications, for example, stressed the importance of England’s links with Puritan colonists in New England, while Henry Jessey, a London Baptist, used accounts of missions in Taiwan and New England to strengthen Anglo-Dutch ties. Late seventeenth-century writings stressed interdenominational cooperation in a way that mid-century writings did not, reflecting the political changes England underwent in this era. If the qualities of the community described in these texts altered, the basic idea of a transatlantic connection did not.
Chapter 3 continues to examine the sympathetic network described in Chapter 2 by showing how the publications of two missionary
