presented a voluntary society as the unifying center and active agent of Britain’s compassion. The Anglican SPG and the Presbyterian SSPCK drew on earlier models of cooperative endeavor for a worthy cause, but they refined those models to stress the utility of a central organization that maximized widespread benevolence. The publications set these groups apart from the public while making their operations trustworthy and admirable. They also configured prayer and financial donations as forms of active but displaced involvement that made readers feel included in the groups’ endeavors. Through their emphasis on collective pity for heathen souls they provided a religious template for what would become a secular model of imperial sentiment constructed as emotional involvement.
The missionaries’ emphasis on shared emotion enhanced Britain’s benevolent self-image, but it also introduced concerns about the moral status of pity. Chapter 4 shows how the anniversary sermons of the SPG grappled with the ethics of pity while debating the necessity of Indian conversion. As they encouraged contributions to support Anglican ministers in America, the authors of these sermons used descriptions of Indians to defend Christianity from challenges posed by heterodox thinkers, especially the idea that God had been cruel in denying Indians earlier access to the gospel. By arguing that the savage behavior of Indians proved the necessity of Christian conversion for salvation, and asserting that God had delayed revealing himself to heathens so that Christians would save them, most of the sermons’ authors sought to recuperate the compassionate character of God as they insisted on the necessity of their faith. These texts illustrate some of the ways in which the idea of Indians provoked debates about the capacity and moral consequences of pity.
Producing concerns about the ethics of compassion, Indians also propelled developments in the portrayal of emotion. Chapter 5 shows how mid-eighteenth-century missionary writings intersected with a broader culture increasingly interested in the depiction of feeling. I contrast the framing of emotion and human relations in two edited memoirs: Jonathan Edwards’s Life of David Brainerd, which describes how Brainerd evangelized several groups of Indians over a four-year period until his death in 1747, and Samuel Hopkins’s Historical Memoirs, Relating to the Housatunnuck Indians, which describes the work of John Sergeant at the Stockbridge mission of western Massachusetts from 1734 until his death in 1749. Unlike earlier tracts, these memoirs present a missionary not only as an extension of collective feeling but also as an object of emulation. While Edwards’s text focuses on the solipsistic emotions of an isolated missionary and inscribes a transatlantic community through collective spectatorship of Brainerd’s spiritual experience, Hopkins’s account positions Sergeant within a network of transatlantic feeling. Together these texts suggest the effects that the culture of sensibility and the Great Awakening had on the representation of Christian mission, even as they imply the importance of Indians to eighteenth-century accounts of emotion. They also show how missionaries began to supersede Indians as the central figures of promotional writings, paralleling a developing British fascination with vanishing Indians.
Chapter 6 illustrates some of the ethical problems that emerged from depictions of Indians in missionary writings, as it argues that missionaries unwittingly helped create the dying Indians that were so useful to Romantic literature and the claims of manifest destiny. It shows that while they evoked pity for the wasteful deaths of unconverted Indians, especially through violence, missionaries also surrounded the exemplary deaths of Indian converts with abundant detail and emotional response. The texts thus encouraged their readers to mourn the deaths of Christian Indians but also to feel pleasure at the recuperation of lost souls, which they saw as the outcome of British benevolence. Missionary writings prepared their readers to expect the disappearance of the Indians from America, associating the death of their bodies with the cultivation of their souls.
British missionary writings had a limited influence on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers. Their impact did not equal that of genres such as captivity narratives or travel writings, and the piteous figures presented in these texts received less attention than the noble savages and incorrigibly cruel brutes that filled more popular publications. Nonetheless, they exerted a subtle influence on Euro-American culture. They helped shape attitudes to Indians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributing in particular to notions that Indians should be pitied, saved, and mourned, sometimes all at once. They played a major role in the development of a benevolent imperialist rhetoric, the impact of which is still felt in the United States and Britain, indeed throughout the world. Finally, as they assisted in the construction of an optimistic moral philosophy intertwined with a culture of sensibility, they presented especially vivid examples of the dramatic transformations that emotion could provoke. What exactly those changes were, and whether they occurred for the better, were questions with answers that did not always match the expectations of the texts’ authors and audience. This book explores some of those answers, and their implications, for the twenty-first century as well as for the era of Britain’s colonization of America.
Chapter 1
Gold for Glass, Seeds to Fruit: Husbandry and Trade in Missionary Writings
“Your Spiritual Factory in New England”
In July 1649, a few months after the execution of King Charles I, Parliament established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to subsidize the efforts of John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew, and other Puritan ministers to convert the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard.1 By 1655, the society had received several thousand pounds from a nationwide parish collection commanded by Parliament.2 It used those funds to purchase land throughout England, some of which had just been confiscated by Parliament from loyalists to the king.3 Besides subsidizing a few missionaries and sending supplies abroad, the rents from these lands funded the printing of several tracts, among them A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel. Joseph Caryl, an Independent preacher of London, introduced this tract with a letter endorsing the organization’s work:
Read this short discourse, and it will tell you that the Lord hath blesed the labours of the Messengers of Sion in New-England, with the Conversion of some (I may say, of a considerable number) of the Indians, to be a kind of first fruits of his (new) Creatures there. O let old England rejoyce in this, that our brethren who with extream difficulties and expences have Planted themselves in the Indian Wildernesses, have also laboured night and day with prayers and teares and Exhortations to Plant the Indians as a spirituall Garden, into which Christ might come and eat his pleasant fruits. Let the gaining of any of their souls to Christ … be more pretious in our eyes then the greatest gaine or return of Gold and Silver. This gaine of soules is a Merchandize worth the glorying in upon all the Exchanges, or rather in all the Churches throughout the world. This Merchandize is Holinesse to the Lord: And of this the ensuing Discourse presents you with a Bill of many particulars, from your spiritual Factory in New England.4
Figure 1. An Act for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England established the first voluntary missionary organization in England. It founded a corporation of sixteen men in England for the collection of donations, named the Commissioners of the United Colonies as agent for the disbursement of funds, ordered that the act be read in every parish of England and Wales, asked that ministers “exhort the people to a chearful and liberal contribution,” and commanded parish officials to undertake a door-to-door collection. The act linked England’s piety and charity to emotion both felt and observed, as it “rejoyce[d]” that “the heathen Natives” of New England “give great testimony of the power of God drawing them from death and darkness … which appeareth by their diligent attending on the Word so preached unto them, with tears lamenting their mis-spent lives.” (The John Carter Brown
