own doores; … [T]hose happy soules that claspe hold of it…. They can set a true estimation of those sublunarie things, that others are contented so to overbuy, more Sottish then the Barbarous Indians to exchange Gold for Glasse.”22 As with Othello and The City Jilt, Hall’s reference to Indians signifies a poor bargain prompted by the duplicity of appearance. Like Boyle and Milton, he harnessed a moral prescription to the image of the duped Indian, warning his readers not to make an equally poor bargain.
Clearly a variety of seventeenth-century writings replicated Columbus’s depiction of naive Indians exchanging their treasures for the trash of those who would become their conquerors. In their appropriation of this trope they took for granted the distinction between real and apparent worth suggested by exchange. That is, the allusion to Indians and trade conveyed the supremacy not only of reality over appearance, but also of the intangible—whether romantic or moral—over the quantifiable. These texts also took for granted the idea that exchange was to the detriment of Indians.
Ironically, this interpretation did not apply to the texts that claimed to be most interested in the welfare of Indians: missionary writings. While they also adopted the trope of gold for glass, they realigned the meanings Columbus had assigned to it by diminishing the real worth of gold in the face of spiritual goods. This change makes sense when we consider the delicate task these writers faced: raising funds to convert Indians by soliciting many of the very people gaining wealth from the exploitation of Indians. This adjustment made it possible to invoke a sense of moral obligation while presenting a model of fair exchange that would not alienate an English or British audience. Understandable though their motives were, the writers of these texts played an important role in developing a rhetorical justification for colonialism. What Columbus took as an example of exploitation that he had rectified to make possible the Indians’ acceptance of Christianity, British missionaries later presented as an emblem of salvation.
“First Fruits”: The Husbandry of Souls
Because it conveyed that the British were giving something valuable to America, the trope of husbandry was crucial to the interpretation of gold traded for glass in missionary writings. Husbandry already was a central Christian metaphor, and it became especially prominent in the seventeenth century. Besides suggesting the spread of the gospel, it conveyed the ordering and tending of the self. Both ideas were attractive ones in Protestant thought, with its emphasis on individual faith and moral accountability unmediated by priests. The pragmatic connotations of this trope also fit into the increasingly secular and financially saturated perspective of early modern Europe. As Richard Allestree noted in The Whole Duty of Man, a popular book of Anglican practical piety, “There is a husbandry of the soul, as well as of the estate.”23 Teaching its practitioners to tend the estate along with the soul, the notion of husbandry helped individuals operate virtuously within the world rather than separate from it.
This trope occupied a prominent position in the rhetoric of colonization because it validated the plantation model that English and Scottish settlers practiced. As Samuel Sewall wrote in the history of Puritan missionary work that prefaced his Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica (1697), “They who remove from one Land to another, there to dwell; that settlement of theirs is call’d a Plantation. Especially, when a Land, before rude and unfurnish’d, is by the New-comers replenished with usefull Arts, Vegetables, Animals.”24 The British applied this trope with ease to the topic of Indian conversion. Except for a tendency to depict the spread of the gospel through a contrast between pagan darkness and Christian light, the missionary texts seem most often to describe the conversion of Indians through images of trade or cultivation. Metaphors of husbandry were most prominent in Puritan writings, even in titles such as New Englands First Fruits (1643). In The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England (1649), the writer J. D., or John Dury, prayed “that those sometimes poor, now precious Indians … may be as the first fruits of the glorious harvest.”25 In The Light Appearing More and More Towards the Perfect Day (1651), Thomas Mayhew, Jr., asked his readers to pray “that the Indians in this small begining [sic], being Gods husbandry, and Gods building, may be a fruitful glorious spreading Vine, and building together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”26 Urging for more missionary efforts several decades later, Cotton Mather warned his readers, “Verily, our GOD will not look on us as a Thankful People, if we are not also a Fruitful People.”27
Although used most vividly in Puritan writings, the rhetoric of husbandry pervaded missionary texts of all denominations. John Wynne, Bishop of Asaph, concluded his sermon of 1725 before the SPG by saying, “Let us then beseech Him, who alone, whatever pains we may take in planting and watering the Gospel, is able to give the Increase.”28 In his History of the Propagation of Christianity, Robert Millar, an affiliate of the Society in Scotland for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), said of America, “The blessing of God, and the pouring out of his spirit from on high, are necessary to turn this wilderness into a fruitful field.”29 In a sermon of 1766 before the SSPCK, George Muir described Indians as “Ignorant of God,—unacquainted with themselves,—their reason, like their fields, quite uncultivated.”30 Whether the earth in which the gospel is seeded or the harvest of that earth, Indians appear in these texts as the objects of cultivation.
The real husbandry that missionaries taught underscored this rhetoric. Most promoters of mission assumed that “culture” or “civilization” – by which they usually meant the acquisition of British clothing and behavior – must accompany conversion.31 The practice of husbandry was crucial to both goals. As Claire Jowitt has explained, “From the end of the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century the main sense of ‘culture’ was to mean ‘human development’, especially in relation to an earlier connotation of husbandry.”32 The New England minister Solomon Stoddard saw conversion occurring along with training in husbandry and trade: “Many Nations, when they were in their Heathenism, lived miserably as to this World…. But since their imbracing the Gospel, they are got into a flourishing condition. God leads them in ways of wisdom, to follow Husbandry, Trades and Merchandize, and to live honourably and plentifully.”33
Of course the Indians of the eastern seaboard did farm and in fact had taught the English to cultivate indigenous crops. This escaped the notice of most proponents of mission, however. Cotton Mather took the Indians’ initial resistance to adopting English husbandry as the greatest sign of their depravity. Describing the first interactions between New England’s colonists and natives, he wrote, “Tho’ [they]…. saw this People Replenishing their Fields, with Trees and with Grains, and useful Animals, which until now they had been wholly Strangers to; yet they did not seem touch’d in the least, with any Ambition to come at such Desireable Circumstances, or with any Curiosity to enquire after the Religion that was attended with them.”34 Although there were ample reasons why the Indians did not accept English-style agriculture, their refusal only enhanced their “barbarous” qualities in his eyes.35 A group of Boston ministers signing a preface to Experience Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727) acknowledged one of their greatest failures to be that “We cannot get the Indians to improve so far in English Ingenuity, and Industry, and Husbandry, as we would wish for.”36 More optimistically, John Sergeant reported in 1736 that the Stockbridge Indians “‘gave very much into Husbandry,… planted more this Year than ever they did before.’”37 The degree to which Indians settled into houses and plantations thus often directed how successful the British felt their missions were.
This rhetoric, along with the economy that supported it, was so pervasive that it shaped how Christian Indians talked about themselves. In Indian Converts Experience Mayhew quotes one Mary Coshomon, who “declared, that she look’d on the Officers of the Church of Christ, as Dressers of the Trees planted in God’s Vineyard; and that she greatly needed to be under such Cultivations,… as Members of Churches might expect to enjoy.”38 Clearly
