the American Revolution. However, it was set apart from similar atrocities for one reason: the perpetrators had refused to recognize the distinction between Christian and non-Christian Native Americans.8 Their urgent desire to extact retribution for their own murdered family members and friends had impelled them to heedlessly kill innocent men, women, and children even as they “began to sing hymns and spoke words of encouragement and consolation to each other.”9 Despite the European-style houses and spatial design of the Ohio missions, and the prospect of Native Christians dressed in very much the same manner as the members of the militia, the Pennsylvanians were not interested in believing these were “peaceful Indians.” In the years following the massacre, both the fledgling United States government and nativist movements among Native communities in Ohio and Indiana would agree that the blood guilt of the murders at Gnadenhütten rested squarely on the fact that Christians had killed Christians. Two decades later, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh would remind future president William Henry Harrison: “You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”10 The truth was that the Christian songs and prayers of the Moravians had not saved them from death or tremendous suffering.
Song and Sound in the Moravian Missions
The massacre at Gnadenhütten raises a number of difficult, but important, issues. The ninety-six people who perished there died partly as a result of their tenuous existence at the boundaries between cultures, ethnicities, nations, and religions. What had begun in the 1740s as an attempt by German missionaries to create new multicultural Christian utopias in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had ended tragically in the death of many of these same Delaware and Mohican Moravians along the Ohio frontier. Although singing had for a brief time in the early history of the Moravian missions created a space for exchange of spiritual and cultural ideas between Delaware and Mohican communities and Moravian missionaries, ironically it was those very hymns that would linger most powerfully in memories of the massacre.
Working forward in time from the founding of the first Moravian settler community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741, to the massacre at Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782, this book positions song and sound at the center of interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in eastern North America. It is no coincidence that the singing of the Native Moravian congregation at Gnadenhütten persisted in memories of the massacre. Hymns were central not only to the Moravians’ missionary philosophies, but also to daily Christian practice and life-ways in mission communities. Hymns and rituals involving singing served as sonic markers of history, place, and identity. The role of hymns in eighteenth-century Moravian life accomplished what Gary Tomlinson has termed “songwork,” which he defines as the place and efficacy of song in given societal circumstances.11 Moravian hymns did cultural work. They were sung at weddings, funerals, and baptisms; they accompanied manual labor; they served as forms of greeting and celebration; they comforted the sick and dying; and they regulated personal mental health. Hymn singing was not confined to the sacred space of a worship hall, but integrated into daily life.12 Moravians envisioned hymns as powerful tools to integrate people into their communities and to communicate core Moravian values both inside and outside of their communities. Study of Moravian hymnody yields a deeper understanding not only of the relationships between missionaries and Native Christians, but also of the connections of Moravian mission communities with the wider world they inhabited.13
Studying hymnody as it is embedded within historical cultures of hearing and listening is important to understanding concepts of social and religious identity and place both for European and Native Moravians. Just as religious experiences so often happened through ordinary day-to-day, person-to-person exchanges, experiences of sound were similarly intimate and heard within the confines of a meeting space, worship hall, or bedroom, or were bounded by the wider soundscapes of communities or the acoustic ecologies of the natural environment. This is as true of Moravian missions as it is of other historic and modern communities. In the context of a time period in American history when the border between settler and Native communities and nations was a shifting spatial and cultural space, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. These cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also went beyond musical traditions such as song and hymnody. The natural and human environments of early Pennsylvania were comprised of complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic soundscapes. Study of these acoustic environments is important to understanding the social, religious, and spatial relationships that characterized life in both Native and settler communities. The closer we can come to comprehending how early Americans heard their world, the closer we will be to critically understanding not only the history of the Moravian missions but also the difficult and often violent histories of the emergence of the modern American nation on Native soil during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783).14
Yet, despite the importance of sound and song to the Moravians, there have been no comprehensive attempts to study their mission communities and missionary practices from that perspective. While there is a vast and growing literature on the Moravian missions and encounters between Indigenous peoples and missionaries in early America, only recently have scholars begun to incorporate information about musical practices in Moravian mission contexts.15 Of particular note are studies by Walter Woodward, as well as Rachel Wheeler and me, on the indigenization of Moravian hymnody and the role of song as a meditator of cultural interactions between Moravian missionaries and Native Christians.16 These studies also intersect with recent publications on music and Christian missions in colonial contexts more broadly, including Glenda Goodman’s work on Native-language psalmody in New England and the soundscapes of colonial encounters, and studies by Kristin Dutcher Mann and Geoffrey Baker on music in Spanish mission contexts.17 Although music and sound are often relegated to the margins of history, or remain under the purview of musicological inquiries, sensory perceptions and cultural practices surrounding sound are important ways of understanding Indigenous responses to colonialism. This is especially true because hymns and other musical forms often embed traces of Native agency even when contained within the archival records of settler communities that are often dominated by non-Native voices.18
Recovering the sonic history of the Moravian missions also restores a part of American history that is often overlooked. In early America, sounds and silences possessed the power to unite and divide, to produce understandings and misunderstandings, and to constitute adaptive or destructive strategies for navigating an unprecedented period of cultural shift and physical copresence between European settlers and Native nations and communities. Studies by Richard Cullen Rath, Peter Charles Hoffer, Geoffrey Baker, and Sarah Keyes have demonstrated that colonial efforts to remodel the landscapes of the Americas after traditional European settlement patterns also included transformation of the soundscapes, or aural landscapes, of the Americas to resemble the familiar soundscapes of European places.19 As Sarah Keyes has argued, building fences, felling trees, and effecting other physical changes to particular ecological environments went hand in hand with transforming the American landscape into a civilized soundscape of ringing axes, lowing cattle, and clanging bells. Indigenous peoples reacted against this physical and aural encroachment, and the sounds of ritualized speech and music became crucial in encounters between colonial settlers and Native communities.20
Soundscapes also defined the nature of both settler and Native communities and their geographic boundaries. The ability to control the aural dimension of landscapes, places, and communities was inextricably intertwined with struggles for power and access to natural resources. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America to observe new systems of government, he also observed a process of sonic colonization of America’s natural environment, including its fauna: “As soon as a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of territory occupied by the Indians wild game takes fright. Thousands of savages wandering in the forest without fixed dwelling did not disturb it; but as soon as the continuous noise of European labor is heard in the vicinity, it begins to flee and retreat toward the west, where some instinct
