During the late winter 1631, Chickatabot, a Massachuett sachem, visited the new Puritan colony’s governor, John Winthrop, and presented him with “a hogshead of Indian corn.” Winthrop hosted the sachem and his party, noting they wore “English clothes” and the sachem “behaved himself as soberly, etc., as an Englishman.” Less than two years later, Winthrop recorded Chickatabot and “many of his people” had died during an outbreak of smallpox. He noted that the colonists cared for the Indians during their sickness and adopted many of the surviving children. However, by early 1634, he reported that most of the adopted Indian children had also perished, including one whom Winthrop had kept. Another Indian, known to Winthrop as John Sagamore, died during the 1633 epidemic. Winthrop wrote Sagamore “died in a persuasion that he should go to the Englishmen’s God” and that many Indians “in their sickness confessed that the Englishmen’s God was a good God and that if they recovered they would serve him.”[1]
Environmental historian Alfred W. Crosby found that the worst epidemics among the Indians occurred during the sixteenth-century, well before the Pilgrims’ and Puritans’ arrival as early as 1620. The 1616-19 epidemic, which also happened before the Plymouth colony’s founding and which Crosby suggested to have been bubonic or pneumonic plague, devastated native coastal settlements from what became Cape Cod to Maine, killing approximately nine of every ten exposed Indians. Traditional treatments of illness, namely “the swift transfer of a patient from broiling sweathouse to frigid lake” only hastened the afflicted Indian’s demise from European-introduced diseases. William Bradford, who arrived in the New World in 1620 and led the Pilgrims’ separatist colony of Plymouth, observed how the epidemics devastated Indian communities. He noted how “they fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another” and “would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way.”[2]
The historiography provides an understanding of how New England’s Indians reacted to the devastation wrought by European diseases, the mortality of which Winthrop recorded in his journal. The apparent English resistance to whatever was killing the Indians convinced them that their new, light-skinned neighbors possessed a super-natural power, which persuaded those like John Sagamore to “go to the Englishmen’s God." Others entrusted their orphaned children to the colonists to be raised in the protection of this god. Yet, this is not to suppose that all Indians, those afflicted by diseases and those few able to escape such ravages, sought the protection of the Puritan God. Clearly, southern New England Indians possessed religion before the first Europeans are known to have arrived. Based in pre-agricultural, Algonquin traditions, they espoused a polytheistic religion with “Manitou” having an equivalent meaning to the colonists’ God. The English acknowledged as much during the 1620s. Both societies believed in an afterlife, which Crosby argued resulted in something “truly hideous” when an epidemic devastated one society while leaving the other seemingly unscathed. The epidemics created fear among the Indians and led them to blame the colonists for what happened. They referred to Plymouth’s Pilgrims as Wotawquenange, meaning “stabbers or Cutthroats.”[3]
Winthrop’s late summer 1632 journal entry supports this interpretation of animosity. Situated between his interactions with Chickatabot and Sagamore, Winthrop wrote that summer that the Indians “did not frequent our houses as they were wont, and one of their pawawes told us that there was a conspiracy to cut us off to get our victuals and other substance.” In turn, Puritan colonists re-enforced their notions of Indians as “dark and rude” along with being “Devil-worshippers,” similarly to how the English regarded those found in Ireland and in the West Indies.[4]
The friendly interaction between Chickatabot and Winthrop seems entirely out of place eleven years later. During the late summer 1642, Winthrop recorded an incident involving an Englishman traveling from Dorchester to Watertown who found himself lost. “[B]eing benighted and in a swamp about 10 of the clock, hearing some wolves howl and fearing to be devoured of them,” Winthrop wrote that the wayward traveler cried out. Hearing the man’s pleas, a Cambridge colonist “hallooed to him” but dared not venture into the darkness to find the lost traveler, believing Indians had actually captured and were torturing the Englishman. Instead, the timid rescuer fired off his weapon, which alerted watchmen as far away as Salem. Over the next four hours, Massachusetts colonists brave enough to venture out encountered no Indians and “all retired but the watch.”
Winthrop also noted “an unsettled frame of spirit” among his colonists. Some of whom “concluded there would be no subsisting here, and accordingly they began to hasten away, some to the West Indies, others to the Dutch, at Long Island, etc., and others back for England.” In New England, Winthrop admitted they found “a wilderness where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men.” The idea of the friendly Indian in “English clothes” appears to have died with Chickatabot. Yet, Winthrop continued to rely upon the covenants, “whether civil or sacred,” to which the colonists had bound themselves. He cried out into his journal that “for if one may go, another may, and so the greater part, and so church and commonwealth may be left destitute in a wilderness, exposed to misery and reproach, and all for thy ease and pleasure” of these fleeing colonists.[5]
Several inferences may be drawn from Winthrop’s journal entries. The New England colonists came to live in a hostile, “benighted” environment. They believed wild animals preyed upon Englishmen who found themselves outside and unprotected while searching for a path to settlement and safety. Colonists questioned their covenants with “church and commonwealth” and some fled to seemingly less daunting New World colonies or back home to familiar old England. The Massachusetts colonists perceived their Indian neighbors initially as friends perhaps and then as tormentors who attacked them as wild beasts would in the darkness. Most striking after a dozen years in the New World, Winthrop conveyed little difference, if any really, among his notions of darkness, wilderness, wild beasts, and Indians.
Reading Winthrop’s account of the lost traveler in the wilderness may lead one to think that the colonists in Massachusetts encountered more than they could handle. However, they crossed the Atlantic to settle a Puritan colony. The essence of wilderness is precisely what they hoped to find that, in turn, would allow for the redemption of their Christian religion plagued by a corrupt, and worse yet a papist, European society. To bolster his faith, Winthrop believed “but to knowe that the life which is most exercised with tyralls and temptations is the sweetest, and will prove the safest.”[6] They likened their crossing the Atlantic to form the New England colonies to the ancient Israelites’ Exodus, crossing Egypt’s wilderness to reach the promised land of Canaan. Upon reaching the New World in 1620, Pilgrim and soon-to-be Plymouth Governor William Bradford looked for their “Pisgah,” the mountain from which Moses had seen the Promised Land. Environmental historian Roderick Frazier Nash points out that the New World and its wilderness served both as the colonists’ “sanctuary and their enemy,” which we find in both Bradford’s arrival and Winthrop’s journal.
In this wilderness, they sought to establish “an island of spiritual light in the surrounding darkness.” More significantly, they saw themselves as Christ’s soldiers establishing “the citadel of God’s chosen people” and doing battle against Satan in his dark realm. The Devil had seduced the Indians who inhabited the un-Godly American wilderness. In time, the colonists displaced the “hideous Thickets” and erected orderly towns and churches.[7] Believing Satan had seduced the Indians was not a stretch of the Puritan imagination when we consider seventeenth-century European science had not yet explained occurrences of comets and thunder other than as super-natural.[8]
While the Puritan colonists’ religion included a measure of mystery in who could fully possess it, it by no means remained unexplained to them. The Puritan colonists’ Christianity was Calvinist, which simultaneously excluded those who lived profane existences and advanced those who lived saintly ones. As historian Francis Bremer writes, Puritans believed everybody is “a creature of God who through sin has cut himself off from the promise of heaven.” Similar to any monotheistic religion, and most especially Christianity, Puritan ministers facilitated the anointing of saints, the “elect,” whose souls were saved, and guided the rest to live outwardly holy lives, albeit without the essential grace from God needed for salvation. Puritan ministers preached to everyone and dedicated themselves to saving all souls. Despite ministers’ best efforts to save souls, it was left to God as to whether the minister succeeded in saving souls. To clarify, historian Perry Miller wrote that “The essence of Calvinism and the essence of Puritanism is the hidden God, the unknowable, the unpredictable.” Within this perspective, and as Miller also pointed out, the Puritans’ covenant with God was based on a quid pro quo.[9]
Inherent to this arrangement, the Puritan colonists believed their covenant with God justified the structuring of their society in ways that blended church polity and secular government. Calvinist salvation, according to Bremer, inspired the godly and sanctioned the ungodly to be “coerced, to live lives of outward holiness.” The reason for the coercion of the unsaved rested in the reality for Puritans that the judgment of their society would not be decided by the actions or authenticity of the godly but through the behavior of everyone in society. The integrative, common vision of Puritan society is manifested in New England minister Thomas Shepard’s Theses Sabbaticae (1649), which promulgated the moral law conveyed in the Commandments bound both saints and all others. Yet, even Puritans remained sinful, covetous human beings. Miller laid bare the inconsistency of election because “men wished to know what there was in it for them, they could not forever be incited to faith or persuaded to obey if some tangible reward could not be placed before them.” Hence, the Calvinist dogma of “divine omnipotence and human helplessness” encountered a “steady tendency toward Arminianism” and away from predestination, according to historian Edmund S. Morgan. The Puritans recognized a need to adapt their religiosity to the New World, which begs the question of accommodating their theology to preparing their Indian neighbors for Christian salvation. God, through the covenant with man, revealed His hopes and expectations by way of the Commandments that Puritan covenant theologians believed applied to every person, even wretched Indians. In return, every person who received the opportunity to submit to God’s will should accept it and enjoy God’s grace.[10]
[1] John Winthrop. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649. edited by Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1996: 36; 58-60; 63.
[2] Bradford as cited in Alfred W. Crosby. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Volume 33, Number 2 (April 1976): 290-296.
[3] Neal Salisbury. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500 -1643. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 37; 133-36; Crosby, 298; Jill Lepore. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage Books, 1999: 28.
[4] Wintrop, 50; Richard W. Cogley. John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999: 7; John Putnam Demos. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 71.
[5] Winthrop, 214-6.
[6] Winthrop as cited in Edmund S. Morgan. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958: 11; 46-7. Also in The Puritan Dilemma, Morgan clarifies that Winthrop and the first Massachusetts colonists’ “wilderness” included a “few hundred acres” of cleared land and a “straggling collection of huts and hovels and canvas booths that went by the name of Salem.” Fishermen and fur traders had previously created this settlement (p. 34; 55).
[7] [need a cite for Bradford as Governor];; Roderick Frazier Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind. Fourth Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001: 33-8.
[8] David D. Hall. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990: 106.
[9] Bremer, 42; 13-6; Miller, Marrow, 93; 71; Morgan, Dilemma, 137.
[10] Bremer, 53, 76 (quote), 83; Miller, Marrow, 54-5 (quote), 63-8, 95; Morgan, Dilemma, 136.