Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (18 page)

Whatever the disappointments involved in the evangelization of Spanish America, the fact remained that, to European eyes, millions of lost souls, formerly wandering in the darkness and subject to the tyranny of Satan, had now been brought into the light. The Spanish achievement was impressive enough for William Strachey to hold it up as an example to his compatriots as they embarked on the colonization of Virginia: `Have we either less means, fainter spirits, or a charity more cold, or a religion more shameful, and afraid to dilate itself? or is it a lawful work in them, and not in us? . . .' The opportunities, as he saw it, were great. The Indians were `simple, and innocent people', and - using the image of the tabula rasa employed by Las Casas - he described their minds as `unblotted tables, apt to receive what form soever shall be first drawn thereon ...'"'

Whether the English had `fainter spirits', a `charity more cold, or a religion more shameful' than the Spaniards are matters for debate, but they certainly had `less means'. With the coming of the Reformation to England, the religious orders disappeared. There was no cadre of militant evangelists in the home country ready to take up the challenge of converting the peoples of North America to the faith. Nor was the Anglican church in the early seventeenth century in a position to devise and implement a Spanish-style programme of evangelization, enjoying full and effective support from the crown. It was still struggling to establish itself and its doctrines at home, and had neither the energy nor the resources to devote much attention to the opportunities that awaited it overseas.

The first meeting of the Virginia Assembly in 1619 endorsed the Church of England as the legally authorized religious establishment in the colony,12 but it was neither quick nor very effective in establishing itself. In 1622 there were fortyfive parishes to be cared for, and only ten ministers in residence." Gradually a church was created in the colony, with the parish as a vital element in local life, but it was a church far removed from the hierarchy in England and one controlled by the planters themselves. Institutionally, therefore, the Anglican church failed to transfer its authority across the ocean, and there was to be no bishop in Virginia, or indeed in any part of British North America, before the Revolution.84 Not surprisingly, in view of this absence of authority and direction, no systematic programme was developed for Christianizing the Virginian Indians, and Henrico College, founded in 1619 for the education of Indian children, closed its doors even before it ever got round to opening them.85

But it was not simply the organizational weaknesses of the Anglican church that hampered its missionary effort in British America. It also possessed no monopoly of religious life. Unlike Spanish America, the English settlements would become an arena for competing creeds. Although Maryland was designed as a haven for Roman Catholics, they were outnumbered from the start by Protestants, and the colony survived its early years by having no established church (which meant, uniquely for British as well as Spanish America, having no compulsory tithes or other more or less compulsory forms of contribution for the support of the clergy), and adopting a pragmatic form of toleration which made religion a private affair.86 It was only after the Glorious Revolution, in 1692, that the first moves were made to establish the Church of England as Maryland's official church. In New England the purpose behind the founding of Puritan settlements was to promote a purer form of religious life and worship than seemed possible under the Anglican church as currently established, and their founders were pre-eminently concerned with constructing in the New World a church of visible saints. 87

This preoccupation did not necessarily preclude a mission into the wilderness to convert the Indians, although in practice it did much to complicate the enterprise. The very fact that the seal designed for the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 displayed an Indian with a scroll emerging from his mouth bearing the legend `Come over and help us', borrowed from the vision of St Paul in Acts 16:9,88 indicates an initial commitment to missionary activity which promised more than it eventually delivered (fig. 7). In the early years there was a shortage of pastors even to minister to the needs of the settlers, and the difficulty of mastering Indian languages was to be a further obstacle to progress in the British colonies, as in the Spanish. But some individuals, in British as in Spanish America, made a determined effort to overcome this obstacle. Roger Williams, whose `soul's desire', as he wrote, was `to do the natives good', published his A Key into the Language of America in 1643.89 In 1647 Governor Winthrop reported in his journal that the pastor of Roxbury, the Reverend John Eliot, had taken `great pains' to learn Algonquian, `and in a few months could speak of the things of God, to their understanding'.9' At the same time Thomas Mayhew, who had settled on Martha's Vineyard, achieved some important conversions and was acquiring proficiency in the native language. The 1640s, then, saw the beginning of a major effort, although small-scale by Spanish standards, to win the North American Indians to Christianity.91

This effort benefited from the triumph of the parliamentarians in the English Civil War, which created a more favourable official climate in the home country for the support of Puritan missionary enterprise overseas. In 1649 the Rump Parliament approved the founding of a corporation, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in New England, to promote the cause of the conversion of the Indians by organizing the collection and disbursement of funds.92 The enterprise was therefore dependent on voluntary contributions from the faithful - a reflection of the growing tendency in the English world to rely on private and corporate initiative and voluntary associations to undertake projects which in the Hispanic world came within the official ambit of church and state.

As in Spanish America the missionary effort supported by the Society involved the compilation of dictionaries and grammars, and the preparation of catechisms in the native languages.93 It also included something that did not figure on the Spanish agenda - the translation into a native Indian tongue of the Bible, a heroic enterprise completed by Eliot in 1659 and published in 1663. The fundamental importance of the written word to Protestantism strengthened the arguments for the schooling of Indians, and considerable effort - including the construction of an Indian College at Harvard in 1655 - was to be devoted to the teaching of Indian children.94 But the most spectacular, if not the most successful, feature of the New England missionary enterprise was the establishment of the `praying towns' - the fourteen village communities set up by Eliot in Massachusetts for converted Indians.95 The practical purpose behind their foundation was similar to that which inspired the creation of the so-called reducciones in the Spanish colonial world from the mid-sixteenth century: it was easier to indoctrinate Indians and to shield them from the corrupting influences of the outside world if they were concentrated in large settlements, instead of living dispersed. The Spanish policy of concentrating Indians in reducciones led to massive forced resettlement in Mexico and Peru.96 Although there were none of the forced movements of population which dramatically altered the demographic landscape of the Spanish viceroyalties, the praying towns were reducciones writ small, the visible manifestations of the conviction that, if only the Indians could be isolated and brought under the exclusive tutelage of ministers and pastors, they might one day be fitted to join the community of saints.

The results, in both instances, failed to correspond to the high hopes with which the experiment had been invested. Many of the Peruvian Indians fled the reducciones as soon as they could, while some of Eliot's praying Indians were to join King Philip's warrior bands.97 The praying towns had to face not only the scepticism of many of the colonists, but also the derision and hostility of Indian tribes which remained impervious to the appeal of Christianity; and the very proximity of these hostile tribes made the praying towns less safe from attack than reducciones that lay in the heartlands of the Spanish viceroyalties. The towns did, however, achieve some important successes. Where the Spanish church turned its back on the ordination of Indian ministers, the Puritans succeeded in training a number of converts for the ministry, some of whom in turn went out to carry the gospel to unconverted tribes.98 Their contribution was all the more important because the first obligation of Puritan ministers was to their own communities of the elect, and, unlike the friars in Spanish America, they could not devote themselves full time to evangelization among the Indians.

Against the blanket `conversion' of the indigenous population under Spanish rule, must be set the conversion of some 2,500 Indians - perhaps 20 per cent of the Indian population of New England - by the time of the outbreak of King Philip's War in 1675.91 The fact that New England was still a frontier society with relatively few Indians living within the borders of the settlements made conditions very different from those that prevailed in the Spanish viceroyalties. It was one thing, for instance, to establish a college for the sons of an old-established indigenous nobility in the urbanized environment of Mexico City, and quite another to persuade young Massachusetts Indians to abandon their open-air existence for the sedentary life and unfamiliar diet of a colonial grammar school. The Indian College at Harvard, not surprisingly, was no College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, which, in the early years after its foundation in 1536, enjoyed a resounding success in creating a new and hispanicized native elite, allegedly capable of producing Latin sentences of a Ciceronian elegance that astonished Spanish visitors. Very few Indians actually went to the Indian College, and scarcely one of them survived the ordeal of exposure to life at Harvard. The college was eventually demolished in 1693.100

The character of the Puritan message, moreover, played its own part in adding to the uphill nature of the task. Puritanism was an exclusive, not an all-embracing, form of religion, and it depended for conversion on the working of God's grace. For this reason, there could be no imitation of the Spanish policy of compelle eos entrare - `compel them to come in'. On the contrary, the colony's policy, as John Cotton wrote in the 1630s, was `not to compel' the Indians, `but to permit them either to believe willingly or not to believe at all'.10' Puritan theology was complex, and no doubt the complexity was all the greater for a population still being initiated into the fascinating mysteries of the written word. Moreover, as a religion without images, and one which prided itself on the simplicity of its worship in the barest of churches, it offered little in the way of the visual and ceremonial that seems to have appealed to the indigenous populations of Mexico and Peru. Only the singing of hymns and psalms tempered the rigour of the message.102

The new faith also demanded changes in social behaviour even more exacting than those required by the Catholic Church in Spanish America. The doctrine of election carried with it strict adherence to a set of norms which left little latitude for manoeuvre where standards of `civility' were concerned. `I find it absolutely necessary', wrote Eliot, `to carry on civility with Religion.'103 Conversion to Christianity meant in effect conversion to an English way of life, and in the praying towns the Indians were expected to abandon their wigwams for the allegedly superior comforts of English-style houses, built with little regard to the climatic conditions of New England.104 Anglicization extended even to attempts to persuade Indians to abandon their traditional custom of wearing their hair long. `Since the word hath begun to worke upon their hearts,' wrote a minister, `they have discerned the vanitie and pride, which they placed in their haire, and have therefore of their own accord ... cut it modestly."°5 In Peru, where the long hair of the Indians outraged Spaniards as much as it outraged the Puritans of New England, a Spanish official, Juan de Matienzo, showed more sensitivity. He could see no great objection to long hair, except perhaps on grounds of cleanliness, and wrote that `to make them change their custom would seem to them a sentence of death. 106

The willingness of the New England converts to face the derision of their unconverted fellow Indians and reconstruct their way of life, even to the extent of adopting the dress and hairstyles of the Europeans, suggests that, for some tribes at least - perhaps those whose lives had been especially disrupted by the advent of the Europeans and their diseases - the new faith, for all its complexity, met a real need.107 Yet these converts remained a small minority, precarious clusters of believers in a pagan ocean, and even then their conversion was regarded with scepticism by many of the settlers, who remained convinced that the whole notion of conversion and civilization of the Indian was `meere fantasie'.108 One or two, like Thomas Morton, might even affect to question its desirability, finding `the Massachusetts Indian more full of humanity, than the Christians',10N but Morton was a notorious maverick.

Although John Eliot shared with Bartolome de las Casas the name of `Apostle to the Indians',"° he was a Las Casas in a minor key. Las Casas devoted a large part of his long life to campaigning, lobbying and writing on behalf of the Indians against their detractors in America itself and at the Spanish court. Confronted by a settler community which justified its exploitation of the Indians by arguments based on their natural inferiority as human beings, he sought to end the oppression by working for the abolition of the encomienda and arguing that the Indians had the spiritual aptitude to assimilate true Christianity if they were removed from the hands of the encomenderos and placed directly under the benevolent rule of the Spanish crown.

The agitation of Las Casas and his fellow Dominicans on behalf of the Indians was sufficiently powerful to persuade Charles V, on the recommendation of the Council of the Indies, to order in 1550 that all further expeditions of conquest in the New World should be suspended until a junta of theologians had pronounced on the moral issues involved. The junta, convened in Valladolid in September 1550, and holding a second session in May 1551, was confronted with the opposing arguments of Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, and Sepulveda, the emperor's chaplain, who had no personal knowledge of American Indians but on the basis of his reading of Aristotle had asserted their natural inferiority in his treatise, Democrates secundus. It was this inferiority, in Sepulveda's view, that justified making war upon them.i"'