During the seventeenth century four European countries—France, England, Netherlands, and Spain–established permanent colonies in the Americas. Their justification in ruling Native American nations and in taking their lands lay in a religious concept commonly call the Discovery Doctrine which gave Christian nations the right, if not the obligation, to rule over all non-Christians. All the European colonial powers in the seventeenth century were Christian theocracies to some extent. While the Spanish and the French had state-sponsored missionaries who attempted to convert the pagan Indians into Christians, the English left missionary efforts to a few idealistic individuals. For the English, their religious views of the world which emphasize their moral, religious, and economic superiority guided their activities in North America.
The primary focus of the English colonization of North America was on the land. In their Christian worldview, they did not recognize American Indians as having any real rights to land. For example, prior to sailing to the Americas in 1630, John Cotton preached to the Puritans that they did not have to buy the land, nor did they have to ask permission to use it. God was their landlord. In Massachusetts, John Cotton justified the killing of Indians and the take-over of Indian land by preaching:
“By right of just occupation from the grand charter in Genesis 1st and 9th Chapters, whereby God gave the earth to the sons of Adam and Noah, to be subdued and replenished.”
(A note on the name Massachusetts: the Massachuset Indians were living in what was to become New England when the English arrived. Due to the smallpox epidemics of 1616-1620 and 1633-1635, the tribe became extinct. The name, however, was adopted for the colony and later the state. In general, Massachuset (spelled with one “t”) refers to the tribe and the language, while Massachusetts (spelled with two “t”s) refers to the colony and the state.)
Regarding the Puritan view of the Indians, Charles Segal and David Stineback, in their book Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, write:
“For the Puritans, they were primarily the villains in a sacred drama, counterpart of the heathen tribes that Joshua conquered, children of the Devil who tempted Christ in the desert, forerunners of the legions of darkness that would gather at Gog and Magog for a last furious but futile battle against the elect.”
For the Puritan viewpoint, there were only two parties in the world: God’s and the Devil’s. From the Puritan perspective, God’s party was entrusted with a world-redeeming errand, while Satan’s party was heathen, doomed, and dark-skinned.
The Puritans in particular set out to destroy the power of the Indian spiritual leaders whom they viewed as being in league with the devil. In 1621, for example, the Reverend Jonas Stockam preached in Virginia that the only way of bringing the gospel to the Indians was to kill the elders. He said:
“till their Priests and Ancients have their throats cut, there is no hope of bringing them to conversion.”
In New England, the Puritans viewed places which were important to Indian spirituality and mythology as being associated with Devil worship and thus assigned their own English names to these places which often included references to the Devil.
The English assumed that their version of Christianity was superior to all other religions and, therefore, that English religious law should apply to all people, including non-Christian Indians, In 1637, for example, the Bay Colony legislature ordered all towns to restrain Indians from profaning the Sabbath. In other words, all Indians, even those who were not Christian, had to obey the Christian rules regarding the Sabbath, including not working on this day. In an article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Lyle Koehler reports:
“Local Indian ruling officials were expected to assess fines for idleness, lying, Sabbath profanation, eating lice, polygyny, and fornication, none of which were offenses before the Puritan intrusion.”
The Massachusetts General Court outlawed all Indian religious rituals in 1646. The law mandated heavy fines for those who worshiped in the Indian way. In addition, the Court required that the penalty for blasphemy and for denying the Christian religion was death.
Missionaries
The royal charters given to English colonists always mentioned the obligation to bring Christianity to the “savages.” In general, there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm about converting the Indians. From the viewpoint of the English missionaries, conversion to Christianity required not only that the Indians give up their traditional ceremonies, but that they also adopt English cultural traits, such as clothing, marriage, gender roles, housing, and so on. Christian Indians who had become English in culture could not be integrated into English colonial society, which was based on segregation. Therefore, the missionary efforts sought to create Christian Indian communities, often known as “praying towns,” in which the Christian Indians could live separately from the English.
By 1674, the Puritans had established 14 mission villages. In these towns, the Indians were given daily instruction in Christianity and European trades. Ethnologist T.J.C. Brasser, in a chapter in North American Indians in Historical Perspective, reports:
“Puritan ideas of ‘right walking’ were made understood by a series of prohibitions against idleness, fornication, women with loose hair or with uncovered breasts, the killing of lice between the teeth, and a range of other niceties.”
In 1677, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that all Indians be settled in four praying towns: Natick, Punkapoag, Hassanamesit, and Wamesit. The Indians in these towns were prohibited from entertaining “stranger” Indians and the Court ordered that a list of all inhabitants of the praying towns be made annually. When leaving the towns, the Indians were required to have a magistrate’s certificate proving their loyalty. When approached by an English person, the Indians were to lay their guns on the ground until the English had examined their papers.
In New England, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was founded in 1649 to help convert Indians to Christianity. The idea of the Society is to instruct the Indians in the “proper worship of God.”
In 1663, John Eliot translated the English Bible into the Massachuset language with the aid of a Massachuset servant who spoke both languages. English professor Laura J. Murray, in an article in The New England Quarterly, writes:
“Eliot believed that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel and thus especially suited to be beneficiaries of God’s redeeming hand.”
Explanation of Indian Origins
The land which the English found was not, of course, unoccupied. In the English myth of the New World, the presence of the indigenous peoples of North America had to be explained. They assumed that their version of creation was universal and thus they had to fit the Indians into this creation story. In noting that the Bible and Christianity limit the discussion about the origins of Indian people, David Lovejoy, in an article in the New England Quarterly, writes:
“Indians must have originally migrated from the Old World, for it was impossible to believe that they were not descendants of the first Adam by way of Noah and the Ark. Any other theory, suggesting a second creation, was promptly labeled heresy, and in the early years proponents suffered death for spreading it.”
Very often, Indians were seen by the English as being associated with Satan, either as his disciples or as his children. In 1641, for example, letters from well-known theologian Joseph Mede to New England ministers suggested that Indians had migrated to the Americas because the Devil had led them there. In an article in the New England Quarterly, David Lovejoy explains:
“An increasing fear of losing his dominance in Europe as the Gospel spread had provoked the Devil to gather together hordes of barbarous northerners who had never heard of Christ. An empty land superior to their own, the Devil promised them, where they might thrive in a kingdom over which he would rule.”
There were also a number of people who felt that Americans had descended from a Jewish tribe. In his 1650 publication Jewes in America, or probabilities that the Americans are of that race, Thomas Thorowgood made a comparison of Jewish and Indian culture in an attempt to prove that Indians were really Jewish. He suggested that Indians were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. He cited the similarity between Indian and Jewish rites, knowledge of the flood, dancing, and circumcision. Not everyone agreed with this idea, however, and in 1652 Sir Marmon l’Estrange published Americans no Jews, or improbabilities that the Americans are of that race which disputed Thorowgood’s claims.
Indians 101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series explores various American Indian topics. More about American Indian history from this series:
Indians 101: The First Anglo-Powhatan War
Indians 101: Early Spanish Invasions of the Great Plains
Indians 101: Virginia and the Indians, 1606 to 1608
Indians 101: The English and the Indians in Maine
Indians 101: The 17th Century Wampanoag
Indians 101: Grey Lock's War
Indians 101: New Amsterdam and the Indians
Indians 101: The Timucua and the Spanish