25 the Great Awakening and Indian Conversion in Southern New England William S

25 The Great Awakening and Indian Conversion in Southern New England William S. Simmons University of California, Berkeley Historians and anthropologists know a great deal about the conversion of the New England Indians to Christianity in the seventeenth century. Missionaries such as John Eliot of Roxbury and Thomas Mayhew Jr. of Martha's Vineyard are well known for their efforts to convert the Native Americans of what is now Massachusetts to English Puritan religion and culture. It is not well known, however, that a significant number of New England groups did not convert in the seventeenth century and that they practiced their traditional religion into the fourth decade of the eighteenth century. In the early 1740's, however, about a century after the first missionary efforts by Eliot and Mayhew, these remaining Indian groups gave up their ancestral religion and converted to Christianity. Their conversion was not a gradual process. It occurred quickly over a period of several months during that first great surge of religious enthusiasm to affect the American colonies which was known as the Great Awakening. In this paper I am concerned with two general problems. The first is to explain why the traditional eighteenth century Indian remnants converted on this occasion. The second is to discuss the consequences of this conversion for the social and cultural life of these groups. We will begin with a review of the historical substance of this event and of the theoretical issues pertinent to this discussion of conversion. I One of the dominant themes of modern anthropology has been the process of interaction between small scale traditional cultures and large scale colonial and mainly western cultures which have intruded into their territories. The results of this interaction may be classified into three straightforward categories. First, the traditional culture is destroyed by disease, war, or demoralization. Second, the traditional culture survives and attempts to adapt within the new situation by identifying with the symbols of the dominant culture. By symbols of the dominant culture I mean the key religious symbols of that culture and the moral behavior associated with these symbols. Third, the traditional culture survives and attempts to adapt by rejecting the symbols of the dominant culture. This was the approach first taken by the New England groups which later converted in the Great Awakening. Examples of total rejection are rare. The Handsome Lake religion of the Iroquois and the Peyote religions of the nineteenth century were by Christian standards rejections of conventional faith, but as Wallace, Lanternari and others have clarified, 26 these separatist religions involved strong symbolic and behavioral borrowing from and convergence with colonial culture. We will ask first why a significant number of New England Indian groups rejected the dominant colonial religion and then why they changed their minds. II Our understanding of the conversion in the seventeenth century of the Indians of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Colony, and Martha's Vineyard was advanced significantly by Alden Vaughan's account published in 1965, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. It has been enriched more recently by Neal Salisbury's doctoral dissertation, Conquest of the "Savage": Puritans, Puritan Missionaries, and Indians 1620-1680 and by Francis Jenning's highly original book, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest. In general we may conclude from these that acceptance or rejection of English religion by seventeenth century Indian communities was influenced strongly by political and demographic variables. Indians converted where colonial populations were strong and where traditional Indian communities were weak. Missionary success was an expression of political domination. Conversion of the Martha's Vineyard population by the Mayhew family would seem to be an exception, but a close analysis of the process of conversion on that island reveals that domination by the missionary of Indian shamans was paralleled by gradual domination of the Indian sachems by the English colonial community. Those Indian groups which inhabited northeastern Massachusetts and the shores of Massachusetts Bay, the peripheral coastal regions of southeastern Massachusetts, and Martha's Vineyard, were the ones who accepted the religious symbols of English culture by converting to Puritan Christianity. All of these groups were directly colonized by English settlers, had been weakened to varying degrees by European diseases, and were weak politically, both vis a vis other Indian groups and vis a vis the colonial English. Successful resistance towards English religion was related to the degree of group autonomy and was not a reflection of whether or not the group was allied with or perceived as an enemy by the English. The most powerful Indian groups in southern New England, the Narragansett, Pokanoket, and Mohegan, did not convert to Christianity even though a number of English clergymen and Indian converts did offer them the opportunity. The Mohegans of Connecticut, long term allies of the United Puritan Colonies through the Pequot War and King Philip's War, resisted Christianity because their sachem Uncas feared that it would undermine his personal authority. The Narragansetts who lived beyond the Puritan frontier in benign Rhode Island actively resisted attempts by English and Indian converts to influence them. Philip himself, son of the Pokanoket sachem Massasoit, was reported to have told John Eliot that "he did not value what he preached," any more than a button which he pulled from Eliot's coat (Mather 1820:336). After King Philip's 27 War, which took place in 1675-76, the Narragansett survivors combined with the eastern Niantic under the sachem Ninigret and continued to resist conversion even though they had become a conquered subject people. I infer from this case that rejection of the symbols of the dominant culture can occur also when the experience of domination has been too severe, as it was in their destruction in that war (Leach 1958:112-144). The Narragansetts who survived this war, and the Niantics with whom they merged, were angry with the English and rejected their religion on the grounds that it failed to make the English and Christian Indians better people. When the Reverend Experience Mayhew of Martha's Vineyard attempted to preach to the sachem Ninigret II in 1713 the sachem refused his request: I told him the occasion and end of my visiting of him, and desired him to consent that his people should hear me open the mysteries of Religion to them, as being that which was greatly for their good: but he did not seem at all inclineable to what I proposed: He demanded of me why I did not make the English good in the first place: for he said many of them were still bad: He also told me that he had seen Martha's Vineyard Indians at Rode Island, that would steal, and these he said I should first reform before I came to them (Mayhew 1896:110). Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Narragansett-Niantic, Mohegan, Pequot remnants, and the more isolated Montauk of Long Island, continued to practice their ancestral religion which was focused upon traditional religious practitioners known as powwows, whom we may refer to as shamans (Blodgett 1935:27; Occum 1809:106-111; Simmons 1976:217-256). By 1740 the southern New England Indian population had undergone heavy acculturation into the English colonial way of life. Many had worked for colonial families as slaves and indentured servants and had begun to raise English domestic animals and to practice English style plow agricul ture. They participated in a range of new professions as sailors, stone masons, carpenters, well diggers, wood cutters, and domestic laborers of various sorts, and many could speak English. They had changed over the previous century from being a politically autonomous and economically self- sufficient people to being a poor rural working class which was dependent upon the colonial government for protection and which supported itself by small scale farming, hunting, and marginal roles in the rural labor market (Blodgett 1935: 27-29; Callender 1838:138-139; Crane 1899:116; Sainsbury 1975: 378-393; Updike 1907:212). Ill Then came the Great Awakening which burst upon the non- Christian Indians with as much effect as it did upon the White and Black inhabitants of these same areas. Thomas 2 6 Prince, author of a prominent contemporary account of the Great Awakening entitled The Christian History, Containing Accounts of the Revival and Propagation of Religion in Great-Britain and America, which was published in two volumes in 1744 and 1745, summarized the religious situation among the New England Indians at that time: It is no small Part of the wonderful Dispensation of the Grace of God in the present Day, the surprizing Effusion of his SPIRIT on diverse Tribes of Indians in these Ends of the Earth, who wou'd never before so much as outwardly receive the Gospel, notwithstanding the Attempts which have been made this hundred Years to persuade them to it. Their extream love of Hunting, Fishing, Fowling, Merry-Meeting, Singing, Dancing, Drinking, and utter aversion to Industry, have render'd them extremely averse to the Christian Religion: And tho' several Tribes of them both in Plimouth and Massachusetts Colonies and in the Island of Martha's Vineyard have been prevail'd upon to hear the Gospel, many among them hopefully converted, and diverse Churches gathered and maintained among them, for near an Hundred Years: Yet very small Impressions of Religion have been ever made 'till now, on the Mohegan Indians in Connecticut, and scarce any at all on the Montauk Indians in Long Island, or the Narragansetts in Rhode Island Colony (Prince 1745:21- 22) . The Great Awakening began essentially in 1740 with a preaching tour to the American colonies by the English minister George Whitefield, who was known for his ability to arouse an awareness of sin and thirst for salvation among his listeners.

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