Red Brethren

The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America

David J. Silverman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801444777
• eBook ISBN: 9781501704796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

New England Indians created the multitribal Brothertown and Stockbridge communities during the eighteenth century with the intent of using Christianity and civilized reforms to cope with white expansion. In Red Brethren, David J. Silverman considers the stories of these communities and argues that Indians in early America were racial thinkers in their own right and that indigenous people rallied together as Indians not only in the context of violent resistance but also in campaigns to adjust peacefully to white dominion. All too often, the Indians discovered that their many concessions to white demands earned them no relief.

In the era of the American Revolution, the pressure of white settlements forced the Brothertowns and Stockbridges from New England to Oneida country in upstate New York. During the early nineteenth century, whites forced these Indians from Oneida country, too, until they finally wound up in Wisconsin. Tired of moving, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges became some of the first Indians to accept U.S. citizenship, which they called "becoming white," in the hope that this status would enable them to remain as Indians in Wisconsin. Even then, whites would not leave them alone.

Red Brethren traces the evolution of Indian ideas about race under this relentless pressure. In the early seventeenth century, indigenous people did not conceive of themselves as Indian. They sharpened their sense of Indian identity as they realized that Christianity would not bridge their many differences with whites, and as they fought to keep blacks out of their communities. The stories of Brothertown and Stockbridge shed light on the dynamism of Indians' own racial history and the place of Indians in the racial history of early America.

CHAPTER 1

All One Indian

SHORTLY after the Rev. John Eliot began his missionary work in the mid-1640s, Indians around Boston told him that “in forty years more, some Indians would all be one English, and in a hundred years all Indian here about would so be.” Eliot hoped as much, responding that “they [the Indians] and we [the English] were already all one save in two things, which make the only difference betwixt them and us: First, we know, serve, and pray unto God, and they doe not: Secondly, we labor and work in building, planting, clothing our selves, etc., and they doe not: and would they but doe as wee doe in these things, they would be all one with English men.”1 Colonial-Indian relations in New England were still young enough for Eliot and his Native charges to be optimistic that their peoples could and would live side by side, first as neighbors and eventually as something resembling a single community. They assumed that their differences were cultural rather than innate.

Yet this shared principle did not mean that Eliot and the Massachusett Indians possessed identical dreams for the future. Eliot wanted the Indians to adopt Christianity, English manners, and English laws until they were finally ready to enter the colonial state. Certainly this is not what the Indians meant by becoming “all . . . one English.” They pictured reciprocal trade, military alliance, inter-marriage, and perhaps even their adoption of some English religious beliefs and practices in light of the expanding colonial population. Acquiescing to English domination, though, was quite another matter.

The colonial foreground to Brothertown and New Stockbridge involved Native people and Englishmen developing a sense of themselves and each other as Indians and whites in the context of negotiating these competing visions. Englishmen were surprised that most Indians refused to adopt colonial culture wholesale or to accept colonial authority over them even after witnessing the purported superiority of colonial life. Though Indians willingly borrowed what they most admired about the English and even conceded to some colonial influence in their affairs, generally they insisted on political and cultural self-determination. The Indians’ stubborn autonomy fed into the colonists’ growing insistence that Indians were inveterate savages incapable of becoming civilized members of provincial society. According to this view, civility was a feature of whites alone, thereby rendering America theirs for the taking.

Indigenous people, for their part, defined white and Indian through two related processes. First, beginning in the seventeenth century, Indians throughout the Northeast generated a critique of colonialism that whereas their people had extended the hand of fellowship to the English when Indians were strong and colonists were weak, colonists refused to reciprocate once they held the balance of power. Instead, colonists used their strength to exploit and dispossess Indian people, even allies. Eventually, Indians came to attribute this menacing feature of colonialism to the colonists’ fundamental character. Second, Natives explained their peoples’ inability to resist colonial expansion by evoking the spirits. The colonists’ power, Indians argued, stemmed from the Christian God. As for the source of their own weakness, Indians agreed that it extended from a spiritual power of some sort, but they were uncertain as to whether it was witchcraft, a curse by Jehovah, or punishment from an Indian god for straying from time-tested ways. Though neither Indians nor colonists spoke of their differences in the biological sense of being passed from generation to generation through the blood, by the mid-eighteenth century they had begun to think of their differences as permanent. Experiencing and conceiving of a social structure premised on the division of people according to their complexion went hand in hand.

Few Indians had the opportunity, and apparently none the inclination, to express their nascent racial ideas in print. After all, the vast majority of Indians were illiterate and those who had received formal education had no precedent and little incentive for musing on such theoretical issues through a foreign medium. Yet occasionally the surviving record does contain Indian ideas about the nature of Indians and Europeans, many of them generated by the forerunners of the Brothertown and Stockbridge communities. Tracing the evolution of those statements and the contexts in which they were made provides a backdrop for the Christian Indian migration to Oneida country, for that event involved discrete and even historically antagonistic Native communities making common cause as Indians against the threats posed to them by whites. The racial ideas at the foundation of that movement had a genealogy extending back in time to the earliest years of the seventeenth century.

Creations

From their earliest contacts, Indians associated Europeans with spiritual power, which Algonquian-speakers in the Northeast called manit.2 Only spiritual power could explain the newcomers’ stunning technology, such as ships, fire-arms, knives, woven cloth, magnets, magnifying glasses, compasses, and more. According to one sixteenth-century account, these sorts of items “so farre exceeded [the Indians’] capacities to comprehend . . . that they thought they were rather the works of gods than of men, or at the leastwise they had been given and taught us of the gods.”3 But for the Indians, wielding spiritual power was not the same as being a spirit. When Indians shouted “manitou, manitou” at Europeans, they probably meant “you have manit, you have manit” rather than “you are a god, you are a god,” which was how colonists preferred to interpret these words.4 The Europeans’ possession of manit did not make them fundamentally different from spiritually potent Indians such as pawwaws (shamans), though the manifestations of their power were novel. In any case, regardless of whether Indians initially believed Europeans to be gods, it is clear that they did not subscribe to such thinking for long. The Indians’ views of Europeans and, reflexively, of themselves, experienced a long evolution that began rather than ended at this time.

Coastal Indians attempted to harness and appropriate English power through trade and military alliances framed as kin relationships. Indians expected allies to treat each other as family in almost every respect by protecting, feeding, and counseling each other, quickly forgiving each other’s wrongs, and being slow to claim injury. As such, their protocol included activities that one would find in any Native home. Foreign diplomats exchanged presents, feasted, smoked, sang, and danced together, told stories recounting the two groups’ shared history, exchanged marriage partners, and, not least, addressed each other using metaphorical kinship terms like father, son, brother, uncle, and nephew.5 The storied “Thanksgiving alliance” between Plymouth and the Wampanoags makes the point. As the Wampanoag sachem Philip told it from his perspective in 1675, his father, Massasoit, “a great man,” had treated the first colonists of Plymouth “as a little child,” or as a father would treat his son, giving them food, diplomatic intelligence, protection, and even land.6 He expected mutual treatment as the colonists grew in power. The assumption here was that peaceful, productive relationships rested on making two peoples more like one people. Yet even as Indians pursued these alliances, the reality of disease, Christian missions, Machiavellian politics, and war forced them to reconsider whether their interests were compatible with those of the colonists and even if the two groups were fundamentally similar.

The most obvious difference between Indians and Europeans was that epidemics new to America but old to Europe devastated Indian populations, while Europeans went relatively unscathed. Smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, bubonic plague, the flu, mumps, and whooping cough, all of them a regular part of life in the crowded places of Europe, were entirely unknown and horrifyingly lethal to Indian populations. In Europe, most adults carried lifetime immunities to some of these diseases after having suffered them in childhood. But in America these ailments attacked populations with no inherited defenses to them. Thus, almost everyone in Native villages got sick simultaneously once they came into contact with the imported microbes. Parents, children, grandparents: everyone fell together. The sick, who otherwise might have recovered with a bit of warmth, food, and water, died miserably, as nobody was available to care for them. In the outbreaks that struck coastal New England in 1616–19, 1622, 1633, 1643, and 1645, and Long Island in 1622 and 1659, death rates of over 50 percent were common, and Indians sometimes reported losses of 90 percent.7

Watching these mysterious ailments whipsaw through the Native population while colonists remained relatively unscathed raised profound questions, among colonists and Indians alike, about the cause of the disparity. The English generally attributed their health and the Indians’ misfortune to Providence, as when James I, in his patent to Plymouth colony, marveled that “Almighty God in his great Goodness and Bountie towards Us and our People hath thought fitt and determined, that those large and goodly Territoryes, deserted as it were by their naturally Inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People.”8 Indians also sensed the spirits at work.9 For instance, in a 1637 conversation with Roger Williams, the Narragansettsachem, Canonicus, “accused the English and myself for sending the plague amongst them and threatening to kill him especially.”10 Williams’s answer was that “the plague and other sicknesses were alone in the hand of the one God, who made him and us” and that God was just as liable to smite the English as the Indians if he saw cause. Indians remained skeptical, particularly about God’s impartiality. As late as 1750, Oneidas were reluctant to travel to Philadelphia because they feared “the evil Spirits that Dwell among the White People are against us and kill us.”11 Though Indian sorcerers and Indian gods caused their own share of trouble in the world, the disastrous scale of the post-contact epidemics suggested that the colonists and their God were so different in degree as to be different in kind. According to the Native view, it was an entire people’s relationship to the spirits that defined them.

The colonists’ insistence on a broad gulf between their civility and the Indians’ savagery reinforced these early notions of difference. As Englishmen defined it, civility referred to an array of social characteristics that marked hu-mankind’s ascension from wildness. Those qualities included literacy, codified law, monogamous marriage, highly graded social classes, sedentarism, plow agriculture, private property, steady work, and sophisticated technology. Though a people could be civilized without being Christian (such as the Chinese), Europeans generally thought of civility and Christianity as mutually reinforcing, as of a piece. By contrast, Europeans associated savagery with human baseness: anarchy, laziness, nakedness, polygamy, blood thirst, nomadism, and paganism. Eventually, Europeans would come to think of themselves as inherently civilized and of Indians as permanent savages, but in the meantime their spokesmen claimed that bringing the Indians to civility was among their foremost goals. The Massachusetts Assembly followed through on this principle with a 1652 statute that encouraged towns to allot land to Indians “brought to civilitie” so they could live “amongst the English.”12 According to this thinking, the gap between civility and savagery, not complexion, was what divided Indian and English peoples.

Christian missions were among the first sites for Indians and Englishmen to compare ideas about their peoples’ similarities and differences and to test the English commitment to coexistence. The experiment began in the mid-1640s among the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard and the Massachusett Indians around Boston, then gradually extended through English and Indian missionaries alike to the Wampanoags of Cape Cod and Nantucket and the Nipmucs of central Massachusetts.13 The Narragansetts and Niantics of Rhode Island and the Mohegans of Connecticut generally rejected missionary overtures during the seventeenth century, which colonists attributed to their sachems’ fear that Christianity was a wedge for the spread of English jurisdiction.14 Nevertheless, given the tight network of Indian communities throughout the region, they knew about the discussions that took place within the missions, many of them centered on defining Indians, Englishmen, and their relation to each other.15

The missionaries’ agenda was to define customary Indian behaviors, or Indianness, as sinful and savage, and English behaviors, or Englishness, as godly and civilized.16 Yet simply establishing the terms of discussion was fraught with difficulty. Aside from the monumental challenge of trying to interpret theology across a broad linguistic and conceptual divide, Native people found the categorization of them as Indians curious. Echoing the earlier discussion between Roger Williams and the Narragansetts, John Eliot, in just his third meeting with the Massachusett Indians, faced the question, “Why the English call them Indians because before they [the English] came they [the Indians] had another name?”17 Eliot did not record his answer, but in all likelihood he explained that Indians were a group insofar as they all lived sinfully in ignorance of the Word of God. The concepts of Indian and sin were so firmly linked in the evangelistic mindset that one missionary, William Leveritch of Cape Cod, told his Wampanoag charges that there was no difference between them and “those looser sort of English,” that “they are all one Indians.”18

The most heated topic within the missions was how the English could argue that they and the Indians shared a single creator and that Christianity was universal if the Indians’ forefathers had no knowledge of such things. Eliot’s response was that the Indians’ ancestors “were stubborne and rebellious children, and would not heare the word, did not care to pray nor to teach their children, and hence Indians that now are, do not know God at all.”19 Many Indians were unconvinced. In 1714, the Mohegans politely rebuffed the missionary Experience Mayhew, maintaining that “as several nations had their distinct way of worship, so they had theirs; and they thought their way was Good, and that they had no reason to alter it.” In any case, the Mohegans believed that “the difficulties of the Christian Religion were such as the Indians could not endure.”20 The implicit point here, one that Indians in the eighteenth century would repeat over and over again in explicitly racial terms, was that Christianity was meant for whites, not for Indians.

Missionary work, by its very nature, rejected this premise, yet in critical ways the English ghettoized Christian Indians and reinforced the notion of an un-bridgeable divide between peoples, even in the early days of the mission. Tell-ingly, throughout the seventeenth century, colonists and Natives alike called the Christian Indians “praying Indians” rather than just “Christians.” Indians themselves had introduced the term praying Indians to highlight the mission Indians’ distinctive ritual practices. For Englishmen, though, a praying Indian was a hyphenated or qualified Christian. To be simply Christian was to be European; a praying Indian was, by inference, someone between savagery and civility, someone who measured up “almost, but not quite” to the colonists’ godly standard.21 The same divisive principle underwrote the creation of fourteen Christian Indian praying towns in Massachusetts and one each on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard from 1650 to 1671. These praying towns were supposed to be permanent reserves where Christian Indians could live apart from the negative examples of non-Christian Indians...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: That Overwhelming Tide of Fate
• 1. All One Indian
• 2. Converging Paths
• 3. Betrayals
• 4. Out from Under the Burdens
• 5. Exodus
• 6. Cursed
• 7. Red Brethren
• 8. More Than They Know How to Endure
• 9. Indians or Citizens, White Men or Red?
• Epilogue: “Extinction” and a “Common Ancestor”
• Notes