The Poor Indians

British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility

Laura M. Stevens

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780812219678
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812203080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Between the English Civil War of 1642 and the American Revolution, countless British missionaries announced their intention to "spread the gospel" among the native North American population. Despite the scope of their endeavors, they converted only a handful of American Indians to Christianity. Their attempts to secure moral and financial support at home proved much more successful.In The Poor Indians, Laura Stevens delves deeply into the language and ideology British missionaries used to gain support, and she examines their wider cultural significance. Invoking pity and compassion for "the poor Indian"—a purely fictional construct—British missionaries used the Black Legend of cruelties perpetrated by Spanish conquistadors to contrast their own projects with those of Catholic missionaries, whose methods were often brutal and deceitful. They also tapped into a remarkably effective means of swaying British Christians by connecting the latter's feelings of religious superiority with moral obligation. Describing mission work through metaphors of commerce, missionaries asked their readers in England to invest, financially and emotionally, in the cultivation of Indian souls. As they saved Indians from afar, supporters renewed their own faith, strengthened the empire against the corrosive effects of paganism, and invested in British Christianity with philanthropic fervor. The Poor Indians thus uncovers the importance of religious feeling and commercial metaphor in strengthening imperial identity and colonial ties, and it shows how missionary writings helped fashion British subjects who were self-consciously transatlantic and imperial because they were religious, sentimental, and actively charitable.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: "The Common Bowels of Pity to the Miserable"
• 1 Gold for Glass, Seeds to Fruit: Husbandry and Trade in Missionary Writings
• 2 "I Have Received Your Christian and Very Loving Letter": Epistolarity and Transatlantic Community
• 3 "The Reservoir of National Charity": The Role of the Missionary Society
• 4 Indians, Deists, and the Anglican Quest for Compassion: The Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
• 5 The Sacrifice of Self: Emotional Expenditure and Transatlantic Ties in Brainerd's and Sergeant's Biographies
• 6 "Like Snow Against the Sun": The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments