BRIGHTENING GLANCE
BEFORE A SUMMER SUN
By James Ryan
"Home in the Woods" (1847) Thomas Cole
CHAPTER 4
TEACHING BLOODY INSTRUCTIONS
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th' inventor
Shakespeare, Macbeth
The Bible was the common reading fare for the Puritans of New England. That and sermons comprised the bulk of their intellectual stimulation, the times replete with “theological rigor and restraint of the imagination.” [1] And so they remained for almost 200 years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. During this period of religious orthodoxy, fueled by fear and mistrust, attitudes were hardened toward the American Indians by the religious mongers who peddled the propaganda of biblical simile. The Puritan arrival in the new world became a theological “errand into the wilderness” analogous to the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan, a myth to live and kill by. This was a mission far different from the plundering rape and enslavement of aboriginal South and Central America that were basically genocidal robberies on an epic scale. No, the New England Puritans were not out to enslave the aboriginal inhabitants in order to efficiently extract their natural resource wealth. Their calling had a more noble articulation, simply put, “to build a city on a hill.” Of course they needed land, lots of land, and they grabbed it rationalizing all the way. But their overarching purpose had a nobler tone, as Richard Slotkin notes:
What they desired above all was a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible Commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the Word of God to all the world. [2]
This entrenched religiosity during the infancy of what would become the United States of America would have a profound effect on the republic that was born on July 4, 1776. From the beginning, the Puritans had a government by and of the Bible, an embryo of the government that was to come. The dogmatic literalness of Biblical reading proved the perfect format to promulgate their raison d’etre, that is, to create, not a ‘new’ England, but a ‘new’ English Israel in a ‘new’ wilderness. “We fail to grasp the spirit of these men,” wrote George Waller of Butler University, “unless we realize that they considered themselves a chosen people, one to whom God had revealed himself and had led to the promised land far from the sins and corruptions of the Old World.” [3] Their ministerial zeal would only escalate over time.
We do not know who specifically had the creative impulse to decide on and develop the mythic notion that wolf-suckled twins founded Rome. But we do know who best formulated the idea of the New England colony as the new Israel. It was Increase Mather (1639-1723), a Puritan minister of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was perhaps the earliest developer of America’s religious mythology, a mythology that would prove feloniously harmful to millions of the Red race.
In a treatise written in 1676 called A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New-England, Mather described this war as a “warr with the heathen,” more widely and specifically referred to as King Philip’s War. Therein Mather conflated New England with a new Israel, “the English Israel,” thus making instant myth. It took him but one sentence, the opening sentence:
THAT the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land
the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession,
have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part
of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no
man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.[4]
Nor does Mather waste time asserting English Israel’s right of ownership. But one must ask, Where’s the deed to this property? Presumably somewhere in the Bible. Or at least that’s where the English king received his entitlement.
Mather claimed that the sinful subsequent generation of Puritans caused King Philip’s War (1675-76).[5] He also asserted, more subtly, the claim that rightful possession of the land was theirs because the land was virginal, untilled, and hence unimproved. How these barbarous creatures survived all the previous millennia is of no apparent wonderment.
Nor were our sins ripe for so dreadful a judgment, until the Body
of the first Generation was removed, and another Generation risen
up which hath not so pursued, as ought to have been, the blessed
design of their Fathers, in following the Lord into this Wilderness,
whilst it was a land not sown. [6]
And again the assertion of ownership due to “the blessed design of their Fathers” in doing the work of the Lord. And so into the wilderness they came, following the lead of the Lord, into the land unsown. This was a reiteration of the earlier assertion made by John Winthrop in 1628 as governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his tract, Reasons for the Plantation in New England.
As for the natives in New England, they enclose no land, neither have
they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by,
and so have no other but a natural right to those countries. [7]
In 1629, one year later, the Constitution of the Massachusetts Plantation Colony established an “absolute government” in the colony with the intent to “settle the same as may make most to the glory of God.” [8] All powers were derived from the power of the King of England, who too had a natural right to the land ‘discovered’ by English agents of discovery. This argument of natural right to the soil, based on God’s direction to Adam to tend to his (God’s) garden and to cultivate the soil, was a cornerstone of John Locke’s treatises on government that were so enthusiastically embraced by Thomas Jefferson as seminal thinking for the coming United States of America.[9]
Inflamatory Language
Another aspect of the so-called literature of Mather’s time was the abject, remorseless descriptions of the destruction of Indians, in this case the Pequots, the following example by a minister of God, Cotton Mather.
There were hundreds of Wigwams (or Indian houses) within the Fort,
which our Souldiers set on fire, in the men, women and children
(no man knoweth how many hundreds of them) were burnt to death. [10]
While the number of slain Indian men, women, and children was of little apparent concern, one item was. What piqued Winthrop’s curiosity was the seductive quality of Indian life as an alternative to the hidebound, dogmatic way of the Puritans. Indeed some of Winthrop’s “wise, honest, expert, and discrete persons” were going native and to a treacherous extent.
Concerning the number of Indians slain in this Battle, we are uncertain:
only some Indians which afterwards were taken prisoners
(also a wretched English man that apostatized to the Heathen,
and fought with them against his own Country-men).[11]
This treachery phenomenon will be later examined in the writings of John Morton, in particular in A New English Canaan (1637). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of 200 years later, The May-Pole of Merry Mount (1835), is also informative regarding the fear and intolerance of the early colonists.
The mistrust of Indian ways was endemic among the relentlessly hidebound Puritans. And the usurpation of Indian land was equally relentless. And so too was the hidebound, relentlessly violent God of the Old Testament Bible. Open to a random page in the book of Joshua. God is angry, and controlling, a ‘commander-in-chief’ according to Increase Mather’s King Philip’s War battle narrative.Therein God rallies the troops, takes care of logistics just in the nick of time, a literal deus ex machina.
But to proceed,
When the Army was just upon the Resolve to return home,
because provisions were spent, God so ordered, as that a
Vessel loaden with Victuals arrived, whereupon it was
determined to pursue the enemy.
Which led to another feather in God’s victory bonnet. Thus:
But God hath wasted the Heathen, by sending the destroying Angell
amongst them, since this War began. [12]
The Indians stood little chance against God and his destroying angel. Of course, by Mather’s lights, God had little choice. The Indians were savages who did not fight fairly, had little concern about their own lives and lived like animals.[13]
They have advantages that we have not, knowing where to find us,
but we know not where to find them, who nevertheless are alwayes
at home, and have in a manner nothing but their lives and souls
(which they think not of) to loose; every Swamp is a Castle to them,
and they can live comfortably on that which would starve English-men.
So that we have no cause to glory, for it is God which hath thus saved us,
and not we our selves. [14]
We have heard this complaint about all those later enemies of US democracy, those resistors of US imperialism, from the Philippines through Vietnam to Iraq. Always the same refrain, they don’t fight fairly! And again the same problem, defining situations and people by homegrown self-serving standards. Nothing has changed.
Mather’s closing invocation praised the Lord, the architect and commander of the victorious redemptive war in “English Israel,” also referred to as “this Jerusalem.” Obviously this is the same Lord who led Israel to victory.
Now, as the Lord, who doth redeem Israel out of all his troubles,
hath graciously and gloriously begun our Salvation, so let him
perfect it, in such a way, as that no honour at all may come unto us,
but that great glory may be to his own blessed Name for ever.
Let him bring health and cure unto this Jerusalem, and reveal
the abundance of peace and truth. [15]
His son, Cotton, took up the father’s cudgel making “this present evil world” equivalent with the wilderness which led to Canaan, “the wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land.”[16] He even applauded the 1616 plague, the “prodigious Pestilence,” that swept through the New England woods killing vast numbers of Indians. Cotton Mather noted that “the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” [17] Disease had become just another biblical weapon of mass destruction, like the Old Testament plagues that were so much a part of the Israelite’s divine weaponry. The team of invader and God wrought terrible slaughter in order to fulfill the prophecy.
Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a prolific writer, would continue the ministerial work of the father in this vein. There is no clearer example of American exceptionalism and chosen-ness than this excerpt from his sermon, Theopolis Americana, given to the Massachusetts General Assembly on May 9, 1709.
Glorious Things are spoken of Thee, O thou City of God, whose Street
be in thee, O New England; The interpretation of it, be unto you,
O American Colonies... There are many Arguments to persuade us
That our Glorious Lord will have an Holy City in America; a City,
the street whereof shall be Pure Gold... There have been Martyrs
of Christ in America. The Blood of the Martyrs here, is an Omen that
the truths for which they Suffered are to Rise, and Live and carry all
before them, in the Land that hath been so marked for the Lord...
But our Glorious Lord, will order that the Good Seed ere long, to be cast
upon the Fertile regions of America, and it shall be here find a Good Ground,
where it shall bring forth fruit unto astonishments; and unto perpetuity...[18]
Thus Mather reclaims the prophecy in Revelation of the “holy city, a new Jerusalem” where “the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass” and applies it to the colonies. [19] In Mather’s text we also find a seminal articulation of the old immigrant dream of the streets in America being paved in gold. But there is much more here, and it is much more malignant. For in Mather’s enormous mind, America is the “new Jerusalem,” the hope of the world. And the blood of the martyrs must not be in vain, holds Mather, despite the martyrs having fought a war of aggression. And the onslaught will continue as the seeds of these colonists will be cast over the expanse that is America. For it is the destiny of the people to live to the fullest in their predestined land. Indeed this was the “Good News for the Israel of God, and particularly for his New-English Israel,” as he had written in 1693, 16 years earlier, in The Wonders of the Invisible World. For these people were hand-picked and guided by God to plant New England. As if the Indians were neither men nor planters.
The first Planters of these Colonies were a Chosen Generation of men,
who were first so Pure, as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted. [20]
Note again the emphasis on documenting the mission as one relating to soil tillage. The case for invasion, occupation, and conquest will later rest on this agricultural premise. Cotton Mather expands:
The ministers and Christians, by whom New England was first planted,
were a chosen company of men picked out of, perhaps, all the counties
of England, and this by no human contrivance, but by a strange work of God
upon the spirits of men that were, no ways, acquainted with one another,
inspiring them as one man, to secede into a wilderness, they knew not where. [21]
Idle Indians misusing the land of milk and honey. Evil Indians conspiring with the devil as did the Canaanites of old. Thus arose the perfectly concocted rationale (and pulpit propaganda campaign) to destroy them.
And evidence abounded, according to Mather, that the Indians in coming to New England were fully infused with the satanic practices of the Canaanites of the promised land. (Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale College, would later claim that they were one and the same.)
That the Indians which came from far to settle about Mexico, were
in their Progress to that Settlement, under a Conduct of the Devil, very
strangely emulating what the Blessed God gave to Israel in the Wilderness. [22]
Again and again Cotton Mather sounds the demonizing biblical clarion. The white people are God’s people now settled in land that was “once the Devil’s Territories” filled with “Fiery flying serpents.” God, asserted Mather, “sighs over this Wilderness as Moses did over his.” Thus the Old Testament is being fulfilled in lockstep dogmatic manner. And the Indians, the accursed Indians, well they are not even “Swarthy” any longer, these Indians. Now they wear the trappings of where they truly abide for they are “Sooty Devils,” filthy, savage, and straight from hell, “let loose upon us,” like a “plague of old Egypt.” And now Mather renders ocular proof. He conflates the demonizing of both Indian and Black races. He claims that people widely “suppos’d the Black man (as the Witches call the Devil; and they generally say he resembles an Indian).” Surely, in the name of God, these were ill-chosen words. But remember, slavery was legal throughout the northern colonies in Mather’s time. And intolerance and racism (similar to the social plagues these same colonists’ forebears escaped from in Europe) were now encouraged in God’s name from the pen of Cotton Mather. [23]
Indeed Mather believed in witches and devils as much as he believed that the Indians were their incarnation, although the ‘real’ witches in Salem confounded that notion. His book, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, written four years before the Salem witchcraft trials, and surely contributory to that mayhem, notes how the abodes of Indians are indeed used for conjuring evil spirits.
Go tell Mankind, that there are Devils and Witches; and that those night-birds
least appear where the Day-light of the Gospel comes, yet New-England has
had Examples of their Existence and Operation; and that not only the Wigwams
of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters, in the shapes of
Bears and Snakes and Fires, but the House of Christians, where our God has had
his constant Worship, have undergone the Annoyance of Evil spirits. [24]
And so the devil hunt began.
Rules of the Game
Reverend Solomon Stoddard (1647-1728) of Northampton, Massachusetts, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, had this to say in the fall of 1703 about the hunting of Indians, some ground rules to assure fair play. Since the Indian was fleet of foot, dogs should be used “to hunt Indians as they do Bears.” The motion was seconded in Deerfield, Massachusetts where the residents avowed that Indians “act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.” [25] Indeed Indians had an affinity to wolves. They revered them, relegating to them important spiritual powers, particularly in their pelts. Some tribes believed that mankind had evolved from wolves and that Wolf-Man had created the world. Of course, the European invaders were ignorant of all this. But they were imbued with the destructive power of their own European fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm variety. Thus the evil wolves had to be dispatched in America as well. And deal with wolves they did, as they would later deal with the buffalo. In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the first wolf bounty law. Every Englishman that killed a wolf would receive one penny for each one brought in as proof. And in the precision of good Bible readers, the denizens of Massachusetts outdid the wolf bounty with an incentiver pay scale for Indian pelts.
Massachusetts offered bounties for scalps, varying in amount
according to whether the scalp was of men, or women and youths,
and whether it was taken by regular forces under pay, volunteers in
service, or volunteers without pay. [26]
Another accomplice to murder, Thomas Prince (1687-1758), Harvard graduate, and pastor of Old South Church in Boston, was then widely considered to be the most erudite man in America, next to Cotton Mather. His erudition failed to keep him from becoming a firebrand Indian-hater: “those wretched, naked, and barbarous nations, adorers of devils.” Some excerpts from his famous sermon of 1730 will reveal further the extent of his venomous erudition. Delivered to celebrate the centennial of the “Pure Religion” Puritan arrival in America, he made the biblical analogy of Israelites-equal-Puritans in his opening remarks.
I cannot forbear observing, that there never was any people on earth,
so parallel in their general history to that of the ancient ISRAELITES as
this of NEW ENGLAND. To no other country of people could there ever be
so directly applied a multitude of Scripture passages in the literal sense, as to
this particular country: that excepting miracles and changing names,one would
be ready to think, the greater part of the OLD TESTAMENT were written about us. [27]
With that out of the way, he describes what a kinder, gentler God did for these pious Puritans purer-than-pure people. Again it was God as commander-in-chief who dissuaded other nations with just “secular views” from settling the “wilderness” thus limiting colonization to “only men inspired with a zeal for religion.” Another nicety was God having the aboriginal population infected with fatal diseases and internal chaos.
He sends both wasting diseases among the native inhabitants,
and fierce contentions among the survivors, that greatly diminished
their numbers, and made room for His people.[28]
How wonderful a God is this! An invading force could not ask for anything more. But this same fickle God if displeased, as he did to the Israelites, also sent forces against his intrepid Puritans. He came “cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate!”
Other western nations and Indians beset them. God, as he did for the Israelites, so did for the Puritans. The Old Testament and ‘Puritan’ Testament God has been the same consistent white-man’s-friend throughout the eons of massacres.
He made […] the eastern INDIANS, the rod of his anger, and the staff
of His indignation with us. He has sent them against us, and given them
the charge to take the spoil and tread us down as the mire of the street.
They came with open mouth upon us: They thrust through every one they
found abroad: They ensnared and slew our mighty men who went forth
for our defense: They spoiled our fields and pastures: They burned up our
houses: They destroyed our towns and garrisons: They murdered our wives:
They carried our young men and virgins into captivity: They had no pity on the
fruit of the womb; their eyes spared not our children, they dashed them in pieces. [29]
There was no bad news according to Prince, only events “both corrective and merciful.” Indeed they were a people chosen by God – “Like as to ISRAEL of old, so the LORD has sent us” —and nothing could convince Prince otherwise. Religion, you are such a mighty force. Would that you did not kill so many in your and His name.
Another colonial thinker, John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of Methodism took a perversely balanced view of colonial doings. In his sermon, A Caution Against Bigotry, he revealed his abhorrence of the violent behavior of the colonists visited on the Indians by, in effect, blaming the Indians! Guilt by emulation? The American Indians torture people all day long as a matter of their religion, Wesley said, then they roast them to death. This was particularly true of the southern Indian tribes, the Creeks, Cherokees and Chickasaws, who would later be destroyed and dislocated in order to bring slavery to the cleared forests of Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, the so-called Black Belt [30] of the American south. When it comes to the interlocking relationships of the tragedy of the red and black races in America there are very few degrees of separation. Wesley’s demonizing is of epic proportions.
As gross and palpable are the works of the devil among many (if not all)
the modern heathens. The natural religion of the Creeks, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, and all other Indians bordering on our southern settlements
(not of a few single men, but of entire nations), is to torture all their prisoners
from morning till night, till at length they roast them to death; and upon the
slightest undesigned provocation, to come behind and shoot any of their own
countrymen! Yea, it is a common thing among them, for the son,
if he thinks his father lives too long, to knock out his brains; and for mother,
if she is tired of her children, to fasten stones about their necks,
and throw three or four of them into the river, one after another! [31]
These are ludicrous statements. A delegation of Cherokees had actually visited London in 1730 to sign an alliance with the British crown. Indeed, the three tribes disparaged by Wesley were labeled by whites of Wesley’s day, the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) This tag signified their adoption of some “civilized” mores of colonial culture and their peaceful attitude toward the whites.
What could Wesley have been thinking? His slanderous descriptions of Indian practices reads more like Bartolome De Las Casas’ description of the devastation of the Indians of the West Indies by the Spanish. And Wesley had lived in Savannah, Georgia for three years with the intent to bring the Red people Christianity. To his slight credit he assigns blame to the marauding colonists. Would that only the Indians commit such heinous atrocities, laments Wesley. To Wesley’s ire the English were slaughtering with the worst of them, not just following the savageries of the Indians, but also the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and even, the French.
It were to be wished, that none but heathens had practised such gross, palpable works of the devil. But we dare not say so. Even in cruelty and bloodshed, how little have the Christians come behind them! And not the Spaniards or Portuguese alone, butchering thousands in South America: not the Dutch only in the East Indies, or the French in North America, following the Spaniards step by step: our own countrymen, too, have wantoned in blood, and exterminated whole nations. [32]
Beginnings
It all began with John Winthrop (1588-1640), first governor of Massachusetts, a lawyer not a minister. Nevertheless he delivered perhaps the most famous sermon of colonial times. A Model of Christian Charity contained the phrase (“a city upon a hill”) piously borrowed by modern day politicians, most notably John F. Kennedy and an embellishing Ronald Reagan whose speechwriter added the word ‘shining,’ lest Americans miss the point. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. [33] The eyes of all people are upon us.”[34] In this manner the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and latter day America, proclaimed to be the world’s moral high ground.
Whether Winthrop gave the sermon aboard the ship Arbella en route to America in 1630 or beforehand in England matters little. What matters is that Winthrop established the ideals of this Christian endeavor in the new world. It should be noted that Cotton Mather would later consider Winthrop to be the “perfect earthly ruler.”[35] If one was not a Catholic, perhaps. Winthrop was virulently anti-Catholic having separated from the Anglican Church because of the similarity of its rites to Rome. Of course this was a major reason to come to the new world and he articulated the same in his treatise, Reasons for Emigrating to New England, written in 1631.
It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell
into those parts, of the world, to helpe on the becoming of the fullness of the
Gentiles, and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of AnteChrist
which the jesuites labour to reare up in those partes. [36]
He had even less tolerance for the Indians believing them cursed by God and perfectly deserving of the European diseases that ravaged them, writing to a friend in England:
But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection. [37]
This “perfect earthly ruler” also orchestrated the first recorded extermination of an American Indian tribe, the Pequots, in 1637. This infamous deed stills sails through the psyche of America aboard Captain Ahab’s killing machine, Pequod, and there will be more about this later. All Winthrop’s racist, theocratically determined ideas coalesce in the following passage. It would prove to be a pivotal point in Thomas Jefferson’s application of John Locke’s God-given political philosophy to the formative thinking of the United States of America.
The whole earth is the Lords garden & he hath given it to the Sonnes
of men with a general Commission: Genesis: I: 28 : increase & multiplie,
& replenish the earth & subdue it, which was again renewed to Noah:
the end is double & natural, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth,
& God might have his due glory from the creature: why then should we
stand striving here for places of habitation, etc, (many men spending as much.
labor & cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of Land,
it would procure them many & as good or better in another Country)
& in the meantime suffer a whole Continent as fruitful & convenient
for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement? [38]
Yes, the whole earth is the Lord’s garden but the sons of man are not created equal. All men of this particular ‘god’ are white. The others are children of the devil, as we have seen from the mouth of this ‘god’ to the raging brains of his biblical scriveners, and on to the pious colonizers, ransacking the new land in the name of God. The flowering of the predestined use of the soil argument into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny began with seeds sown by these religiously doctrinaire founding colonists. As the east grew ever more densely settled the Indians and their tribes were killed or displaced. Emigration came in waves, the white tide always at the flood. The dream of idyllic living was irresistible. And the religious assurances coming from God, as interpreted and heard and spoken of by man, was inexorable. Brainwashing is a term that springs to mind. For the seventeenth-century Israelites, the Atlantic Ocean posed a formidable obstacle on the way to the New Canaan. And it was therefore probably no coincidence that John Winthrop, in one of his last letters before leaving England forever, referred to “the streights of the redd sea” in acclaiming the power and mercy of the Lord. [39] The power, but not the mercy, fueled the dream of Jefferson and others of the west as an earthly garden of paradise. It was a catastrophe that led to the slaughter of the Indian buffalo herds to make way for southern Indians to make way for even more slavery. All of these romantic, racist, and bloody thoughts and usurpations had sprung forth from the mouths of these God-fearing people.
The tentacles of God’s bloody instructions, fully embraced as a political policy by the Founding Fathers of America, reach back four thousand years, more or less depending on when Moses was found floating among the bulrushes. The historian and great literary stylist, Edward Gibbon, tells us in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the difficulty of selecting myths to establish a religion (or a country). It confounded the early Christians too. It seems that the Nazarene Christians were in heated dispute with the Gnostics. The Gnostics were upset about the Israelite devastation wrought at God’s behest. But they eventually saw the light. Gibbon explains with more than a little sarcasm:
With the conquest of the land of Canaan, and the extirpation of the
unsuspecting natives, they [40] were at a loss how to reconcile with
the common notions of humanity and justice. But when they recollected
the sanguinary list of murders, of executions, and of massacres, which
stain almost every page of the Jewish annals, they acknowledged that
the barbarians of Palestine had exercised as much compassion towards
their idolatrous enemies as they had ever shown to their friends or countrymen. [41]
And so the issue was decided. It was simple enough; barbarians beget barbarians as butchers beget butchers. Blood and offal trace the path of the white man’s progress through the land they still call "God's country."
What they desired above all was a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible Commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the Word of God to all the world. [2]
This entrenched religiosity during the infancy of what would become the United States of America would have a profound effect on the republic that was born on July 4, 1776. From the beginning, the Puritans had a government by and of the Bible, an embryo of the government that was to come. The dogmatic literalness of Biblical reading proved the perfect format to promulgate their raison d’etre, that is, to create, not a ‘new’ England, but a ‘new’ English Israel in a ‘new’ wilderness. “We fail to grasp the spirit of these men,” wrote George Waller of Butler University, “unless we realize that they considered themselves a chosen people, one to whom God had revealed himself and had led to the promised land far from the sins and corruptions of the Old World.” [3] Their ministerial zeal would only escalate over time.
We do not know who specifically had the creative impulse to decide on and develop the mythic notion that wolf-suckled twins founded Rome. But we do know who best formulated the idea of the New England colony as the new Israel. It was Increase Mather (1639-1723), a Puritan minister of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was perhaps the earliest developer of America’s religious mythology, a mythology that would prove feloniously harmful to millions of the Red race.
In a treatise written in 1676 called A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New-England, Mather described this war as a “warr with the heathen,” more widely and specifically referred to as King Philip’s War. Therein Mather conflated New England with a new Israel, “the English Israel,” thus making instant myth. It took him but one sentence, the opening sentence:
THAT the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land
the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession,
have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part
of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no
man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.[4]
Nor does Mather waste time asserting English Israel’s right of ownership. But one must ask, Where’s the deed to this property? Presumably somewhere in the Bible. Or at least that’s where the English king received his entitlement.
Mather claimed that the sinful subsequent generation of Puritans caused King Philip’s War (1675-76).[5] He also asserted, more subtly, the claim that rightful possession of the land was theirs because the land was virginal, untilled, and hence unimproved. How these barbarous creatures survived all the previous millennia is of no apparent wonderment.
Nor were our sins ripe for so dreadful a judgment, until the Body
of the first Generation was removed, and another Generation risen
up which hath not so pursued, as ought to have been, the blessed
design of their Fathers, in following the Lord into this Wilderness,
whilst it was a land not sown. [6]
And again the assertion of ownership due to “the blessed design of their Fathers” in doing the work of the Lord. And so into the wilderness they came, following the lead of the Lord, into the land unsown. This was a reiteration of the earlier assertion made by John Winthrop in 1628 as governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his tract, Reasons for the Plantation in New England.
As for the natives in New England, they enclose no land, neither have
they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by,
and so have no other but a natural right to those countries. [7]
In 1629, one year later, the Constitution of the Massachusetts Plantation Colony established an “absolute government” in the colony with the intent to “settle the same as may make most to the glory of God.” [8] All powers were derived from the power of the King of England, who too had a natural right to the land ‘discovered’ by English agents of discovery. This argument of natural right to the soil, based on God’s direction to Adam to tend to his (God’s) garden and to cultivate the soil, was a cornerstone of John Locke’s treatises on government that were so enthusiastically embraced by Thomas Jefferson as seminal thinking for the coming United States of America.[9]
Inflamatory Language
Another aspect of the so-called literature of Mather’s time was the abject, remorseless descriptions of the destruction of Indians, in this case the Pequots, the following example by a minister of God, Cotton Mather.
There were hundreds of Wigwams (or Indian houses) within the Fort,
which our Souldiers set on fire, in the men, women and children
(no man knoweth how many hundreds of them) were burnt to death. [10]
While the number of slain Indian men, women, and children was of little apparent concern, one item was. What piqued Winthrop’s curiosity was the seductive quality of Indian life as an alternative to the hidebound, dogmatic way of the Puritans. Indeed some of Winthrop’s “wise, honest, expert, and discrete persons” were going native and to a treacherous extent.
Concerning the number of Indians slain in this Battle, we are uncertain:
only some Indians which afterwards were taken prisoners
(also a wretched English man that apostatized to the Heathen,
and fought with them against his own Country-men).[11]
This treachery phenomenon will be later examined in the writings of John Morton, in particular in A New English Canaan (1637). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of 200 years later, The May-Pole of Merry Mount (1835), is also informative regarding the fear and intolerance of the early colonists.
The mistrust of Indian ways was endemic among the relentlessly hidebound Puritans. And the usurpation of Indian land was equally relentless. And so too was the hidebound, relentlessly violent God of the Old Testament Bible. Open to a random page in the book of Joshua. God is angry, and controlling, a ‘commander-in-chief’ according to Increase Mather’s King Philip’s War battle narrative.Therein God rallies the troops, takes care of logistics just in the nick of time, a literal deus ex machina.
But to proceed,
When the Army was just upon the Resolve to return home,
because provisions were spent, God so ordered, as that a
Vessel loaden with Victuals arrived, whereupon it was
determined to pursue the enemy.
Which led to another feather in God’s victory bonnet. Thus:
But God hath wasted the Heathen, by sending the destroying Angell
amongst them, since this War began. [12]
The Indians stood little chance against God and his destroying angel. Of course, by Mather’s lights, God had little choice. The Indians were savages who did not fight fairly, had little concern about their own lives and lived like animals.[13]
They have advantages that we have not, knowing where to find us,
but we know not where to find them, who nevertheless are alwayes
at home, and have in a manner nothing but their lives and souls
(which they think not of) to loose; every Swamp is a Castle to them,
and they can live comfortably on that which would starve English-men.
So that we have no cause to glory, for it is God which hath thus saved us,
and not we our selves. [14]
We have heard this complaint about all those later enemies of US democracy, those resistors of US imperialism, from the Philippines through Vietnam to Iraq. Always the same refrain, they don’t fight fairly! And again the same problem, defining situations and people by homegrown self-serving standards. Nothing has changed.
Mather’s closing invocation praised the Lord, the architect and commander of the victorious redemptive war in “English Israel,” also referred to as “this Jerusalem.” Obviously this is the same Lord who led Israel to victory.
Now, as the Lord, who doth redeem Israel out of all his troubles,
hath graciously and gloriously begun our Salvation, so let him
perfect it, in such a way, as that no honour at all may come unto us,
but that great glory may be to his own blessed Name for ever.
Let him bring health and cure unto this Jerusalem, and reveal
the abundance of peace and truth. [15]
His son, Cotton, took up the father’s cudgel making “this present evil world” equivalent with the wilderness which led to Canaan, “the wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land.”[16] He even applauded the 1616 plague, the “prodigious Pestilence,” that swept through the New England woods killing vast numbers of Indians. Cotton Mather noted that “the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” [17] Disease had become just another biblical weapon of mass destruction, like the Old Testament plagues that were so much a part of the Israelite’s divine weaponry. The team of invader and God wrought terrible slaughter in order to fulfill the prophecy.
Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a prolific writer, would continue the ministerial work of the father in this vein. There is no clearer example of American exceptionalism and chosen-ness than this excerpt from his sermon, Theopolis Americana, given to the Massachusetts General Assembly on May 9, 1709.
Glorious Things are spoken of Thee, O thou City of God, whose Street
be in thee, O New England; The interpretation of it, be unto you,
O American Colonies... There are many Arguments to persuade us
That our Glorious Lord will have an Holy City in America; a City,
the street whereof shall be Pure Gold... There have been Martyrs
of Christ in America. The Blood of the Martyrs here, is an Omen that
the truths for which they Suffered are to Rise, and Live and carry all
before them, in the Land that hath been so marked for the Lord...
But our Glorious Lord, will order that the Good Seed ere long, to be cast
upon the Fertile regions of America, and it shall be here find a Good Ground,
where it shall bring forth fruit unto astonishments; and unto perpetuity...[18]
Thus Mather reclaims the prophecy in Revelation of the “holy city, a new Jerusalem” where “the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass” and applies it to the colonies. [19] In Mather’s text we also find a seminal articulation of the old immigrant dream of the streets in America being paved in gold. But there is much more here, and it is much more malignant. For in Mather’s enormous mind, America is the “new Jerusalem,” the hope of the world. And the blood of the martyrs must not be in vain, holds Mather, despite the martyrs having fought a war of aggression. And the onslaught will continue as the seeds of these colonists will be cast over the expanse that is America. For it is the destiny of the people to live to the fullest in their predestined land. Indeed this was the “Good News for the Israel of God, and particularly for his New-English Israel,” as he had written in 1693, 16 years earlier, in The Wonders of the Invisible World. For these people were hand-picked and guided by God to plant New England. As if the Indians were neither men nor planters.
The first Planters of these Colonies were a Chosen Generation of men,
who were first so Pure, as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted. [20]
Note again the emphasis on documenting the mission as one relating to soil tillage. The case for invasion, occupation, and conquest will later rest on this agricultural premise. Cotton Mather expands:
The ministers and Christians, by whom New England was first planted,
were a chosen company of men picked out of, perhaps, all the counties
of England, and this by no human contrivance, but by a strange work of God
upon the spirits of men that were, no ways, acquainted with one another,
inspiring them as one man, to secede into a wilderness, they knew not where. [21]
Idle Indians misusing the land of milk and honey. Evil Indians conspiring with the devil as did the Canaanites of old. Thus arose the perfectly concocted rationale (and pulpit propaganda campaign) to destroy them.
And evidence abounded, according to Mather, that the Indians in coming to New England were fully infused with the satanic practices of the Canaanites of the promised land. (Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale College, would later claim that they were one and the same.)
That the Indians which came from far to settle about Mexico, were
in their Progress to that Settlement, under a Conduct of the Devil, very
strangely emulating what the Blessed God gave to Israel in the Wilderness. [22]
Again and again Cotton Mather sounds the demonizing biblical clarion. The white people are God’s people now settled in land that was “once the Devil’s Territories” filled with “Fiery flying serpents.” God, asserted Mather, “sighs over this Wilderness as Moses did over his.” Thus the Old Testament is being fulfilled in lockstep dogmatic manner. And the Indians, the accursed Indians, well they are not even “Swarthy” any longer, these Indians. Now they wear the trappings of where they truly abide for they are “Sooty Devils,” filthy, savage, and straight from hell, “let loose upon us,” like a “plague of old Egypt.” And now Mather renders ocular proof. He conflates the demonizing of both Indian and Black races. He claims that people widely “suppos’d the Black man (as the Witches call the Devil; and they generally say he resembles an Indian).” Surely, in the name of God, these were ill-chosen words. But remember, slavery was legal throughout the northern colonies in Mather’s time. And intolerance and racism (similar to the social plagues these same colonists’ forebears escaped from in Europe) were now encouraged in God’s name from the pen of Cotton Mather. [23]
Indeed Mather believed in witches and devils as much as he believed that the Indians were their incarnation, although the ‘real’ witches in Salem confounded that notion. His book, Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, written four years before the Salem witchcraft trials, and surely contributory to that mayhem, notes how the abodes of Indians are indeed used for conjuring evil spirits.
Go tell Mankind, that there are Devils and Witches; and that those night-birds
least appear where the Day-light of the Gospel comes, yet New-England has
had Examples of their Existence and Operation; and that not only the Wigwams
of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters, in the shapes of
Bears and Snakes and Fires, but the House of Christians, where our God has had
his constant Worship, have undergone the Annoyance of Evil spirits. [24]
And so the devil hunt began.
Rules of the Game
Reverend Solomon Stoddard (1647-1728) of Northampton, Massachusetts, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, had this to say in the fall of 1703 about the hunting of Indians, some ground rules to assure fair play. Since the Indian was fleet of foot, dogs should be used “to hunt Indians as they do Bears.” The motion was seconded in Deerfield, Massachusetts where the residents avowed that Indians “act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.” [25] Indeed Indians had an affinity to wolves. They revered them, relegating to them important spiritual powers, particularly in their pelts. Some tribes believed that mankind had evolved from wolves and that Wolf-Man had created the world. Of course, the European invaders were ignorant of all this. But they were imbued with the destructive power of their own European fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm variety. Thus the evil wolves had to be dispatched in America as well. And deal with wolves they did, as they would later deal with the buffalo. In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the first wolf bounty law. Every Englishman that killed a wolf would receive one penny for each one brought in as proof. And in the precision of good Bible readers, the denizens of Massachusetts outdid the wolf bounty with an incentiver pay scale for Indian pelts.
Massachusetts offered bounties for scalps, varying in amount
according to whether the scalp was of men, or women and youths,
and whether it was taken by regular forces under pay, volunteers in
service, or volunteers without pay. [26]
Another accomplice to murder, Thomas Prince (1687-1758), Harvard graduate, and pastor of Old South Church in Boston, was then widely considered to be the most erudite man in America, next to Cotton Mather. His erudition failed to keep him from becoming a firebrand Indian-hater: “those wretched, naked, and barbarous nations, adorers of devils.” Some excerpts from his famous sermon of 1730 will reveal further the extent of his venomous erudition. Delivered to celebrate the centennial of the “Pure Religion” Puritan arrival in America, he made the biblical analogy of Israelites-equal-Puritans in his opening remarks.
I cannot forbear observing, that there never was any people on earth,
so parallel in their general history to that of the ancient ISRAELITES as
this of NEW ENGLAND. To no other country of people could there ever be
so directly applied a multitude of Scripture passages in the literal sense, as to
this particular country: that excepting miracles and changing names,one would
be ready to think, the greater part of the OLD TESTAMENT were written about us. [27]
With that out of the way, he describes what a kinder, gentler God did for these pious Puritans purer-than-pure people. Again it was God as commander-in-chief who dissuaded other nations with just “secular views” from settling the “wilderness” thus limiting colonization to “only men inspired with a zeal for religion.” Another nicety was God having the aboriginal population infected with fatal diseases and internal chaos.
He sends both wasting diseases among the native inhabitants,
and fierce contentions among the survivors, that greatly diminished
their numbers, and made room for His people.[28]
How wonderful a God is this! An invading force could not ask for anything more. But this same fickle God if displeased, as he did to the Israelites, also sent forces against his intrepid Puritans. He came “cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate!”
Other western nations and Indians beset them. God, as he did for the Israelites, so did for the Puritans. The Old Testament and ‘Puritan’ Testament God has been the same consistent white-man’s-friend throughout the eons of massacres.
He made […] the eastern INDIANS, the rod of his anger, and the staff
of His indignation with us. He has sent them against us, and given them
the charge to take the spoil and tread us down as the mire of the street.
They came with open mouth upon us: They thrust through every one they
found abroad: They ensnared and slew our mighty men who went forth
for our defense: They spoiled our fields and pastures: They burned up our
houses: They destroyed our towns and garrisons: They murdered our wives:
They carried our young men and virgins into captivity: They had no pity on the
fruit of the womb; their eyes spared not our children, they dashed them in pieces. [29]
There was no bad news according to Prince, only events “both corrective and merciful.” Indeed they were a people chosen by God – “Like as to ISRAEL of old, so the LORD has sent us” —and nothing could convince Prince otherwise. Religion, you are such a mighty force. Would that you did not kill so many in your and His name.
Another colonial thinker, John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of Methodism took a perversely balanced view of colonial doings. In his sermon, A Caution Against Bigotry, he revealed his abhorrence of the violent behavior of the colonists visited on the Indians by, in effect, blaming the Indians! Guilt by emulation? The American Indians torture people all day long as a matter of their religion, Wesley said, then they roast them to death. This was particularly true of the southern Indian tribes, the Creeks, Cherokees and Chickasaws, who would later be destroyed and dislocated in order to bring slavery to the cleared forests of Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, the so-called Black Belt [30] of the American south. When it comes to the interlocking relationships of the tragedy of the red and black races in America there are very few degrees of separation. Wesley’s demonizing is of epic proportions.
As gross and palpable are the works of the devil among many (if not all)
the modern heathens. The natural religion of the Creeks, Cherokees,
Chickasaws, and all other Indians bordering on our southern settlements
(not of a few single men, but of entire nations), is to torture all their prisoners
from morning till night, till at length they roast them to death; and upon the
slightest undesigned provocation, to come behind and shoot any of their own
countrymen! Yea, it is a common thing among them, for the son,
if he thinks his father lives too long, to knock out his brains; and for mother,
if she is tired of her children, to fasten stones about their necks,
and throw three or four of them into the river, one after another! [31]
These are ludicrous statements. A delegation of Cherokees had actually visited London in 1730 to sign an alliance with the British crown. Indeed, the three tribes disparaged by Wesley were labeled by whites of Wesley’s day, the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) This tag signified their adoption of some “civilized” mores of colonial culture and their peaceful attitude toward the whites.
What could Wesley have been thinking? His slanderous descriptions of Indian practices reads more like Bartolome De Las Casas’ description of the devastation of the Indians of the West Indies by the Spanish. And Wesley had lived in Savannah, Georgia for three years with the intent to bring the Red people Christianity. To his slight credit he assigns blame to the marauding colonists. Would that only the Indians commit such heinous atrocities, laments Wesley. To Wesley’s ire the English were slaughtering with the worst of them, not just following the savageries of the Indians, but also the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and even, the French.
It were to be wished, that none but heathens had practised such gross, palpable works of the devil. But we dare not say so. Even in cruelty and bloodshed, how little have the Christians come behind them! And not the Spaniards or Portuguese alone, butchering thousands in South America: not the Dutch only in the East Indies, or the French in North America, following the Spaniards step by step: our own countrymen, too, have wantoned in blood, and exterminated whole nations. [32]
Beginnings
It all began with John Winthrop (1588-1640), first governor of Massachusetts, a lawyer not a minister. Nevertheless he delivered perhaps the most famous sermon of colonial times. A Model of Christian Charity contained the phrase (“a city upon a hill”) piously borrowed by modern day politicians, most notably John F. Kennedy and an embellishing Ronald Reagan whose speechwriter added the word ‘shining,’ lest Americans miss the point. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. [33] The eyes of all people are upon us.”[34] In this manner the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and latter day America, proclaimed to be the world’s moral high ground.
Whether Winthrop gave the sermon aboard the ship Arbella en route to America in 1630 or beforehand in England matters little. What matters is that Winthrop established the ideals of this Christian endeavor in the new world. It should be noted that Cotton Mather would later consider Winthrop to be the “perfect earthly ruler.”[35] If one was not a Catholic, perhaps. Winthrop was virulently anti-Catholic having separated from the Anglican Church because of the similarity of its rites to Rome. Of course this was a major reason to come to the new world and he articulated the same in his treatise, Reasons for Emigrating to New England, written in 1631.
It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell
into those parts, of the world, to helpe on the becoming of the fullness of the
Gentiles, and to raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of AnteChrist
which the jesuites labour to reare up in those partes. [36]
He had even less tolerance for the Indians believing them cursed by God and perfectly deserving of the European diseases that ravaged them, writing to a friend in England:
But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection. [37]
This “perfect earthly ruler” also orchestrated the first recorded extermination of an American Indian tribe, the Pequots, in 1637. This infamous deed stills sails through the psyche of America aboard Captain Ahab’s killing machine, Pequod, and there will be more about this later. All Winthrop’s racist, theocratically determined ideas coalesce in the following passage. It would prove to be a pivotal point in Thomas Jefferson’s application of John Locke’s God-given political philosophy to the formative thinking of the United States of America.
The whole earth is the Lords garden & he hath given it to the Sonnes
of men with a general Commission: Genesis: I: 28 : increase & multiplie,
& replenish the earth & subdue it, which was again renewed to Noah:
the end is double & natural, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth,
& God might have his due glory from the creature: why then should we
stand striving here for places of habitation, etc, (many men spending as much.
labor & cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of Land,
it would procure them many & as good or better in another Country)
& in the meantime suffer a whole Continent as fruitful & convenient
for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement? [38]
Yes, the whole earth is the Lord’s garden but the sons of man are not created equal. All men of this particular ‘god’ are white. The others are children of the devil, as we have seen from the mouth of this ‘god’ to the raging brains of his biblical scriveners, and on to the pious colonizers, ransacking the new land in the name of God. The flowering of the predestined use of the soil argument into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny began with seeds sown by these religiously doctrinaire founding colonists. As the east grew ever more densely settled the Indians and their tribes were killed or displaced. Emigration came in waves, the white tide always at the flood. The dream of idyllic living was irresistible. And the religious assurances coming from God, as interpreted and heard and spoken of by man, was inexorable. Brainwashing is a term that springs to mind. For the seventeenth-century Israelites, the Atlantic Ocean posed a formidable obstacle on the way to the New Canaan. And it was therefore probably no coincidence that John Winthrop, in one of his last letters before leaving England forever, referred to “the streights of the redd sea” in acclaiming the power and mercy of the Lord. [39] The power, but not the mercy, fueled the dream of Jefferson and others of the west as an earthly garden of paradise. It was a catastrophe that led to the slaughter of the Indian buffalo herds to make way for southern Indians to make way for even more slavery. All of these romantic, racist, and bloody thoughts and usurpations had sprung forth from the mouths of these God-fearing people.
The tentacles of God’s bloody instructions, fully embraced as a political policy by the Founding Fathers of America, reach back four thousand years, more or less depending on when Moses was found floating among the bulrushes. The historian and great literary stylist, Edward Gibbon, tells us in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the difficulty of selecting myths to establish a religion (or a country). It confounded the early Christians too. It seems that the Nazarene Christians were in heated dispute with the Gnostics. The Gnostics were upset about the Israelite devastation wrought at God’s behest. But they eventually saw the light. Gibbon explains with more than a little sarcasm:
With the conquest of the land of Canaan, and the extirpation of the
unsuspecting natives, they [40] were at a loss how to reconcile with
the common notions of humanity and justice. But when they recollected
the sanguinary list of murders, of executions, and of massacres, which
stain almost every page of the Jewish annals, they acknowledged that
the barbarians of Palestine had exercised as much compassion towards
their idolatrous enemies as they had ever shown to their friends or countrymen. [41]
And so the issue was decided. It was simple enough; barbarians beget barbarians as butchers beget butchers. Blood and offal trace the path of the white man’s progress through the land they still call "God's country."
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER 4
[1] David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, p. 15.
[2] Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Indian, 1600-1860, p. 38.
[3] George M. Waller, Puritanism in Early America, p. 25.
[4] Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New-England, p. 9.
[5] “King Philip” was actually Metacom, a Wampanoag chief. The war began when colonists founded so-called ‘praying towns’ where Indians learned the way of the white man including the package deal of literacy and Christianity. The Indians in the praying towns were pawns in the conflict between white settlers and the large majority of ‘unassimilated’ Indians.
[6] Ibid., p.10.
[7] John Winthrop, Reasons for the Plantation in New England, http://www.winthropsociety.org/doc_reasons.php
[8] John Winthrop, The Constitution of the Massachusetts Bay Plantation 30 April, 1629, http://www.winthropsociety.org/doc_const.php
[9] It is significant to note Weinberg’s expansionary opinion regarding God as a real estate deity for the interests of the United States. He writes: “The theory that a use of the soil was ordained by God or morality figured not only in the entire history of Indian relations but also in all issues in which Americans found themselves desiring soil occupied by an ‘inferior’ race.” Albert Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, p. 73.
[10] Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New-England, p. 35.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., pp. 37,77.
[14] “Clearly, one of our focuses is to get, to move people out of their caves, smoke them out, and get them moving and get them. That’s about as plainly as I can put it.” George W. Bush, September 19, 2001.
[14] Increase Mather, op.cit., p. 77.
[15] Ibid.. p.78.
[16] Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World. Observations as Well Historical as Theological, upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils (1693), p. 22.
[17] David E. Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 238.
[18] Cotton Mather, Theopolis Americana, http://personal.pitnet.net/primarysources/theopolis.html
[19] The Bible, Revelation.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. 21:1-2
And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass. I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 21:21-25
[20] Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, pp. 27, x.
[21] Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The ecclesiastical history of New-England; from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of Our Lord 1698. Vol. I, p. 240.
[22] Ibid., p. 104.
[23] Ibid., “Devil’s Territories,” p. ix, “Fiery…,” p. 22, “sighs over…,” p. 32, “Sooty Devils…filthy…let loose…plague,” p. 41, “suppos’d…,” p. 75.
[24] Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences, Relating To Witchcrafts and Possessions, Introduction.
[25] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 45.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Thomas Prince, America Was Founded on God’s Law and Christianity, Sect. III.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Black Belt.
“The term was first used to designate a part of the United States which was distinguished by the color of is soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.” Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, Chapter 7, p.106.
[31] John Wesley, Sermons, http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/38/ par. 9.
[32] Ibid., par. 10.
[33] Borrowed from the Bible: “You are the light of the world. A city set upon a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under the peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to all who are in the house” (Matthew 5:14-15).
[34] Nina Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature to 1820, p. 216
[35] Cotton Mather, Memorable Providences, Relating To Witchcrafts and Possessions, p. 206.
[36] John Winthrop, Reasons for Emigrating to New England (1631), p. 309.
[37] Ibid., p. 234.
[38] Ibid, par.4.
[39] Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629-1700, p. 27.
[40] By “they” Gibbon refers to the early Gnostic Christians who maintained that because of its imperfections the Jewish religion could never have been “instituted by the wisdom of the Deity.” See below: Gibbon, p. 100.
[41] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. II, p. 101.
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