No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2018
In 1643, twelve years after his arrival in Massachusetts Bay, John Eliot (1604-90), the Roxbury clergyman better known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” began to learn an Algonquian dialect in preparation for missionary work. After three years of study, he started to preach to the Indians in the colony. He continued to labor among them until the late 1680's, when his infirmity no longer permitted him to leave Roxbury. Over the course of these forty years, he attracted some eleven hundred Indians to the Christian faith, established fourteen reservations (“praying towns”) for his proselytes, and produced for Indians' use a number of Algonquian language works, including a translation of the Bible.
During the past twenty-five years, Eliot's career has received considerable scholarly attention. In 1965 Alden Vaughan portrayed Eliot as a conscientious missionary whose objective was to spread “Christian civilization” among the Indians.
The author wishes to dedicate this article to his father, who died soon after reading it in draft, and to thank Susannah Heschel for her helpful suggestions.
1. Vaughan, Alden T., New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965; repr., New York: Norton, 1979), 235–308 Google Scholar passim; Jennings, Francis, “Goals and Functions of Puritan Missions to the Indians,” Ethnohistory 18 (1971): 197–212;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Madear, James F., “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism,” The William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter dted as WMQ), 3d ser., 32 (1975): 243-48, 253-55;Google Scholar Holstun, James, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 102-65,208-15;Google Scholar and Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 263-88.Google Scholar Jennings later incorporated an expanded version of his essay into The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975; repr., New York: Norton, 1976), 228-53. The quotation is from Jennings, “Goals and Functions,” 207. These studies are part of a larger body of literature about Eliot. Since 1965, substantial portions of sixteen other articles, chapters in six additional books, and a biography have been devoted to him, and a critical edition of his Indian Dialognes as well as an anthology that generously represents him also have appeared. See Cogley, Richard W., “John Eliot in Recent Scholarship,” The American Indian Culture and Research Journal 14 (1990): 77–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. The focus of the essay precludes discussions of topics related to Eliot's understanding of the millennium, such as his speculation concerning the origins of the Indians and his views about the reform of English law. For a comprehensive, though necessarily brief, introduction to all aspects of Eliot's millenarianism, see Sehr, Timothy J., “John Eliot, Millennialist and Missionary,” The Historian 46 (1984): 187–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. See Cogley, “Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism” Religion 17 (1987): 379-%.
4. All students of Puritanism must come to terms with Bozeman's To Live Ancient Lives. I am certainly indebted to Bozeman, although I disagree with several of his points about Eliot, and I also extend his discussion in directions that he might not countenance.
5. Bozeman, Ancient Lives, 11.
6. See Cogley, “John Eliot and the Origins of the American Indians,” Early American Literature 21 (1986/87): 210-25.
7. Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth: The Civil Polity of the Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ (London, 1659), in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections (hereafter cited as MHSC), 3d ser., 9 (1846): 130-32. See also the three letters of 1649 (July 8, undated, and December 29) that Eliot wrote to Edward Winslow in the immediate aftermath of the Regicide, in Henry Whitfield, The Light Appearing More and More towards the Perfect Day (London, 1651), in MHSC, 3d ser., 4 (1834): 120,127,131; and Eliot and Mayhew, Thomas, Jr., Tears of Repentance, or a Farther Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England (London, 1653), in MHSC, 3d ser., 4 (1834): 212-15.Google Scholar
8. Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth, 133-34. Eliot later stated that monarchy had been invented by Nimrod in an act of defiance against God and that from this idolatrous foundation the institution spread to various ancient peoples, including the Israelites. “The Learned Conjectures of the Reverend John Eliot Touching the Americans,” in Thorowgood, Thomas, Jews in America: Or Probabilities that Those Americans Are Judaical (London, 1660), 6–10.Google Scholar For Nimrod see Genesis 10:8-12.
9. Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth, 130-33; and Eliot to Winslow in Whitfield, Light Appearing, 120,127,131.
10. Eliot to Winslow in Whitfield, Light Appearing, 120,131.
11. Ibid. 131. Cf. Bozeman: “I know of no evidence to support… [the] claim that Eliot intended ‘inaugurating’ the millennium [among the Indians].” Ancient Lives, 272, n. 19.
12. Eliot, The Christian Commonwealth, 135; Eliot to Jonathan Hanmer, July 19,1652, in John Eliot and the Indians, 1652-1657, ed. Wilberforce Eames (New York: Adams and Grace, 1915), 7-8; and Eliot and Mayhew, Tears of Repentance, 212.
13. Eliot, “An Account of the Indian Churches” (1673), in MHSC, Ist ser., 10 (1809): 128. In De Regno Christi (London, 1557), Martin Bucer proposed that Edward VI establish Orders of tens through thousands in England, and in 1637 Captain John Underhill used the System to organize the militia in the Pequot War. Bozeman, Ancient Lives, 269. Eliot never indicated if he knew of either precedent.
14. The Christian Commonwealth, which was not published until 1659, was seen through the London press by someone who identified himself as a “Server of the season.” William Aspinwall, a repatriated Massachusetts man involved in the Fifth Monarchy movement, is a possible candidate. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy,” 253. Ferdinando Nicolls, a rector in Exeter and a correspondent with Eliot, and Hugh Peter, former minister in Salem, are others. Holstun, Rational Millennium, 327, n. 15.
15. Eliot was apparently unaware that his provision for the election of rulers contradicted Exodus 18, where Moses was instructed to appoint the rulers. Holstun, Rational Millennium, 154.
16. Eliot and Mayhew, Tears of Repentance, 212. In light of this quotation, Bozeman's assertion that Eliot “never claimed” that Natick was to “function as the exemplary model guiding England toward millennial transformation” (Ancient Lives, 274, n. 21) is difficult to sustain.
17. Holstun, Rational Millennium, 117-18,156-57.
18. Shurtleff, Nathaniel B., ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston: W. White, 1853-54), 4 (2 ): 33,5 (August 7 and May 22,1661).Google Scholar
19. Ibid., 4 (2): 5-6 (May 24,1661).
20. Holstun characterizes Eliot's testimony as a “masterful display of truculent equivocation.” Rational Millennium, 159.
21. Modern critical scholarship has shown that there are two biblical versions of the origin of the Israelite monarchy. One (1 Samuel 9:1-10:16) is hostile toward the institution, and the other (1 Samuel 8:4-22, 10:17-27) is favorable toward it. Eliot, whose approach to the Bible was precritical, assumed that there was only one version, which he then interpreted in accordance with his current attitude toward monarchy. In the wake of the Regieide, he stressed those passages in the former account that represented monarchy as a “human” polity, and after the Restoration, he evidently gave credence to the latter account, which states that the Israelite monarchy was instituted by God.
22. Eliot, The Communion of Churches, or the Divine Management of Gospel Churches by the Ordinance of Councils (Cambridge, 1665), 16-17; and Eliot to Richard Baxter, July 6, 1663, in Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (London, 1696), 294, 295. These brief passages indicate that from Eliot's point of view there would be litüe room for absolutism in the millennium because monarchs were to share power with the saints, particularly those who were “learned” as well as “godly.”
23. Eliot, The Communion ofChurches, 1-5,36. See also Eliot to Baxter, January 10, 1668; Oct. 28, 1668; and June 20, 1669, in F. J. Powicke, “Some Unpublished Correspondence of the Reverend Richard Baxter and the Reverend John Eliot, the ‘Apostle to the Indians” The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 15 (1931): 165-66, 175-76, 452. In 1657, Eliot told Baxter that he countenanced a broadened Sunday morning communion, for which there was no “test of a relation,” and a restricted communion, to be administered later in the day, for persons who had given the appropriate testimony. Eliot to Baxter, October 7,1657, in Powicke, “Unpublished Correspondence,” 159-60. Eliot did not incorporate this point of view in The Communion of Churches. Cf. Holstun, Rational Millennium, 161.
24. Baxter to Eliot, undated (1667), in Powicke, “Unpublished Correspondence,” 162.
25. Eliot to Baxter, October 28,1668, in ibid., 174. See also Eliot, The Communion of Churches, 13,37. For Elizabethan millenarianism, see Christianson, Paul, Reformers in Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the CM War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 13–91;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Firth, Katharine R., The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 32–149.Google Scholar
26. Eliot to Baxter, October 28,1668, in Powicke, “Unpublished Correspondence” 174-75.
27. Eliot to Henry Ashurst, November 30, 1670, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings (hereafter cited as MHSP), 17 (1879-80): 247. The quotation contains references to Revelation 17:12-14 (the “ten kings”), Isaiah 49:23 (“nursing fathers and mothers”), and Daniel 2:34-35 (the “stone”). By an exegetical Convention, Puritan millenarians identified the ten kings as the European successors to the Roman Empire. Eliot never speculated about how, or when, the remaining nine kings were to be “converted.” It should be noted that in The Christian Commonwealth (131) Eliot interpreted the “stone” as the civil, not the ecclesiastical, Kingdom and said that monarchs were its foes, not its Champions.
28. Eliot to Baxter, June 15,1669, in Powicke, “Unpublished Correspondence,” 171.
29. Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company, 5:136,327-28 (May 24, 1677; October 12,1681).
30. “The Reverend John Eliot's Records of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (hereafter cdted as NEHGR) 33 (1879): 415 (April 1677); and Eliot to Robert Boyle, June 17, 1681, in MHSP 17 (1879-80): 253.
31. Eliot to Boyle, August 29,1686, in MHSC, Ist ser., 1 (1794): 187; John Dunton's Letters from New England (1686), Publications of the Prince Society 4 (1867): 192-93; and Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), 2 vols. (Hartford: S. Andrus and Sons, 1853), 1:579-80.Google Scholar
32. 'The Reverend John Eliot's Records,” 415 (November 27,1676); The Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, MHSP 13 (1873-75): 311 (July 8, 1680); and Eliot, The Harmony of the Gospels (Boston, 1678), 26-30.
33. Eliot to Boyle, March 15,1683, MHSC, Ist ser., 3 (1794): 181.
34. Eliot, The Harmony of the Gospels, 42,46,57; Eliot, A Brief Answer to a Small Book Written byjohn Norcot against Infant-Baptism (Boston, 1678), 6; and Eliot to Boyle, December 17, 1675, MHSP 17 (1879-80): 251. Eliots revised judgment about the millennium was evidently shared by his Indian proselytes. See Eliot, The Dying Speeches ofSuch Indians as Dyed in the Lord (Boston, n.d. [ca. 1680]), 8,12.
35. Eliot, The Harmony of the Gospels, 42; and Eliot to Boyle, July 7,1688, MHSC, Ist ser., 3 (1794): 188.
36. Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729,2 vols., ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 1:279 (June 1,1691).
37. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 238.
38. Ibid., 238-42,248.
39. Daniel Gookin, The Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (1674), MHSC, Ist ser., 1 (1794): 191-92; John Eliot's Indian Dialogues: A Study in Cultural Interaction, ed. Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 59-60, 120-28; and “The Petition of John Eliot, August 13, 1675” in The Records of the Colony ofNew Plymouth, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer (Boston: W. White, 1855-61), 10:451-53. The Indian Dialogues was first published in 1671. Jennings did not discuss these examples of Eliots post1660 conduct toward the sachems.
40. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 242,251-52.
41. Eliot to Hanmer, July 19,1652, in Eames, ed., John Eliot and the Indians, 7. Tlüs point has been misunderstood by Neal Salisbury: “Puritan missionaries first directed their efforts at detaching the Indians from their ‘savage’ culture and initiating them to the ways of ‘civilization’ before introducing them to Christianity. In the words of John Eliot,… they must liave visible dvüity before they can rightly enjoy … ecclesiastical communion Red Puritans: The Traying Indians' of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot” WMQ, 3d ser., 31 (1975): 28. “Ecclesiastical communion,” which Salisbury equates with the “introduction of Christianity,” presupposed considerable Christian instruction.
42. Jennings, The Invasion of America, 242,248,252-53.
43. See Eliot to William Steele, October 8,1652, NEHGR 36 (1882): 29495; and “The Petition of John Eliot.”
44. Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr., The White h/Ian's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 114.Google Scholar
45. See Hughes, Richard T., ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988),Google Scholar and Hughes and Allen, C. Leonard, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).Google Scholar For typologies of Protestant primitivism, see Hill, Samuel S., Jr., “A Typology of American Restitutionism: From Frontier Revivalism and Mormonism to the Jesus Movement,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976): 65–76;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hughes, “Christian Primitivism and Perfectionism: From Anabaptists to Pentecostals,” in Reaching Beyond: Chapters in the History of Perfectionism, ed. Stanley M. Burgess (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986), 213-46. See also Muncy, Raymond Lee, “Restitution and the Communal Impulse in America” The Restoration Quarterly 19 (1976): 84–97;Google Scholar and the collection of essays on European and American Christian primitivism in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44, no. 1 (1976).
46. For a fuller criticism of the recent literature about Protestant primitivism, see Bowden, Henry, “Perplexity over a Protean Principle: A Response,” in Hughes, ed., The American Quest, 171-78.Google Scholar
47. See the discussion defined by notes 4 and 5 above.
48. For the Pentecostals, see Grant Wacker, “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in Hughes, ed., The American Quest, 196-219. For the Disciples, see Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 102-32, 153-87; and Bill J. Humble, “The Restoration Ideal in the Churches of Christ,” in Hughes, ed., The American Quest, 220-31. And for the Mormons, see Jan Shipps, “The Reality of the Restoration and the Restoration Ideal in the Mormon Tradition,” in Hughes, ed., The American Quest, 181-95; and Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 133-52.
49. See Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 1-7, 20-24.