LIKE THE SPANISH BEFORE them, the English who sought to colonize North America in the late sixteenth century did so in the name of God. Spreading Christianity through two means—transplanting the English and converting the Indians—helped drive these first efforts at imperialism. Upon touring the coast of California in 1579, the famed explorer Sir Francis Drake, whose father was a minister, wanted to open the “blinded eyes” of the local Indians by introducing them to “the right knowledge and obedience of the true and everliving God.” A copy of John Foxe’s The Book of Martyrs—among Protestants a book almost as sacred as the Bible itself—reportedly sailed with Drake to provide shipboard inspiration. A hardened explorer and jaded pirate, Drake was not entirely motivated by a desire to spread Christianity. But so great was the urge to enlarge the faith that even he felt the need to justify his exploits in terms of religion.1
Indeed, the very fact that the New World had been revealed to Europeans was itself thought to be an act of God. These new lands offered Europe a chance to resettle people from its growing populations, and in the process spread Christianity. But—in a development that would set England, and later America, apart—following the Reformation it was imperative that the type of Christianity be Protestant. John Jewel, the Protestant bishop of Salisbury, agreed with Catholics that the Indians lived a life of inherent sin, “going naked, having no manner sense, nor knowledge of God, but falling down either before an old tree, or before the sun, and the moon, or whatsoever thing they saw first in the morning.” But their salvation could never come from the Catholic faith. Even in their state of idolatrous ignorance, Jewel declared to a Catholic adversary in 1570, the Indians “might see both your and our religion set open before them, I doubt not, but nature herself would lead to judge, that ours is the Light, and yours Darkness.”2
England’s leading intellectual architect of colonial expansion, a man who seamlessly blended the objectives of church and state, was Richard Hakluyt, a well-connected graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, and an ordained Church of England minister. Religious faith did not solely shape Hakluyt’s considerable scholarship—classical learning and the new humanism were just as important—yet it did play an immensely significant role in the widespread propagation, promotion, and legitimation of his views on New World settlement. Like many of his contemporaries, Hakluyt was as fiercely opposed to the Catholic Church, which he feared as a source of despotism, as he was devoted to Protestantism. With his tales of foreign adventure and discovery—not only of English exploration but travels by Europeans in general—Hakluyt became his era’s most famous and authoritative chronicler of European expansion. Very much in tune with the spirit of the times, he was just as interested in geography as he was in theology. In Hakluyt’s worldview, which came to shape England’s early colonization of America, geography and theology would combine in a spiritual geopolitics of transatlantic expansion. Catholics, he believed, aimed to extinguish the passionate, reformed fires of liberty Protestantism had lit. As the leading Protestant power, England’s very fate hung in the balance of its conflict with Spain. In his twin quests to spread Protestantism and English power, Hakluyt portrayed the New World as the decisive theater of conflict between the two rival Christian faiths. Given its century-long head start, Spain held a dangerous advantage.3
Fearing that England was falling behind its Catholic European rivals in the New World, Hakluyt combined the strategic urgency of spreading England’s trade and territory with the zeal to spread its Protestant faith into a compelling argument for overseas expansion. His message was a powerful blend of territorial, ideological, and commercial ambition that many of his Elizabethan countrymen found impossible to resist. One of the most important tasks, something that would justify the imperial enterprise overall, was the conversion of the benighted savages who had lived for too long without God. It was necessary, Hakluyt wrote in his widely influential 1584 tract, Discourse of Western Planting, “for the salvation of those poore people which have sitten so longe in darkenes and in the shadowe of deathe, that preachers should be sent unto them.” The kings and queens of England, he pointed out, “have the name of Defendors of the Faithe,” which obliged them not only to protect Protestantism at home but also “to inlarge and advaunce” it beyond England’s shores. And while Hakluyt appreciated that any colony would have to be commercially successful to survive and could not rely on faith alone, he thought faith would be its most important and ultimately determining trait. “Firste seek the kingdome of God and the righteousness thereof,” he instructed, “and all other thinges shalbe mynistred unto you.” Politics and economics were thus intimately mixed with faith.4
The infamous “Black Legend,” in which English writers detailed (and exaggerated) the uncommon barbarism and cruelty of Spanish colonialism in Latin America, played a large part in creating this worldview and provided English colonial activists with a powerful ideological weapon that endured well into the eighteenth century. The Black Legend contrasted sharply with England’s supposed benevolence and concern for the welfare of the indigenous peoples. In a moral and ideological sense, it was an important rhetorical tool to justify England’s overseas expansion. The Spanish, Hakluyt charged, were “pretending in glorious words” in their missionary efforts, but “in deed and truth sought not them [the Indians], but their goods and riches.” The virtuous English, on the other hand, would educate, enlighten, and Christianize the ignorant peoples who had the good fortune to find themselves under English rule.5
The Black Legend’s power stemmed from the notion, prevalent in England’s domestic politics as well as its foreign relations, that Catholics were inherently expansionist. Abroad, Catholics threatened English liberties and security with the might of the Spanish and French militaries; at home, they did so through a fifth column of Catholic traitors. Catholicism sought power and influence, especially at the expense of those who challenged its moral authority; it could not tolerate rival religions. Fear and loathing of Catholicism fueled England’s foreign policy to such an extent that English patriotism became suffused with, even indistinguishable from, Protestantism. Sure enough, Spain’s attempted invasion of England in 1588, and then its sponsorship of the Catholic League of France afterward, simply confirmed its innate aggressiveness and rapaciousness. The English had to remain vigilant, a stance that took them to Holland, where they fought alongside their fellow Protestants, the Dutch, against Spanish rule (just as Irish Catholics went to Holland to fight with the Spanish against the Protestants).6
What seemed to make the papist conspiracy so dangerous was that all Catholic roads led to Rome. England, virtuous but isolated, was up against a worldwide conspiracy orchestrated by the Vatican. “It is most certaine and true that the king of Spaine is wholie addicted to the Pope,” the explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert warned Elizabeth in 1577. In thrall to a despotic pope, the Spanish were duty-bound to promote the Vatican’s agenda and were “thereby an enemie to all others that not be of the same religion.” So long as the Spanish “be of that religion and we of ours there can be betwene us and them no good friendship.” Sir Humphrey’s solution was for England to go on the offensive in the Caribbean and seize the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. This was an unfeasibly ambitious and, given the strength of the Spanish navy at the time, foolish plan that Elizabeth sensibly ignored. Yet three decades later, after a string of victories in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, the colony of Virginia fit neatly into this strategy of defensive expansionism.7
Thanks in part to Samuel Purchas, so too would New England. Purchas was Hakluyt’s successor as chief propagandist for the expansion of English power and the Protestant faith. Even more than Hakluyt, Purchas was passionately committed to the spread of the gospel. Like Hakluyt, he was a minister in the Church of England; like Hakluyt, he thought of Catholicism as a threat to England’s security, its political freedom, and its religious faith; and like Hakluyt, Purchas thought that England’s best defense was the offense of New World settlement. “[S]o little a part of the World in name Christian!” he lamented, “and so not little covered over … with Antichristian Heresie!”8
The main difference between them was timing. Hakluyt wrote in the final decades of the sixteenth century, when England was just beginning to mount its colonial enterprise. Purchas wrote in the 1620s, after the establishment of Virginia and the migration of the Pilgrims to Plymouth Colony. Thus Purchas knew, as Hakluyt could not, the difficulties that English colonists would face as they built their new lives in the New World. Accordingly, he portrayed the native peoples of North America as just as great a threat—albeit of a different kind—as Roman Catholics, branding them “Outlawes of Humanity,” “unnaturall Naturalls” who were “like Cain, both Murtherers and Vagabonds.” In a tremendously important conclusion that would justify the seizure of Indian territory for centuries to come, Purchas argued that the Indians had forfeited their claim to the land by not cultivating or taming it for permanent settlement. In the book of Genesis, God had given people the right to cultivate, and own, any vacant land they encountered, and so the wild and untamed New World, Purchas informed his audiences, was rightfully there for the taking.9
Before he became a successful author, Purchas had been renowned as a gifted storyteller. He would regale the people of his local parish in Eastwood, in the Puritan heartland of Essex, with tales of foreign adventure—though not his own, for he had had none—and exotic lands. He would tell them about the Virginia Company, whose members were trying to establish a godly Protestant community among the heathen savage. For his stories, his standing, and his piety, which was not exactly Puritan but not all that far off, he was a frequent guest at the local manor, Rochford Hall. One evening in 1606, one of his listeners was a young man by the name of John Winthrop, son-in-law of the family who lived at Rochford Hall. A few decades later, Winthrop would become the founding governor of Massachusetts, the driving force behind the English colony that most successfully blended faith and fortune. As Winthrop’s biographer Francis Bremer writes, Purchas’s riveting tales “resonated with his godly audience,” for although they emphasized the economic and strategic benefits of overseas expansion, they were first and foremost “wrapped in a call to religious service.”10
ENGLAND’S INITIAL ATTEMPTS at North American colonization were fitful, amateurish, and, as a result, spectacularly unsuccessful. One of the main problems was that expectations for English settlement on the North American shore had been shaped by the Spanish experience in Mexico and South America, where armies of conquistadores and Catholic missionaries were reaping untold riches in both gold and souls. Conditions further north were far different, although this was at first lost on English explorers. Hakluyt had been infuriated by the second and third expeditions of Martin Frobisher, who in the 1570s had looked for gold instead of the Northwest Passage. If “we had not been led with a preposterous desire of seeking rather gaine than God’s glorie,” Hakluyt chastised other New World adventurers, England would not be losing its imperial race with Spain. Yet at Roanoke, a lost island colony established off the North Carolina coast in 1585 and mysteriously abandoned five years later, even the godly met with a similar fate; this complete failure led to the postponement of other plans for American settlement. Still, the men who had headed the venture were devout Protestants who hoped to establish a godly realm in the name of the English crown. As one of them put it, their objectives were simple: “1. To plant Christian religion. 2. To trafficke. 3. To conquer.”11
For a brief time, war with Spain and the fate of Roanoke deterred other would-be colonists. But peace finally came in 1604 and opened the flow of money for colonial enterprise and shipping lanes for commercial sailing. In 1607, having been granted an exclusive charter to settle all the land between present-day North Carolina and New York, the Virginia Company established a permanent settlement, Jamestown, in the coastal, malarial swampland of lower Chesapeake Bay. While they again hoped to find precious metals and other riches, this time the colonists were careful to frame their enterprise as a religious mission. Expansion would bring with it spiritual as well as material wealth because it would spread properly Christian—that is, Protestant—values to the Indians. In a perfect marriage of merchant and missionary zeal the colonists, declared the Governing Council, would “buy” from the Indians “the pearles of earth, and sell to them the pearles of heaven.” Richard Hakluyt was an original charter member of the Virginia Company, while Samuel Purchas was among its most fervent supporters in England.12
Profit was important, but Virginia was in large part a missionary enterprise and the colonists, backed by sponsors in England, regarded their journey to the New World as a sacred mission. Although it would wane as the years passed, Virginia was founded in a spirit of intense religious fervor. Relative to population, the colonists enjoyed an even higher concentration of trained ministers than did the mother country, and religious observances were officially mandated and strictly enforced. Everyone involved in the project was swept along by the holiness of its mission. As the poet John Donne, a member of the Virginia Company who encouraged his son to emigrate there, instructed a group about to embark for the colony, “Your principal end is not gain, nor glory, but to gain souls to the glory of God. This seals the great seal, this justifies itself, this authorises authority, and gives power to strength itself.”13
In the eyes of the first generation of colonists, the marriage between faith and nation was bound to be a happy one, for God had already baptized Virginia as a promised land that, in the words of one settler, would “flow with milk and honey.” This was an important vision, central to the idea of expansion, for the promised land meant that the settlers of Virginia must be a chosen people. It could be no other way: only God’s chosen few could inhabit the land promised to his people. In the Bible (Luke 12:32), Jesus speaks of his followers as a “little flock,” a faithful, special minority whose mission was to spread the gospel to the rest of world; they would lead, and others would follow. Despite the trials of the first settlement efforts, Virginians perceived their colony as blessed, a refuge and repository for Christian civilization. “So then here is a place,” John Smith wrote in 1612, “a nurse for souldiers, a practise for marriners, a trade for marchants, a reward for the good, and that which is most of all, a businesse (most acceptable to God) to bring such poore infidels to the true knowledge of God and his holy Gospell.”14
But the promised land had to be free from contagion, and so containment was as important as conversion. Thus in addition to saving the souls of lost Indians, the need for geopolitical advantage over Spain drove English expansion forward. Just as it had shaped the initial push for colonization among Hakluyt and his contemporaries, anti-Catholicism added necessity, not to mention a great deal of urgency, to the settling of Virginia. In making this point, many of Virginia’s advocates invoked the Black Legend; others played upon England’s own schismatic sectarian turmoil. William Symonds, for example, combined patriotism with Protestantism when he admonished Virginia’s leaders “to carry thither no Traitors, nor Papists that depend on the Great Whore.”15
Toward the end of his life, Hakluyt reflected on Virginia with evident pride. The settlers had founded a free, patriotic, and faithful Protestant society where the “Preachers shall be reverenced and cherished, the valiant and forward soldiour respected, the diligent rewarded, the coward emboldened, the weake and sick relieved, the mutinous suppressed, the reputation of the Christians among the Savages preserved, our most holy faith exalted, all Paganisme and Idolatrie by little and little utterly extinguished”—in short, a promised land. The establishment of Virginia had been an enormously difficult enterprise, and its survival would not be assured for several decades. Hakluyt would have been forgiven had he despaired, but his faith in an English, Protestant Virginia never wavered. This was the nature of his ideological commitment and religious zeal, traits that helped cast in iron an emerging colonial self-perception that America was a different and special place.16
IF VIRGINIANS THOUGHT THEMSELVES EXCEPTIONAL, the intensity of their self-confidence was nothing compared to the unshakeable selfrighteousness of their English neighbors further north. Everything that had helped to form the worldview of Virginia was magnified several times in the godly colonies of New England. A key difference was their brand of Protestantism: instead of the establishment Anglicanism of Virginia, the people who founded and settled New England were reformed Calvinists—mostly Puritan Congregationalists—who believed that the Church of England had become almost as corrupt as the Roman Catholic Church. Theirs was a purer form of worship that relied only on the word and spirit of God, not a decadent, liturgically driven hierarchy. Puritans who rejected Anglican ways were more passionate, rigorous, and dogmatic than their fellow Protestants. The Puritans of New England, observed an astonished Dutch trader and fellow Calvinist, had established a moral code of “stringent laws” that they “maintain and enforce very strictly indeed.” It was this uncompromising theological rigor that drove them across the Atlantic in 1630.17
Few addresses in American history have been as exhaustively quoted as John Winthrop’s sermon, delivered on the deck of his ship Arbella while en route to Massachusetts, that invoked the image of a Puritan “city on a hill” to instill unity and purpose. The Puritans thought of themselves as exceptional. They believed they were different from, and better than, not only Catholics and Indians, but also Anglicans and even other Protestants, such as Quakers and Baptists. They were, Winthrop reminded them, God’s chosen people who sought a freer life. Using the favorite Puritan trope of the covenant, Winthrop told his fellow migrants that they had formed a pact with God: he would deliver them safely to the New World, while they had to build and maintain a properly Christian community. So long as they upheld their end of the covenant, Winthrop promised,
the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his own people and will commaund a blessing upon us in all our wayes … wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us…18
Should they betray God, Winthrop warned that the Puritans would be cast out and made a terrible example of dealing falsely with the Lord. An embattled minority of a spiritual elite, the Puritans saw themselves as conductors of a noble experiment that must be defended at all costs. They were God’s chosen ones; now they must live like it.
As historians have pointed out, Winthrop’s sermon, so famous today, generated little comment at the time because its themes and allusions were so commonplace among Calvinist Puritans. Chosenness provided an extremely powerful motivation for the move to New England, and subsequent expansion within it, precisely because it was so commonplace. Massachusetts would of course have its own dissenters and nonconformists—competing “orthodoxies,” in Janice Knight’s telling, as opposed to Winthrop’s illusion of consensus—but for the most part the notion that the Puritans had embarked upon a mission from God went unquestioned.19
The Puritans left England, their home, reluctantly. Suffering the persecutions of Bishop William Laud’s Church of England, they felt they had little choice but to go into exile; and like all exiles, they hoped one day to return to their homeland. However, though they did not always enjoy it, once in exile they sought to establish a truer, purified style of worship, modeled on the early Christians, that would eventually reform the mother church itself. The allure of erecting a reformed church in New England was strong, and it played a significant factor in drawing the Puritans across the Atlantic. Many began to perceive New England as a haven of religious liberty. It was the exile’s refuge, a sacred space to wait while the fury of religious tyranny exhausted itself back home—“a refuge,” Winthrop believed, “for many whom [God] meanes to save out of the general callamity.” Or as Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, remarked after the first wave of Puritans had sailed from England, “God begins to ship away his Noahs. God makes account that New England shall be a refuge for his Noahs … a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones to run unto.”20
While Hakluyt, Purchas, and others argued that God had anointed England as a chosen nation, the Puritans gave this familiar conceit a new twist. Instead of looking solely to the book of Genesis for inspiration, they saw their own plight as a sequel to the book of Exodus. New England was their promised land. In this idea lay the seeds of permanent settlement, of the transition from exile to migration, and of the idea that America, not England, was the land of the chosen people. If the Puritans obeyed the terms of their covenant with God, their new home would be the site of a New Israel. While the topography and climate of New England were physically daunting, the land itself could also be spiritually liberating. Sheltered from the evils of a fallen Europe plagued by Turks and Catholics, and from an England that had been corrupted by an Anglican church that had lost its way, New England was not only vacant but untainted, waiting to be used by a pious and hardworking people. It was a promised land that quickly became the promised land. Massachusetts, described by one of the first settlers as “our new paradise,”21 was just such a place, and would provide all of the Puritans’ spiritual and material needs. Only America could provide refuge for the godly.
The Puritans knew this because God had revealed it to them. Providential thinking played a large part in the everyday life of early modern England. People from all ranks of society invested ordinary occurrences with sacred meaning about God’s intentions for the future, and acted accordingly. But while providence was taken seriously by most English people, nobody invested it with as much significance as the Puritans. As strict Calvinists who believed in predestination and a God who was an active participant in the daily life of earthly matters, the Puritans thought they could determine God’s will and guidance when he chose to reveal it to them through miraculous signs in everyday life. Thus the offer of a religious refuge across the ocean, the fact that it was to be a community peopled entirely by the godly (at least, that was the intention), and the colony’s early success were all signs, in Edward Johnson’s timeless phrase, of God’s “wonder-working providence.” As John Cotton preached in his 1630 sermon “God’s Promise to His Plantations” to those who were about to sail for New England, “God assigned out such a land for such a posterity, and for such a time.” Or as he later explained to a skeptical colleague who did not see the need to move, God had “shutt a dore” in England while “openinge a dore to us” in Massachusetts.22
OVER A CENTURY had passed between the European discovery of the Americas and the Puritan migration to Massachusetts, and so by the 1620s the question of native peoples was nothing new. It would, however, prove to be no less perplexing. The first generation of migrants to New England believed much of their effort would be focused on converting Indians to the gospel. The founding charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company stated that its primary goal was “to incite the natives … to the knowledge and obedience of the onlie true God and Saviour of mankinde.” Tellingly, instead of a scriptural quotation or other biblical injunction, the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony pictured an Indian pleading, “Come Over and Help Us,” an allusion to an episode in the Book of Acts (16:9) when Paul has a vision of the Macedonians crying out to him with these same words. (Not coincidentally, the Puritans gave the Wampanoag chief Metacom the name of Philip, half-brother to the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great.) Converting the Indians, moreover, would have the additional effect—perhaps more important than conversion itself—of checking Catholic advances in the New World, by Spain to the south and, increasingly as the century wore on, France to the north. As Winthrop recorded, by converting the native population New England would act as a “bullwarke” against the “kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuites laboure to rear.”23 Hakluyt and Purchas could not have put it any better.
But as the decades passed, it became clear that succeeding generations of colonists lacked the fervor of their founding ancestors. In the words of the historian Jon Butler, the middle decades of the seventeenth century marked a “starving time” for institutional Christianity in the colonies. In Virginia, greater numbers of immigrants arrived with trade and agriculture instead of religion on their minds. Fewer people attended church and observed religious occasions, the ratio of ministers to the general population fell, and those ministers who did continue to preach were often just as profane as their impious congregants. Christian belief endured, but the colonists’ fealty to institutional religion was altogether much more fragile. Even in the “Bible Commonwealth” of Massachusetts, church membership plummeted sharply: in 1650, for example, only a third of Boston’s residents were members of the church; by 1677, only 15 percent of Northampton residents claimed church membership.24
In both Virginia and Massachusetts, the conversion of Indians to Christianity was a major casualty of the ebb of organized religion. Henrico College, established solely to convert and educate Virginia’s Indians, closed in 1619 even before it could open. By the 1640s, the numbers of colonists engaged in farming and trade had long passed those involved in missionary work. The evangelists of New England fared better than their counterparts in Virginia, but not by much: while the Indian College at Harvard actually opened its doors to Indians, only five were educated there, and the college was quickly closed. Thanks to the ravages of war and disease, actual missionary endeavors did not really get under way in Massachusetts until the 1640s. True, the indefatigable John Eliot, famed for his painstaking translations of the Bible into Algonquin languages and his establishment of several “praying towns” inhabited by converted Indians, had some success in bringing the gospel to the native peoples of Massachusetts. There was also Thomas Mayhew, who converted hundreds of Indians on Martha’s Vineyard. But in both instances, and despite some evidence of genuine, faithful conversions, Indians often converted for their own, largely secular reasons—usually for material or political gain—and blended Christianity with local religious beliefs and customs to create a syncretic faith that bore little relation to Christianity and no resemblance at all to the rigid, doctrinaire Protestantism practiced by the Puritans. So while Indians were converting to a kind of Christianity, it was not the Puritans’ kind.25
As a result of unconverted Indians, converted but insincere Indians, cultural segregation, and war, the colonists’ attitudes toward native peoples steadily hardened. Once perceived as essential goals of colonization itself, by the late seventeenth century conversion and assimilation were no longer considered possible and all but disappeared as colonial priorities. Inauspiciously for the Indians, this repeated a pattern established by the English conquest of Ireland in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Like the Irish, the Indians came to be considered too barbaric to undergo complete conversion to Protestant Christianity and adhere to civilized codes of conduct. Both the Irish and the native peoples of North America were considered recalcitrant savages too ignorant to even realize the benefits they were spurning. First impressions of innocence thus gave way to the notion that the New World must be conquered, its wild, unknown evils tamed and defeated.26
Negative stereotypes about the Indians thrived in such an atmosphere. Native Americans provided English colonists with a “social mirror” that reflected the English religious, social, and political ideals with their complete, ghastly opposites. And to early modern Europeans, the main thing that distinguished them from the Indians was not race, but religion, from which conceptions about racial, ethnic, and cultural difference flowed. While English Protestants were enlightened by a Christian God and the Protestant faith, the Indians worshipped inauthentic pagan gods of dubious morality; while English families and communities were harmonious, organic models of charitable order and Christian virtue, Indian society was disordered, chaotic, and oppressive; while the English cultivated God’s land, the Indians allowed it to lie fallow, untamed and unproductive; while the English inhabited bodies—with fair skin and fine hair—that were assumed to be a reflection of God’s image, Indians and African slaves had dark skin that was further blemished by tattoos and other markings of the devil; and while the English enjoyed knowledge and certain natural rights that went with it, the Indians lived a life of ignorance and enslavement. The Indians were barbaric, and barbarians could be easily distinguished from the English, and dealt with accordingly.27
The notion of the promised land, then, could be read in two ways, as both promising and perilous. After the colonists had lived in the New World for a few years, they could see for themselves that it had not necessarily been given to them through God’s grace—or, if it had, that God was intent on making them earn it. Indeed, the haunted “wilderness,” an inverted image of the “land of milk and honey,” dominated the thoughts and stoked the fears of the colonists across English North America. The land was potentially a promised land, but first it must be cleansed of the evil influences that already lurked there. To the people of Massachusetts Bay, the woods that surrounded their towns and villages provided a home for dark forces, both Indian and French, that were committed to their destruction. The wilderness, threatening and malevolent, must be tamed if the Puritan experiment was to survive. “So Sathan may stir up and combyne many of his Instruments against the Churches of Christ,” declared the New England Confederation in 1645, but “the Lord of Hostes, the mighty one in battaile,” will defend his people and bring about their salvation.28