GOD

DESPITE THE DIFFICULTIES of language and cultural differences, the new arrivals and the original people of southern New England engaged in theological discussions. The English, as Protestant Christians, explained their belief in one God, an all-powerful and distant deity who could alter the course of human affairs, and who did so to test and to punish. They also, somewhat contradictorily, mentioned a second figure: Satan or the Devil, who tempted Christians to sin. God and Satan represented the limits of the new residents’ cast of spiritual characters. Unlike other European Christians, they ignored the possible intervention of others, holding no faith in aid offered by Mary, the earthly mother of Jesus Christ, or a host of saints, deceased Christians of deep faith whom Roman Catholics revered. Bringing these ideas to Native New England, the planters tried to understand how the residents’ view related to the reality of the unseen. Edward Winslow decided that Natives had a vague idea of God, a distant creator figure whom they called Kiehtan, as well as an alarming intimacy with Satan, or Hobbamoqui, who concerned himself with their day-to-day affairs. After these exchanges, Winslow remained satisfied that he knew the truth both about the existence of God and Satan, and about how Native peoples mistook the situation with their only partial understanding. For their part, the original residents must have wondered whether the God Winslow spoke of was the same as Kiehtan—and if so why he bothered with daily needs. Native people found even stranger the idea that Hobbamoqui, who cured and otherwise cared for them, represented evil. In such incomplete exchanges, Native and English beliefs circulated in New England.¹

For the planters, God affected their lives constantly. Seventeenth-century English people believed in divine providence, the idea that God shaped daily events, and they often cited what we might see as fortuitous happenings as part of divine design. Epidemics wiped out many of the region’s inhabitants prior to the arrival of the Mayflower, a fact which numerous Europeans cited as reflecting God’s care in clearing the land for their arrival.² According to A Relation or Journall, many aspects of their experience represented divine providence at work. God directed their course to “one of the most pleasant, most healthfull, and most fruitfull parts of the world.” Finding (and taking) buried corn soon after their arrival offered another concrete example of God’s care. When a musket blew apart without inflicting injury, or a teenager started a fire that did not spread, or armed Natives ran away rather than attacking, or sick people in a burning house full of gunpowder got out in time, all these averted disasters gave credence to the view that God watched over them.³

God concerned himself with all manner of events, according to the settlers. Edward Winslow gave God credit for the increase in the number of residents, which prepared them to withstand the “savages.” Under the new conditions, should the region’s residents decide to overcome Plymouth, doing so “will be more hard and difficult, in regard our number of men is increased, our towne better fortified, and our store better victualed.”⁴ Solidifying a new business partnership with London investors, William Bradford observed, “doubtless this was a great mercy of God unto us.”⁵ Reporting on an alleged assassination plot against Winslow, John Winthrop concurred that “God preserved him.”⁶ With God caring for them so assiduously, the settlers could confidently enter a potentially hazardous trade relationship, noting that God’s providence had heretofore been good to them, and they had no reason “(save our sins)” to expect it to change.⁷ For the Plymouth people, God busied himself with their epidemics, sailing voyages, firearms, population increase, assassination attempts, and even trade. Anything that concerned them might draw the attention of the deity as well.

They knew that their sins could change the outcome because God also meted out punishment. That idea lay behind the comment that their sins might cause trade to falter. Bradford, for one, thought anyone hostile to Plymouth itself risked God’s anger. In his view, the Lord so firmly supported the settlement that its enemies needed to beware. His “Of Plimoth Plantation” frequently explained that God would judge anyone who opposed the undertaking. He described retribution against a seaman who abused the passengers on the way from England; against John Pierce, who tried to profit from their work through specious claims; and against John Lyford, who was guilty of sexual assault and denigrating the church. His kinsman, Nathaniel Morton, amplified Bradford’s theme, expanding on that aspect of God’s protection when he wrote his own account.

The men of early Plymouth were far from alone in expecting God to punish sins, which represented a common way to think about how God interacted with the world. A visiting ship’s captain, Christopher Levett, cited God’s potential anger as a reason to keep his wife. He described one particularly sinful and lazy migrant as justly dying, having done nothing to earn God’s protection and much to deserve his wrath. When settlers arrived at Salem, the first party to launch the colony of Massachusetts Bay, they were soon consulting with Plymouth leaders about how to assuage God’s anger as indicated in a high death rate among the migrants.⁸ People in both Salem and Plymouth agreed that they ought to accept God’s judgment and not become impatient with “such afflictions” that God visited upon them.⁹

Living in this world of reward and punishment, settlers tried to please God and avoid his ire. They struggled to figure out what God wanted and to comply with his wishes. In this project, they relied heavily on the scriptures, which they viewed as God’s word. A very early assessment by a participant in the plantation judged that “Our company are for the most part very religious honest people; the word of God is sincerely taught us every Sabbath.” As a result, he offered his opinion that nothing was lacking, at least nothing “a contented mind can here want.”¹⁰ Everyone agreed that a successful settlement had to observe the proper religious forms, even if they might disagree about what those forms entailed. As their London financial backers advised, their best course was to “walk close to God, being fervent and frequent in prayer, instruction, and doctrine, both openly and privately.”¹¹ Bradford wrote A Dialogue in which he depicted young men eagerly seeking the guidance of their elders, while the elders routinely cited God’s word as the ultimate source of authority. This fanciful account exactly reflected Bradford’s ideal. Although gratified to learn that their community enjoyed a reputation as godly, Samuel Fuller warned that they had better live up to that reputation, “that it may be more than a name, or else it will do us no good.”¹² Plymouth would succeed only if its inhabitants did right. Otherwise God would make sure they failed.

Given this high level of engagement with their God, these English people thought it their duty to alter the beliefs of the region’s original residents. When writing to an English audience, Plymouth authors frequently noted the goal of converting the Indians, declaring it one of their purposes. Such was the case with the dedication to Edward Winslow’s Good Newes, which noted the fact that “the Church of God being seated in sincerity” in the area held out hope for converting the “heathen.”¹³ Those investors who continued to back Plymouth over the years supported “their ends and intents,” which they summarized as “the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ in the propagation of His gospel and hope of gaining those poor savages to the knowledge of God.”¹⁴ References to the need to convert the Natives were as common as they were unfulfilled, not only in Plymouth but throughout the English settlements around the Atlantic.

This oft-repeated theme produced no serious or sustained effort at conversion in the first years. In general, theological discussions involved comparing beliefs rather than trying to persuade anyone to change those views. Exchanges with residents were limited by language mastery, since only a few Native people knew English initially and others on both sides only slowly picked up the new language. No English person on the Mayflower arrived able to speak an American language. Only in a few rare cases did English migrants arrive with indigenous language knowledge. Thomas Harriot, who did so, proved the difficulties involved: he arrived in Roanoke already conversant in a local dialect because he had lived in the household of Sir Walter Raleigh with two Native men for years. They taught him their language prior to sailing home with the settlers. In Roanoke, Harriot conversed with the inhabitants about their beliefs, leaving an important account of what he heard.¹⁵ No one arriving in Plymouth was similarly prepared.

Even when language posed no barrier, the first arrivals made little effort. The local man with the greatest facility with English in 1620, Tisquantum, became an interpreter and adviser to the Plymouth community. He spent most of his time with the settlers in the eighteen months before his death in 1622. Yet Bradford seemed almost surprised to note that as his death approached, Tisquantum described himself as “desiring the governor to pray for him that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in Heaven.”¹⁶ Although he had been frequently in Plymouth in the company of Bradford, Winslow, and others, no reference survives to indicate that anyone conversed with him about his beliefs or tried to get him to embrace their own. When the English made statements to Native people about their God, they tended to be straightforward references to what their God wanted of them. Captain Levett explained that his refusal to beat his wife arose out of his desire to please God, and some Plymouth men told a Native man that they could not accept a gift of possibly stolen tobacco for fear of being punished by God. Neither conversation involved directly urging their listeners to change their own behavior in these exchanges. They simply noted the way in which their understandings of sin and punishment guided their own actions.¹⁷

This page from the 1619 Book of Common Prayer depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded by their family tree. While seemingly no one brought this book—which contained the liturgy of the Church of England—to Plymouth, its imagery nonetheless conveys the complex Christian theology which all English people did bring. The nature of the early communications between Native and English was incapable of conveying the wealth of complex ideas on either side.

While direct missionary effort did not occur, some settlers did engage in exchanges that seemed to pit the two religious views against each other. When both the Natives and the settlers worried over a drought, Winslow was pleased to report that the Christians got results when the Native spiritual leader could not. After they held a community day of humiliation (including fasting and prayer), rains came and saved both Native and English crops. Winslow interpreted this as “showing the difference between their conjuration, and our invocation on the name of God.”¹⁸ Treating the two belief systems as dueling efforts to gain supernatural support, they asserted that their own faith better protected its followers. Such observations served as a sort of indirect effort to persuade, since a spiritual authority that could protect its followers was attractive to Natives and English Christians alike. If Christianity proved more effective, the Natives might eventually be convinced to adopt it. In the meantime, the timely rain after fervent prayer certainly reassured Winslow that his own religion was superior.

Mostly English Christians did not move beyond tentative efforts to understand Native belief. Some of them fell back on the idea that Natives had no religion, a view both Thomas Morton and one of the anonymous Plymouth men who contributed to A Relation or Journall (1621) expressed. Yet Morton—who resided in a nearby trading outpost and so encountered many of the same people as did the first Plymouth residents—went on to describe aspects of the local belief system that seemed to contradict his general assessment. He clearly knew they adhered to what we today would recognize as a religion, but because it was not the same as his own, he was unwilling to label it as such. The author contributing to A Relation or Journall noted with surprise that despite a lack of awareness of God, the Natives were “very trusty” (that is, trustworthy). He believed that only fear of God’s punishment made Christians good and wondered why someone lacking “knowledge of God” could behave well.¹⁹

What especially struck English observers was the fact that Native peoples looked to multiple sources of spiritual power, whereas Protestant Christians limited themselves to revering only God. English authors translated Native belief into a variation on (or misunderstanding of) the Christian cosmology. The Americans living in New England, rather than recognizing the single deity, acknowledged two, according to many English authors. The Church of England clergyman William Morrell declared that the locals worshipped two gods, an idea that not only Winslow but also Captain Levett and the Salem minister Francis Higginson repeated. Levett and Higginson both offered names for these figures that differed from what Winslow heard: they learned about Squanto (or Squantam) and Tanto (or Tantum).²⁰ Levett assumed that those spiritual leaders who dealt with Tanto, whom he equated with Satan, were witches. Making this equation, he placed the supernatural being and the religious system it represented in a recognizable context. When the English posited Native belief in two Gods, they revealed the depth of their misunderstanding and their own inability to reach across the cultural divide to comprehend a different belief system.

Just as the Natives wondered how to think about the Christian God within their own accustomed framework, the English could only understand Native belief through their own. Hence, they described Native belief in terms of heaven and hell, God and the Devil, and witches. God to the English meant guidance, punishment, and reward, with the ultimate reward being eternal salvation. Although they could hardly conceive of life outside this framework, confronting Native beliefs gave them a glimpse of a different view. On the Native side, more flexibility reigned. To their way of thinking, the insistence on a singular entity was unnecessarily limiting, and their initial impulse was to incorporate this seemingly new being into their own complex and populous spiritual world. If the English God proved powerful and effective, he would be worth knowing, but they were a long way from thinking that they needed to reject aid from all other beings as a result of learning about God.

Both Native peoples and English settlers changed as a result of exchanging their religious views. God was an English concept, not a Native one. Still, both groups held broadly analogous beliefs about how forces beyond human control shaped their lives. Over the centuries after 1620, Native peoples gradually came to terms with the English God, accepting the idea and making it their own. Plymouth conversations offered an early, tentative introduction on both sides to vastly different understandings. When English people wondered how Native goodness came about in the absence of the threat of divine punishment, their ideas about God were being challenged, just as were those ideas of the Natives who wondered how God fit into the world they knew.