The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
apprehension, to fear of Catholics, to self-promotional displays of generosity, to guilt?
I believe all these motivations applied, in varying degrees, to donors, but we still need to account for the complex discursive process by which the promoters of missions in America made readers in Britain care about distant projects and feel empowered to assist them. Ann Jessie Van Sant has described the widely held eighteenth-century view that “sympathetic feelings, which require vividness and proximity, arise through an act of the imagination largely dependent on sight.”43 This visually oriented understanding of pity underlay the fund-raising strategies that charities such as the Magdalen House for reformed prostitutes deployed, especially ceremonies that placed objects of charity before the gaze of their benefactors. She writes, “Contemplation of the fortunes of others, with the actual eye or the mind’s eye, allows an imaginative exchange of place that ‘makes real’ and ‘brings near’ experience not one’s own.”44 Compassion is enabled by a visual aid, especially when it is propelled by the evangelical fantasy of making the other spiritually similar.
The desire to make Indians visible did govern much of the discourse of mission. Promoters were well aware of the boosts their projects were likely to receive when they presented living Indians to a metropolitan audience. The widely celebrated visit to London in 1710 of “the four Indian kings,” representatives of the Iroquois nations, inspired much British interest in missions, as did Occom’s visit in 1766–68.45 Because they rarely could present living Indian converts to benefactors in Britain, however, fund-raising tracts often fabricated such spectacles by presenting detailed portrayals of Indians complete with evocative descriptions of emotional turmoil.
But in spite of efforts to include affecting portraits of Indians, few missionary texts truly asked readers to feel sympathy for them. Even if the figure of the Indian had not had to compete in British minds with images of murderous savages from captivity narratives, the writers of these texts seem to have anticipated, and perhaps themselves felt, an inability to express sympathy for a people so distant—culturally or geographically—from themselves. British depictions of Indians often elicited less emotional connection than spectatorial objectification from their audience. This is always a hazard of such portrayals, but it was especially likely with Indians, whose depictions had been overdetermined by their displays as “New World artifacts and curiosities placed in ‘Raree Shows’ near Bible-thumping chapels,” as Polly Stevens Fields has noted, as well as in travel writings.46 Occom demonstrated his painful awareness of the function his visit to Britain had served when he reminded his teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, “[I]f you had not this Indian Buck you would not [have] Collected a quarter of the Money you did, one gentleman in Particular in England said to me, if he hadn’t Seen my face he woudnt have given a tuppence but now I have 50 pounds freely.”47 Much of the money Occom raised seems to have emerged more from fascination at his racial difference than from a sense of shared situation.
Instead of eliciting sympathy, many missionary writings asked readers to feel pity for the Indians presented to them, but then encouraged readers to feel sympathy for other British people, and sometimes for non-British Protestants, who were trying to save the Indians. Through a variety of strategies that I will explore in this book, these writings operated within an understanding of “sympathy” that anticipated and transcended Smith’s dichotomy between global and local. For although missionary texts beckoned their readers’ compassionate gazes to faraway lands, they often marked that imagined connection as a self-referential one to other British people. The readers of these texts were encouraged to think of Christian mission as a duty placed within their inner circles of obligation. This duty emerged from self-interest, as it would help secure Britain’s interests abroad, its safety at home, its moral purity, and—for some audiences—the second coming of Christ. To assist missionary projects was also, however, to help English or Scottish people in the colonies, and to prove the compassion that all Britons felt for the spiritually needy. Even while stressing the Indians’ foreignness, missionary writings thus presented Indians as the focal point for a triangulated expression of closeness between other English, Scots, or Europeans.
While eliciting pity, and while stressing the profits of promoting the gospel, the writers of these texts at once evoked and peddled a transatlantic sense of togetherness. That is, they insisted that everyone must help in this endeavor if it was to succeed, but they also suggested that one reward of such charity would be an enhanced collective identity. English people would feel themselves to be part of a great and divinely blessed endeavor if they all helped their compatriots in the colonies spread the gospel among America’s Indians. In the preface to an account of Puritan New England missions, the Independent preacher Joseph Caryl proclaimed in 1655, “Beloved Brethren, Yee may now see and taste the fruit of those Prophecies, which ye have been helping to birth.”48 Suggesting the tangible rewards of mission through the medium of the text, Caryl also marked his readers as “Brethren” connected by their midwifery to a spiritual birth. As he sought funds in 1650 for the conversion of the Indians he thought were the lost tribes of Israel, Thomas Thorowgood insisted, “[S]urely the poore natives will not be a little encouraged to looke after the glorious Gospel of Christ, when they shall understand that not onely the English among them, but wee all here are daily sutors for them at the throne of grace.”49 Thorowgood described two triangles of affection: the first between the English, their counterparts in America, and the Indians, and the second between the English, the Indians, and God.
Collective acts of giving, Thorowgood suggested, are mutually enriching because they strengthen these triangulated relations. By pooling their resources for Indians, the English can connect with their brethren abroad: “And let these words be understood as awakenings to those of our nation there and our selves also that wee all labour mutually and from our hearts, to propagate the Gospell there because wee, who eate every man of his owne vine, and of his owne figtree and drinke every man water out of his owne cisterne (Esa 36.16) should witnesse our thankfulnesse unto God, for these favours, by sympathizing affections toward our brethren there, and the natives.”50 Sealing transatlantic ties, mission also promises reciprocal profit: “Honour will redound to this England, not onely from ours there, who professe truly, if they prosper, we shall be the more glorious, but the Natives enlightened by us will return hither the tribute of their abundant thankfulness.”51 The text argues that advocacy for Indians will enhance England’s own case for salvation, just as underwriting mission will increase trade. Money becomes the medium of, and a metaphor for, mutual redemption. It provides the channel through which networks of sympathy are extended to include others by remaining focused on those closest to oneself. Collective missionary endeavor promotes profit, but collective identity also is the profit.
This economically articulated triangle of compassion between colonial missionaries, their metropolitan readers, and the Indians they were trying to save shares much with the erotic triangles studied by Eve Sedgwick and Rene Girard.52 Just as men often are portrayed in literature as manifesting attraction to each other through romantic rivalry for a feminine object, the writers of missionary texts expressed affinity and sought mutual benefit through their pity for Indians. In terms of the rhetorical categories developed by Aristotle, missionary writings rooted their pathos in their ethos, and they defined ethos largely as a matter of shared pathos.53 That is, these texts generated emotion (pathos) for their cause by establishing the character of the text’s author (ethos), and they established the author’s character by stressing his closeness—in situation, nationality, affect, and belief—to the audience. The pity for Indians that the audience was asked to feel was generated through affinity with the texts’ authors. Shared pity for Indians, in turn, fostered ties between British people on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to affectionate correspondences between individuals, collaborations between groups, and suggestions that the effort to save Indians souls united all Britons, in Britain and America, in a shared endeavor. Several marginal groups also claimed that missionary projects generated from shared pity for Indians would contribute to national solidarity and strength in order to assert their affective membership in a developing national community that might otherwise have ignored them. Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and other denominations each described missions in ways that made their work seem central to Britain, even as they described the multidenominational