Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved

This chapter analyses slavery and missions together for the first time in Edwardsean scholarship. From 1731 to 1758 Edwards not only owned slaves but also advocated missions among Native Americans. He helped found the Stockbridge mission then assumed its pulpit. Immersed in a missionary network, he wrote David Brainerd’s biography and launched Gideon Hawley’s lifetime of mission labour. Many Indians were enslaved after King Philip’s War; many fell into bondage or servitude in the mid-eighteenth century. Native Americans in Edwards’s time feared enslavement. The Atlantic slave system swelled in the mid-eighteenth century. Slaveholder, yet opponent of the slave trade, Edwards developed typological arguments that criticized English settlers for their depredations against Native Americans. In this, Edwards honed a theological instrument later wielded by abolitionists. Edwardsean typology undermined biblical proslavery arguments, clearing a path for modern abolitionism as opposition to enslavement in all times and places.

The Role Which Religion Played during the King Philip’s War

King Philip’s war (1675-1676) was arguably one of the most brutal and bloody conflicts in the Atlantic world. As a war fought among the English colonial forces and the Natives, King Philip’s war was an important turning point, as it secured the colony’s position over the Natives. Most of the Indian resistance were killed or enslaved during the war. The rest of the Indian population after the war experienced an extreme demographic decline through frequent dislocation and death (Note 1). However, the war ended with the death of Metacom, the sachem of the Wampanoag tribe. The war was victorious for the English, as it undermined Native military strength and political sovereignty and reduced future resistance to expansion, giving the English control over some of the colonies and Native reservations (Note 2).Many historians narrate the war by focusing on the causes and effects of this brutal conflict. However, this paper looks at the different roles that religion played in the war, considering the motives and effects of the evangelization, and the effects of the war on Christian Indians. This paper also examines how the Puritan evangelists and religion contributed and perpetuated the war through using evangelization to create cultural divisions within the tribal communities and creating strong racial distinctions among the English colonists and the Indians. Throughout the war, religion perpetuated and prolonged the war by creating religious and cultural divisions among the tribes; by giving strong justification for anti-Indian bias; and by giving both sides confidence that they had God’s blessing.

Cartographic Intertextuality: Reading The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson with Geographic Information Systems

The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson from 1682 is not only famous – or infamous – for its brutal descriptions of the armed conflicts of King Philip’s War, it is also a colonial document that contains both religious as well as spatial representations of Native American territories. This article proposes to analyze this entanglement of space and text with a combination of digital text analysis tools and geographic information systems (GIS). Applying the potentials of such technologies and methods to the study of captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s opens up new opportunities to better understand the interaction of writing and space in colonial New England.

“Jethro, Who Saved Taunton”: An African Man's Captivity Narrative during King Philip's War

This article examines the experiences of Jethro, an enslaved African man who was captured by the Narragansetts during King Philip's War. While captive, Jethro used his bilingualism to gather information about the Narragansett's war plans and then escaped and relayed them to the English. Jethro was granted freedom for this wartime service and went on to purchase property in the North End of Boston. He was representative of the charter generation of enslaved persons who showed that attitudes about race in seventeenth-century Massachusetts were still being formed. This essay further demonstrates how Jethro's story was appropriated by colonial writers at the time for their own unique purposes. Analyzing Jethro's story provides an opportunity to foreground Africanness in American captivity narratives.

Becoming a “Nation of Statesmen”: The Mohicans' Incorporation into the Iroquois League, 1671–1675

Using oral traditions alongside the documentary record uncovers a little known peace forged between the Mohicans and the Iroquois League on the eve of King Philip's War. The resulting alliance altered the regional balance of power and provided the foundation for Mohican diplomacy for the next century and a half.

What Does Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Do?

David Silverman offers a critical appraisal of two prizewinning works in Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks, and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast, by Christine M. DeLucia. Silverman’s review treats the methodology associated with NAIS with some skepticism, offering the opportunity for a lively discussion about the merits and perils of community-engaged history scholarship. Four scholars of Native American history, including DeLucia, respond, defending new approaches to Indigenous history represented by these recent works.