Chapter 2: The Wrong Way to Spread the Gospel. Jesus commanded His apostles, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you." Matthew 28:19-20. So Jesus expected His disciples to journey to other lands and preach the Gospel.
According to the colonial charters, one of the primary reasons the English came to America in the first place was to bring the Gospel to the Indians.
For example, the very first colonial charter, that of Virginia, states that one purpose of that colony was for "the furtherance of so noble a work which may, by the providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the glory of His divine majesty in propagating the Christian religion to such people as still live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God." Similarly, the charter for Massachusetts invests the government there with the authority "for the directing, ruling, and disposing
of all other matters and things, whereby our said people, who are inhabitants there, may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed as their good life and orderly conduct may win and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith, which in our royal intention and the adventurer's free profession is the principal purpose of this plantation." What I mean by the term "Christians." Before going any further, I need to explain
that when I use the term "Christians" throughout this book, I'm referring to men and women who professed to be Christians.
I am by no means implying that the people who called themselves Christians were living by Jesus' teachings. In fact, the primary message of this book is that most of the colonists who professed to be Christians were, in fact, not living by Jesus' teachings. However, I'm afraid you'll find this book quite tedious if I keep using the phrase "professing Christians" over and over again. Furthermore, I don't pretend to know with certainty whom Jesus has accepted into His kingdom and whom He has rejected.
For that reason, I'll stick with the term "Christians." America's Original Inhabitants. The part of America where the English settled wasn't vacant land. Various Indian tribes laid claim to nearly all of it as their hunting and foraging grounds. Historians estimate that there were probably about two million Native Americans living east of the Mississippi before the Europeans came to America. Each tribe was ruled by a chief known as a Sachem.
Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrim Settlers, wrote this about the Sachems: "Every Sachem knows how far the bounds and limits of his own country extend and what is his own proper inheritance. Out of that land, if any of his men desires land to plant their corn, he gives them as much as they can use, and he sets them their boundaries. Within this circuit, whoever hunts, if they kill any venison, they bring him his fee, which is the fore parts of the deer, if it is killed on the land.
However, if it is killed in the water, then they bring him the skin thereof. The great Sachems or kings know their own bounds or limits of land as well as the boundaries of the rest of the Sachems." So even though much of the land in the eastern United States appeared vacant to the English, it all lay within the boundaries of some Indian tribe's territory. It wasn't free land up for the grabbing. The Policy of the English Toward Savages.
When the English first thought about establishing settlements in the New World, Sir George Peckham articulated the official policy of the English government in a work entitled The Advantages of Colonization. He said that the Europeans were not free just to take the lands from the savages. Instead, he said that only under two conditions would it be lawful for Christians to establish colonies in lands inhabited by savages.
The first condition is when Christians, by the good feelings and willing assent of the savages, are allowed by the savages to have quiet possession. The second is when Christians are unjustly repulsed and they seek to attain and maintain the right for which they come. That, of course, is nothing more than a clever way of saying that it's always right for English Christians to establish settlements among savages. After all, what other situations could there be than the two that Peckham described?
Either the native people would voluntarily allow the English to plant settlements in their lands, or the native people wouldn't allow the English to plant settlements and would try to repulse them. To be sure, the English wanted to have good relations with the Native American inhabitants. They didn't come to America with the design of enslaving or conquering the Indians. They wanted to live peacefully side by side with them, and they hoped to civilize them and convert them to Christianity.
Nevertheless, the official English policy went on to say, "But if after these good and fair means are used, the savages nevertheless will not be satisfied, but barbarously practice violence either in repelling the Christians from their ports and landings, or in hindering them afterwards from enjoying the rights for which both painfully and lawfully they have adventured themselves there, then in such a case it is no breach of justice for Christians to defend themselves, to pursue revenge with force, and to do
whatever is necessary for attaining their safety.
For it is allowable by all laws in such distresses to resist violence with violence." John Cotton, the famous Puritan minister, set forth a similar doctrine in a booklet entitled The Divine Right to Occupy the Land. Now, God makes room for a people when He makes a country, though not altogether void of inhabitants, yet void in that place where they reside.
Where there is a vacant place, there is liberty for the sons of Adam or Noah to come and inhabit, though they neither buy it nor ask permission, so that it is free from that common grant for any to take possession of vacant countries.
Indeed, no nation is to drive out another without special commission from heaven, such as the Israelites had, unless the natives do unjustly wrong them and will not recompense the wrongs done in a peaceable way, and then they may right themselves by lawful war and subdue the country unto themselves. The Puritan settlers in New England followed John Cotton's policy to a T.
They didn't ask permission from the Indians to settle in Massachusetts, and when the Indians resisted them, they pointed to that resistance as an excuse to take murderous vengeance on the Indians until they had subdued the country unto themselves. Give us something more sensational. When a good friend of mine reviewed the first draft of this book, he told me, "David, I was expecting something a bit more sensational at the start.
You bring out some astounding issues further in the book, but the matters you bring up in the first couple of chapters aren't particularly shocking. Maybe you can explain to your readers that you're a retired attorney and that you're looking only at hard, confirmable facts. You're not trying to stuff the book with lurid details about exceptional incidents whose historicity may be suspect." His words gave me much food for thought.
I had to agree with him that what I've shared with you so far isn't particularly shocking, nor has it meant to be. But I had to ask myself, why isn't it shocking? After all, we have a situation where people from one country came in droves to a foreign land and then slaughtered the native people when those natives futilely tried to resist. In the end, the invaders took over the whole continent and virtually exterminated the original inhabitants. Why don't we find that abhorrent?
One reason is that we like to think of the whole matter in euphemistic language that enables us to soften and justify the issue in our minds. In other words, we mentally like to cloak the extermination of the Indians in innocuous language similar to that used by John Cotton and Sir George Peckham. What the English really meant. The English policy toward the Indians becomes shocking only when we recognize what it really meant.
The English Christians were saying that they had the right to come to America and settle on any land they chose that appeared to be vacant. The native inhabitants would, of course, object to this and attack them. Once the natives did this, the English had the right to annihilate the natives in retaliation. That's what the English Christians were saying, but couching it in innocent language. It took someone as bold as Theodore Roosevelt, the famous U.S.
president, to express what the colonists actually believed and where their innocuous policies finally ended. Roosevelt did this not because he condemned the colonists, but because he shared the same view toward the Indians as they did, and he wasn't the least bit ashamed of it. In the late 1800s, Roosevelt wrote a four-volume history of America entitled The Winning of the West. In typical Roosevelt fashion, he defended the policies of the white settlers in straightforward language.
If what I've said so far hasn't shocked you, what Roosevelt wrote should. The white settlers were unflinchingly bent on seizing the land over which the Indians roamed, but which they did not in any true sense own or occupy. In return, the Indians were determined at all costs and hazards to keep the men of chain and compass and of axe and rifle and the forest-felling settlers who followed them out of their vast and lonely hunting grounds. Nothing but the actual shock of battle could decide the quarrel.
Nor was there any alternative to these Indian wars. It is idle folly to speak of them as being the fault of the United States or colonial government. And it is even more idle to say that they could have been averted by treaty. Here and there, under exceptional circumstances or when a given tribe was feeble and unwarlike, the whites might gain the ground by a treaty entered into of their own free will by the Indians without the least duress.
But this was not possible with warlike and powerful tribes when once they realized that they were threatened with serious encroachment on their hunting grounds. No treaties, whether between civilized nations or not, can ever be regarded as binding in perpetuity. With changing conditions, circumstances may arise which render it not only expedient, but imperative and honorable to abrogate them.
Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all important that it should be won for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations.
All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.
It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which apply between stable and cultured communities as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are are the people who stay at home.
Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination to understand the racial importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands. So they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands as once it was itself misjudged. The homestaying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Afrikaner his conquest of Matabele land.
Likewise, the homestaying American of the Atlantic states dislikes to see the western miners and cattlemen win the Sioux hunting grounds for their own use. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end shape their own destinies. The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.
The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Māori. In each case, the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison.
Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little consequence whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to the Austrian Kaiser or Italian king. However, it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow Aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant world races.
Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last 2,000 years is lost.
It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without compassion, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes in point of hideous brutality. Their armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops.
They are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their somber foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.
All of those horrendous things that Roosevelt described were the inevitable result of the innocent-sounding policies that Sir George Peckham and John Cotton articulated. Those hideous things are what the Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the other colonists all implemented. The English policies guaranteed that the white men and the Indians would not be able to live together in peace. Because they couldn't live together, one side had to go, and that was the Indians.
We're talking about genocide, not some minor sin. So, in light of how things turned out for the native inhabitants, I think we need to ask the question, was it right for English Christians to come to America in the first place?