42 For the history and text of the Calvinistic “Lambeth Articles” see Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom vol. 3, p. 523.
43 Meade, Old Churches vol. I. pp. 77. We gain insight into the missions efforts of Whittaker from his “Tractate by Master Alexander Whittaker,” written at Henrico in 1613.
“They (the Indians) acknowledge that there is a great good God, but know him not, having the eyes of their understanding as yet blinded; wherefore they serve the Devil for fear, after a most base manner, sacrificing sometime (as I have heard) their own children to him. I have sent one image of their god to the Council in England, which is painted on one side of a toadstool, much like unto a deformed monster. Their priests (whom they call Quickosoughs) are no other but such as our English witches are. They live naked in body, as if their shame of their sin deserved no covering. Their names are as naked as their body: they esteem it virtue to lye, deceive, and steal, as their master the Devil teacheth them.
“Their men are not so simple as some have supposed them, for they are of body lusty, strong, and very nimble; they are a very understanding generation, - quicke of apprehension, sudden in their dispatches, subtile in their dealings, exquisite in their intentions, and industrious in their labour. I suppose the world hath no better marksmen than they be: they will kill birds flying, fishes swimming, and beasts running. They shoot also with marvelous strength: they shot one of our men, being unarmed, quite through the body and nailed both his arms to his body with one arrow: one of their children also, about the age of twelve or thirteen years, killed a bird with his arrow, in my sight. The service of their god is answerable to their life, being performed with great fear and attention, and many strange dumb shews used in the same, stretching forth their limbs and straining their body, much like to the counterfeit women in England, who fancy themselves bewitched or possessed of some evil spirit. They stand in great awe of the Quickosoughs or priests, which are a generation of vipers, even Satan’s own brood. The manner of their life is much like to the Popish hermits of our age; for they live along in the woods, in houses sequestered from the common course of men; neither may any man be suffered to come into their house, or speaks to them, but when the priest doth call him.
“He taketh no care for his victuals; for all such kind of things, both bread and water, &c., are brought into a place near his cottage and there left, which he fetcheth for his proper needs. If they would have raine, or have lost any thing, they have recourse to him, who conjureth for them and many times prevaileth. If they be sick, he is their physician; if they be wounded, he sucketh them. At his command they make war and peace, neither do they any thing of moment without him. Finally, there is a civil government among them which they strictly observe, and show thereby that the law of nature dwelleth in them; for they have a rude kinde of commonwealth and rough government, wherein they both honour and obey their king, parents, and governors, both greater and lesser. They observe the limits of their own possessions. Murder is scarcely heard of; adultery and other offences severely punished.” (Meade, Old Churches vol. I. pp. 134-135.)
44 The intermarriage of the Indian princess and the English settler brought on an era of peace in Virginia. But there were storm clouds brewing both in the mother country and secretly in the council fires of Powhatan’s chiefs. The Reverend Peter Fontaine, corresponding with his brother in England while defending intermarriage with the Indians as a means of their civilization and Christianization, explains why the practice had ceased among the Virginians:
But this, our wise politicians at home put an effectual stop to at the beginning of our settlement here, for when they heard that Rolph had married Pocahontas, it was deliberated in Council whether he had not committed high treason by so doing, that is, marrying an Indian princess; and had not some troubles intervened, which put a stop to the enquiry, the poor man might have been hanged up for doing the most just, the most natural, the most generous and politic action, that ever was done on this side of the water. This put an effectual stop to all intermarriages afterwards. (Meade, Old Churches Vol I. p. 82.)
Pocahontas died while in England, although her family returned to America. Pocahontas’ family legacy has included many illustrious American descendants, most notably, President Woodrow Wilson. But the frowns of the English leaders on the intermarriage of Virginians and Indians ended this form of “generous” diplomacy. Nevertheless, the good news of the gospel’s advance in the wilds of the new world prompted responses of joy. Plans began to establish a University in Virginia. Gifts flowed in for the building up of the church across the ocean. In 1622, a clergyman was requested to bring a Thanksgiving message in London for all of God’s mercies to the Virginian colony.
45 The struggle to Christianize the Indians was captured in a letter by Colonel Byrd: “The whole number of people belonging to the Nottoway Town, if you include women and children, amounts to about two hundred. These are the only Indians of any consequence now remaining within the limits of Virginia. The rest are either removed or dwindled to a very inconsiderable number, either by destroying one another, or else by smallpox or other diseases; though nothing has been so fatal to them as their ungovernable passion for rum, with which, I am sorry to say it, they have been but too liberally supplied by the English that live near them. And here I must lament the bad success Mr. Boyle’s charity has hitherto had toward converting any of these poor heathen to Christianity. Many children of our neighboring Indians have been brought up in the College of William and Mary. They have been taught to read and write, and have been carefully instructed in the Christian religion till they came to be men; yet after they returned home, instead of civilizing and converting the rest, they have immediately relapsed into infidelity and barbarism themselves. And some of them, too, have made the worst use of the knowledge they acquired among the English, by employing it against their benefactors. Besides, as they unhappily forget all the good they learn and remember the ill, they are apt to be more vicious and disorderly than the rest of their countrymen. I ought not to quit this subject without doing justice to the great prudence of Colonel Spottswood in this affair. This gentleman was Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia when Carolina was engaged in a bloody war with the Indians. At that critical time it was thought expedient to keep watchful eye upon our tributary savages, whom we knew had nothing to keep them to their duty but their fears. Then it was that he demanded of each nation a competent number of their great men’s children to be sent to the College, where they served as so many hostages for the good behaviour of the rest, and, at the same time, were themselves principled in the Christian religion. He also placed a schoolmaster among the Saponi Indians, at a salary of fifty pounds annum, to instruct their children. …I am sorry I cannot give a better account of the state of the poor Indians with respect to Christianity, although a great deal of pains has been taken and still continues to be take with them. For my part, I must be of the opinion, as I hinted before, that there is but one way of converting these poor infidels and reclaiming them from barbarity, and that is charitably to intermarry with them, according to the modern policy of the most Christian King in Canada and Louisiana. Had the English done this at the first settlement of the Colony, the infidelity of the Indians had been worn out at this day, with their dark complexions, and the country had swarmed with more people than insects. It was certainly and unreasonable nicety that prevented their entering into so good-natured an alliance. All nations of men have the same natural dignity, and we all know that very bright talents may be lodged under a very dark skin. The principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the different opportunities of improvement. The Indians by no means want understanding, and are in figure tall and well proportioned. Even their copper-coloured complexions would admit of blanching, if not in the first, at the furthest in the second generation. I may safely venture to say, the Indian women would have made altogether as honest wives for the first planters as the damsels they used to purchase from aboard ships. It is strange, therefore, that any good Christian should have refused a wholesome straight bedfellow when he might have had so fair a portion with her as the merit of saving her soul.” (Meade, Old Churches, vol. I. pp. 283ff.)
46 The marriage of the Princess to the Englishman created a sense of peace and well being between their formerly warring peoples. But things forever changed for the worse on March 22nd of that year. Unbeknown to the settlers that began to spread out without fear along the James River, a massacre had been secretly planned for a period of years. Bishop Meade describes this as “one of the most unexpected and direful calamities which had ever befallen the Colony”:
On one and the same day the attack was made on every place. Jamestown, and some few points near to it, alone escaped, having received warning of the intended attack just in time to prepare for defenses. Besides the destruction of houses by fire, between three and four hundred persons were put to death in the most cruel manner. (Meade, Old Churches, vol. I. p. 85.)
The previous spiritual calls by the clergy and the crown for the evangelization of the Indians were instantly silenced by clamorous demands for merciless revenge to protect the devastated and vulnerable colonists. The East India Company that had strenuously worked to build the colony and good relationships with the Native Americans expressed the outrage that gripped the betrayed Anglicans:
We condemn their bodies, the saving of whose souls we have so zealously affected. Root them out from being any longer a people,— so cursed a nation, ungrateful for all benefits and incapable of all goodness,—or remove them so far as to be out of danger or fear. War perpetually, without peace or truce. Yet spare the young for servants. Starve them by destroying their corn, or reaping it for your own use. Pluck up their weirs (fishing-traps.) Obstruct their hunting. Employ foreign enemies against them at so much a head. Keep a band of your own men continually upon them, to be paid by the Colony, which is to have half of their captives and plunder. He that takes any of their chiefs to be doubly rewarded. He that takes Opochancono (the chief and brother of old Powhatan, who was now dead) shall have a great and singular reward.
Later an order was given, “The Indians being irreconcilable enemies, every commander, on the least molestation, to fall upon them.” The tragic blueprint for dealing with the Indian tribes of North America was thus first written by the devastated colonists. What then was to become of the colony’s vision, said so well by the King’s patent?:
So noble a work may, by the Providence of God, hereafter tend to the glorie of his divine majestie, in propagating of Christian religion to such people as sit in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the infidels and savages (living in those parts) to human civility and quiet government. (Meade, Old Churches Vol I. p. 63.)
Bishop Meade describes the sense of the mother country at this nadir of despair,
The missionary effort was considered as a failure; the conversion, or even civilization, of the Indian, was regarded as hopeless. . . . The Indians were now objects of dread, of hate, of persecution. A sentiment and declaration is ascribed to one of the last of the ministers who came over, “that the only way to convert the Indians was to cut the throats of their chief men and priests.” (Meade, Old Churches, vol. I. p. 87.)
47 Although the numbers of settlers continued to grow, there was a clear decline in the spiritual health of the clergy in the post-Pocahontas era. This historical reality was written in laws aimed at the clergy. “Laws now seem to be required to keep the ministers from cards, dice, drinking, and such like things; and even to constrain them to preach and administer the communion as often as was proper,— yea, even to visit the sick and dying.” Meade, Old Churches, vol. I. p. 92.
48 See Alan Harding, The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion: A Sect in Action in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2003). This summary is dependent on the BBC’s Making History: The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/makhist/makhist7_prog5d.shtml. Lady Huntingdon appointed evangelist George Whitefield (1714-70) to be her chaplain. Whitefield began preaching in the fields to miners at Kingswood near Bristol after being prevented from preaching in the churches. When Whitefield’s ministry brought him to America, he became the first nationally famous preacher. James Hutson, the current Chief of the Manuscript Division of he Library of Congress, has compared the impact of Whitefield’s coming to America in the mid-1700’s to the British invasion of the Beatles in the1960’s. After her husband’s death, the Countess was called the “Elect Lady” of Methodism. She hoped to evangelize the upper class but when opposed by Anglicans she created her Connexion which Whitefield led from 1748. She developed chapels in connection with her residences, which she could accomplish because of her noble position. When she opened them for public evangelistic preaching, the Anglican Church resisted. So in 1781 her new movement left the Anglican fold.
The Countess proceeded to appoint evangelical ministers, but her determined efforts to win the souls of the nobility were not always welcomed. The Duchess of Buckingham declared that Lady Huntingdon’s doctrines were “strongly tinctured with impertinence toward their superiors. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches who crawl the earth.” Ultimately, Whitefield’s Calvinist theology led to a division between Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion and John Wesley, the Arminian (Anti-Calvinist) founder of the Methodist Church.
In all, Lady Huntingdon built sixty-four churches, targeting the aristocratic rich as well as a college for the education of her ministers. Most of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion chapels that remain are now part of the United Reform Church, though more than twenty chapels remain outside that Church, partly because they were owned by local trusts and could go the way trustees wanted. The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion still exists as a small denomination with twenty-five chapels in this country and is affiliated with the Evangelical Alliance.
49 Jackson & Twohig, The Diaries of George Washington. vol. 3..[November] 1774, November 5.
50 WGW, vol. 27, 8-10-1783. For the full range of correspondence and strategic plan development of the mission, see the Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series vol. 2 (W. W. Abbot ed, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) pp. 200, 205-218; 330-332; 386, 392-396.
51 Ibid., 27, 8-10-1783, note.
52 Ibid., vol. 37, 1-20-1799. To Reverend Bryan, Lord Fairfax, Washington wrote on January 20, 1799, “Lady Huntington as you may have been told was a correspondent of mine, and did me the honor to claim me as a relation; but in what degree, or by what connexion it came to pass, she did not inform me, nor did I ever trouble her Ladyship with an enquiry. The favourable sentiments which others, you say, have been pleased to express respecting me, cannot but be pleasing to a mind [ sic ] who always walked on a straight line, and endeavoured as far as human frailties, and perhaps strong passions, would enable him, to discharge the relative duties to his Maker and fellow-men, without seeking any indirect or left handed attempts to acquire popularity.”
53 WGW, vol. 27, 8-10-1783.
54 The letter continues: “I have been induced from this great object before me, to accept the obliging offers of Mr. James Jay (who was upon the point of embarking for America) to convey the outline of my design to each of the governors of those states, in which from nearest access to the Indian Nations and from soil and climate, a situation for many hundred families for the services of the Indians and the establishment of a people connected with me, should appear best. And whose object would be to support the Gospel, and render those missionaries sent by me for the Indians and their various ministrations among themselves, the more consistently useful for all.
“Should I be able to obtain a sufficient quantity of land suitable for such purposes, my intentions would be to transfer both my trust estate with all my own property in Georgia for this more extensive prospect, and which from the extreme heat of the climate renders the labours of missionaries there of little advantage. This with the poor and little, all I have to give on earth, has been long devoted to God, should so ever a happy a period arrive as in his tender mercy to us. We might be made the fortunate and honoured instruments in that great day approaching for calling the heathen nations as his inheritance, to the glorious light of the Gospel. Or should this offer any little prelude to so important an event, the hearts of all men for this purpose will be made subject. And as certainly no interested motives can appear, but on the contrary, a ready willingness to do and suffer his righteous will as his servants, so none can feel any effect from the accomplishment of the design but the increase of order, wealth, and the pure protestant faith, carrying the glad tidings of peace and Christian love over the earth.
“I indulge myself with the hope of your forgiveness for an openness so due to you on a subject that interesting in its views to me and also considering it as so great an honour done me by you admitting a representation for your attention, tho’ but for an hour.
“My kind and most excellent friend Mr. Fairfax undertakes the care of this packet for me. His noble just and equitable mind renders him the friend of my highest regard and his ever willing and important services engage me as are under the greatest obligation to him and who on all occasions has my first confidence.
“You must yet bear with me by the liberty I take in sending the copy of the letter to the governor and outlines of the plan, as no reasons to you on the subject is compatible with the just honour and respect you must ever claim from me.
“Could my best compliments and best wishes to Mrs. Washington be rendered acceptable, she would help to plead my pardon with you to this unreasonable long letter but which does certainly contain in meaning the truest and most faithful regard, from Sir, Yours and Mrs. Most devoted obedient and most humble servant S. Huntingdon’
March 20, 1784. George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 4. General Correspondence. 1697-1799 Selina S.
Hastings to George Washington, March 20, 1784, Image 324ff.
55 WGW 28: 2-27-1785.
56 Ibid., vol. 28, 1-25-1785.
57 Ibid., vol. 28, 2-8-1785.
58 Ibid., vol. 28, 6-30-1785.
59 Ibid., vol. 31, 10-25-1791. In Washington’s Third Address To Congress on October 25, 1791, he wrote: “… the Executive of the United States should be enabled to employ the means to which the Indians have been long accustomed for uniting their immediate Interests with the preservation of Peace. And that efficacious provision should be made for inflicting adequate penalties upon all those who, by violating their rights, shall infringe the Treaties, and endanger the peace of the Union. A System corresponding with the mild principles of Religion and Philanthropy towards an unenlightened race of Men, whose happiness materially depends on the conduct of the United States, would be as honorable to the national character as conformable to the dictates of sound policy.”
Compare President Washington’s letter to Reverend John Carroll, the first Roman Catholic Bishop in the United States, on April 10, 1792. “Sir: I have received and duly considered your memorial of the 20th. ultimo, on the subject of the instructing the Indians within, and contiguous to the United States, in the principles and duties of Christianity.
