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Seven: The Logic of Place
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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Williams’s vision of a pluralist community was formed in a context where the problem of coexistence was shaped by the con®icts between radically different but also well-established communities. Although young, the New England colonies increased and grew stable with the help of their Native neighbors and a constant in®ux of immigrants. During Williams’s time, although Native communities were devastated by disease and war, many nevertheless remained strong and together represented a majority of the population along the coast and its river valleys. The question for Williams was not primarily one of how to sustain the diverse communities, but how to provide for their peaceful coexistence. When he began his pamphlet The Examiner Defended with the metaphor of a ship, Williams offered a logic of relations in terms of which some aspects of coexistence could be understood in light of present shared interests and others in light of fostering ongoing difference. The “Ship of the Commonwealth,” he says, “must share her weals and woes in common.” Those on board the ship “all agree (in their commanding orders, and obeying stations) to give and take the Word, to stand to the Helm and Compass, to the Sails and Tacking, to the Guns and Artillery” (Williams 1963, 203). And yet on this same ship, the “Consciences of the Passengers, whether Jews, Turks, Persians, Pagans, Papists, Protestants” are nevertheless to be treated with “kindness and countenance” (Williams 1963, 209). The shared interests and the diverse community were related in the same way that the ship as a whole relates to its private cabins. In this case, the cabins are not to be understood as “private” worlds in the sense that they are not or cannot be shared, but rather as marking the presence of distinctly different communities. Passengers can be expected to support the smooth operation of the ship as a present shared interest, while in their cabins they remain “Pagans” or “Turks” through their distinctive 133 c h a p t e r se v e n The Logic of Place practices and beliefs. The sharp division between state and church that seems implied by the metaphor is not from this perspective either sharp or permanent, but rather marks a functional separation. The state is a changing collaboration that serves to preserve and promote the distinctive communities that make it up. As a result, the communities themselves , as lived interactions framed by history, shared attitudes, and future aspirations, form the ground both for the state and for the identity of individuals. The ship metaphor marks an adaptation of a European conception of social context to an alternative vision of coexistence. Just as the functional relations of wunnégin framed coexistence for the Narragansett , the functional relations aboard the ship of the commonwealth reconstructed coexistence for Williams. By the end of King Philip’s War in 1676, however, the context had changed. While many European and Native people still sought coexistence , others, particularly those who viewed themselves as part of the story of Christian progress, continued to press inland relying on the practices of slaughter, exclusion, and removal rather than either conversion or coexistence in their contact with Native peoples. During the last years of the seventeenth century, the English colonies of the Northeast consolidated politically and militarily even as they grew and became home to new German immigrants. Faced with new European in®uences and an apparent decline in the commitment to “original” Puritan Christianity , the shape of the westward colonial movement changed again in the 1730s. Now, the desire for land along parts of the western border of the European colonies combined with the evangelical efforts of a new movement: the Great Awakening. For those Native and European people who still recognized the importance of coexistence, it was no longer to be understood as the problem of ¤nding ways for ®ourishing communities to coexist peacefully. Instead, it was a problem of ¤nding ways to resist the destruction of diverse communities in the face of territorial expansion and religious evangelism. Signi¤cantly, the Great Awakening did not begin in the urban areas like Boston, which were isolated from contact with Native people. It began on the borders of European settlement where the European American leadership faced nations from the Algonquian and Iroquoian traditions, the same traditions that, in league with Roger Williams , had challenged the authority and power of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One branch of the new movement emerged along the Connecticut River, the old border of...