The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier

Introduction

Introduction In the history of early Maine’s religious culture, few families stand out like the Wheelwrights. The first settlers to bear the name were dissenters , radical antinomian Puritans and associates of Anne Hutchinson who, unwelcome in Massachusetts Bay and having few other options , came to settle in the remote province in 1643.1 In Maine the Wheelwrights prospered and multiplied, and the family’s prestige grew in proportion to its size. For generations, they furthered the cause of godly society in northern New England as ministers, militia captains, and civic leaders. A few Wheelwrights, however, made their mark in less conventional ways.The intertwined stories of two of them begin in November 1753 when Nathaniel Wheelwright left Boston for French Canada on a mission to redeem captive Protestant children who had been seized in the most recent round of the violence that frequently wracked Maine’s English settlements. Two months later, this heir to New England Puritanism could be found in seemingly unlikely circumstances: drinking wine and eating sweets in the company of Soeur Esther Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant Jésus, a nun of the Ursuline convent in Quebec.2 1 Figure 1. Nathaniel Wheelwright, by John Singleton Copley (ca. 1750). Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In eighteenth-century North America, such an encounter— between a Protestant man and a Catholic woman, a layman and a cloistered nun, a New Englander charged with saving fellow Protestants from popish captivity and a Canadian who embodied Catholicism ’s extremes—was an unusual occurrence indeed. What brought these two together, however, was a consequence of the circumstances of religious life and culture in early American borderland communities .To Nathaniel Wheelwright, this cloistered nun was no random acquaintance. Named Esther at birth, she had been abducted from Maine as a child during Queen Anne’s War. When the opportunity arose, she refused to come back; instead, she took the vows and veil of the Ursuline order. In doing so, Soeur (later Mère) Esther made a conspicuous religious commitment to Catholicism, a form of Christianity that in most ways was considered the antithesis to the professed beliefs of both her antinomian ancestors and her living New England Protestant relatives.3 The latter included her nephew Nathaniel Wheelwright, whose father was Soeur Esther’s brother. Soeur Esther’s transformation from Puritan girl to Catholic woman resulted from the Province of Maine’s unique status as both an outpost of New England culture and a crossroads for the cultures of others. Much of this cross-cultural contact was a consequence of violent frontier warfare involving English and French and Native American forces which devastated Maine’s frontier communities.The last years of the seventeenth century (termed decennium luctuosum, or “sorrowful decade,” by Cotton Mather) brought violence, death, and loss of family and property to Maine’s English settlements.These conditions persisted in varying degrees of intensity for three more decades , spanning 1688 to 1727.The destruction was more than physical : the conflicts with Catholic French and Indian forces also took a heavy toll on spiritual stability and orthodoxy. This instability was exacerbated by Maine’s preexisting conditions . As an intercolonial crossroads, Maine had long been regarded as a “pagan skirt” of New England.4 The persistent violence of 1688 through 1727 reified this perception, as the forces of rival Christian visions curtailed efforts to create in Maine an extension of New England ’s godly society. Introduction 3 Contemporary witnesses to the decennium luctuosum and beyond feared the consequences of converging Christianities in times of war. Writing from a Massachusetts threatened by the loss of its charter— a consequence of the ill-fated Dominion of New England and Glorious Revolution, and the aforementioned frontier conflicts—Increase Mather fretted that the influence of Catholicism had already seeped into English Protestantism.5 Mather called this spiritual contagion the “spice of popery,” and he warned that, if left unchecked, it would infect New England’s purer Protestant religious culture.6 Both Mathers’ concerns were well placed. Decades of human movement and interaction, warfare, religious options, and discrete in- fluences shaped a unique religious culture in Maine that reflected the province’s diverse Christian population. How this happened and the consequences of Maine’s position as a temporal and literal crossroads for converging Christianities are the subjects of this book. Early Maine’s religious culture defies conventional perceptions of religious...