Experience Mayhew's Indian Converts: A Cultural Edition

Introduction

Introduction NO A little over a hundred years after the first English interactions with the Wampanoags at Plymouth Plantation, Puritan missionary Experience Mayhew published the life stories of four generations of Wampanoag men, women, and children who had lived on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The history was unprecedented in scope and content. Although written in English for a primarily British audience, Mayhew’s Indian Converts (1727) drew upon the Wampanoag sermons, oral history, and dying speeches that he and his family had been collecting and translating for over eighty years (1642–1727). A fluent speaker of Wôpanâak,1 Mayhew dedicated his own life to ministering to the Wampanoag community on the island, like the previous three generations of Mayhews before him. By publishing Indian Converts , he hoped not only to raise interest and money for missionary activities but also to save souls: perhaps by reading about the lives of Christianized Wampanoags, his white readers would repent and rededicate themselves to the spiritual path of Calvinism. Whatever Mayhew’s original intent, today his history provides the most extensive information we have about any Algonquian community during the early English colonial period. Mayhew’s text includes detailed biographies of twenty-two Wampanoag ministers, twenty “good men,” thirty women, and twenty-two pious children . In addition, Indian Converts contains three appendixes with brief biographies of a further eight ministers, seventeen good men, and nine women. These 128 total biographies cover four generations of converts who lived on the island between the early 1600s and the 1720s, when Mayhew was writing. Although he recorded the life stories only of people who had already died and had lived exemplary lives, he frequently mentioned not only prominent Wampanoag Christians who were still living but also notso -exemplary Wampanoags who served as foils to his heroes and heroines. We have no comparable series of biographies for any colonial community in 1 Wôpanâak is an Algonquian language that is closely related to Massachusett, the language used in Natick and several other New England praying towns. New England, let alone any other Native American community. Moreover, Mayhew’s personal knowledge of both the people and the language they spoke makes his history stand out from other tracts published by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.2 For readers of Mayhew’s own day, Indian Converts provided more than just interesting historical information: its publication was an important typological event. On October 9, 1727, a small advertisement appeared for Mayhew ’s tome in the Boston News-Letter noting that the book was “Just arrived from London, and neatly bound.” Colonists such as Rev. Jonathan Edwards scanned early periodicals for natural and human incidents—including book publications—that could be “signs of the potential fulfillment of biblical prophecies and the expansion of the kingdom of God.”3 Although some advertisements in the News-Letter were about runaway slaves, misbehaving wives, or land for sale, others—such as the advertisement for Mayhew’s work—were more clearly framed as omens and lessons.4 In the 1720s and 1730s, New England Protestants increasingly saw themselves as part of an international war against Catholicism in which Protestant missionary success would be an important harbinger of the second coming of Christ and the millennium. For ministers Benjamin Colman, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Wadsworth, Joseph Sewall, and other backers of Mayhew’s book, Indian Converts was an essential confirmation that Protestants—not Catholics— were winning the theological war for America, and clear evidence that New England was doing important missionary work.5 Written on the cusp of the first Great Awakening, Indian Converts helps to illuminate the theological upheaveals that rocked New England in both English and Native communities. I see the book’s distinctiveness and significance in the context of two theological shifts: (1) the changing landscape of New England Puritanism leading up to the first Great Awakening, and (2) the changing landscape of Wampanoag cultural and religious life. 2 introduction 2 Established in 1649 and also known as the Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel in New England, this society mainly supported missionaries who espoused a Calvinist and Congregational creed. Missionary John Eliot published eleven pamphlets between 1643 and the 1670s which, in 2003, Michael Clark collected and reprinted as The Eliot Tracts. Eliot, however, was not nearly so fluent as Mayhew in Algonquian languages, nor was he raised near any Native communities. 3 Kidd, Protestant Interest, 57. 4 The advertisement following...