Race, Imitation, and Forgetting in Benjamin Tompson’s New England Pastorals

Race has become an important focus of inquiry in early modern studies. What still remains less clear, however, is how and when we can establish theoretical connections between literature, ideas about race, and the British colonial cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Repeatedly, despite this early period’s rich literary evidence of broad and flexible racial vocabularies and of deeply racialized thinking, scholars have still tended to categorize race as a more modern idea—the product of the eighteenth century (Hannaford 187–233) or of the full development of the slave trade (Chaplin). The centuries that saw the beginnings of England’s Atlantic empire are ironically a less frequent choice for analysis of how colonialism inflected race (Loomba and Burton). To be sure, part of this gap probably reflects a certain methodological uncertainty; Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system analysis insisted on viewing the emergence of capital as a global phenomenon, but had little to say about literature or culture, for example (Loomba discusses these methodological issues). While insights borrowed from such disciplines as African American cultural studies and critical race theory have proven foundational to many discussions of race in Renaissance literature, their roots in analysis developed from the study of the United States may make them less useful when transferred to the pre-Revolutionary existence of separate colonial cultures along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean (but see Hill). Nor is the black-white binary that was foundational to critical race theory equally relevant across all these colonial cultures. While intermarriage between whites and blacks was criminalized in Virginia as early as 1680, Winthrop Jordan believed that by 1680, there were no more than “a few hundred” blacks in all of New England (66).

One way of closing the gap of time and method between early modern texts and postcolonial readings as we seek to analyze how these texts transmit and codify race is to attempt more fully to read them within the global flow of a new world system, a system manifesting itself through processes of circulation and return rather than only through a one-way traffic from present to past, from metropolis to colonial periphery. The colonial poetry of Benjamin Tompson (1642–1714) takes its place in the global flow of cultural goods as it turns to the resources of classical literary genre to express its new circumstances of colonial location and relationship—in the new world of Massachusetts (where he was born and educated), in the bond between colonial subject and representatives of the Crown, and, at its most troubled, in the relationship between colonists and Indians. Tompson was in his early thirties during King Philip’s War of 1675–76, the last and most violent of New England’s colonial Indian wars. His appeals to his mixed classical genres—elegy, pastoral, georgic—as he seeks to comprehend the nature of New England life and the traumatic fact of a war that killed a greater proportion of the population than any other in American history speak to what Edward Said called “the authority of recognizable cultural formations” (12). Tompson’s memorializations of the New England present become culturally visible through the literary resources of a far more ancient past.

My discussion of Tompson’s attempts to produce classicized versions of the war and of the colonial society that succeeded it follows from Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, which studies the war in relation to language and literacy: what the colonists wrote about it, how they defined themselves and their works in opposition to Spanish imperium in the New World, how writing about the war depicts a contest for meaning in which only one set of adversaries had access to the written language that was so fundamental to colonial justifications and characterizations of empire. Lepore believes that the end of the war led to drawing “new, firmer boundaries between English and Indian people, between English and Indian land, and between what it meant to be ‘English’ and what it meant to be ‘Indian’” (xiii). But she also notes how tenuous and indefinite such boundaries must...