USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 36
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Eliot says that an Indian taken in the Pequot wars, and who lived in Dorchester, was the first native " whom he used to teach him words, and to be his interpreter." He took the most unwearied pains in his strange lessons from this uncouth teacher, finding progress very slow and baffling, receiving no aid from the other tongues which he had learned and taught in England and which were so differently constituted, inflected, and augmented. Though he is regarded as having gained an amazing mastery of the Indian language, he frequently, even at the close of a half century in his work, avows and laments his lack of skill in it. He secured from time to time what he calls the more " nimble-witted" natives, young or grown, to live with him in Roxbury, and to accompany him on his visits, to interchange with him words and ideas. A beautiful tribute was borne to him by Shepard, of Cambridge, who said that while some of the English exceeded Eliot in con- verse with the Indians about common matters, trade, &c., " in sacred lan- gnage, about the holy things of God, Mr. Eliot excels any other of the English." Differences of judgment have been expressed as to the capacity
I [An account of his ancestry is given in " The Pilgrim Fathers of Nazing," in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1874. The will of his father, Bennett Elliott, with notes, is given in the Heraldic Journal, iv. 182. His descend- ants are given in W. S. Porter's Genealogy of the Eliots, New Haven, 1854. The tabular pedigree given in Drake's Boston was prepared by William HJ. Whitmore, who had printed ten copies of it in a somewhat different form, previously, in I857. He has also traced the family in the NV. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1869. The earliest life of Eliot is Cotton Mather's, 1691, afterwards embodied in his Magnalia, which is largely bor- rowed from by Dunton, who describes a visit to Eliot in 1686. Dunton's Letters, p. 192; Drake, Town of Roxbury, p. 185. Danker's Journal,
16So, also gives an account of an interview. It is printed in the Long Island Hist. Soc. Coll., and extracted from in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., May, 1874. There are various later lives of Eliot,-one by Convers Francis ; another in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. viii. ; one in the Methodist Magazine, 18IS; others by Dearborn, Thornton, and N. Adams, and a sketch by Miss Vonge in her Pioneers and Founders. A paper by the Rev. Martin Moore on Eliot and his converts in the Amer. Quarterly Register is reprinted in Beach's Indian Mis- cellany. Cf. Biglow's Hist. of Natick, and the accounts of Natick and Newton in the History of Middlesex County, ii. The general historians, Hubbard, Palfrey, Barry, &c., of course deal with the subject. - ED.]
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
and adaptability of the Indian tongue for converse on themes of dignity, in abstract discourse. Mr. Leverich, of Sandwich, a successful Indian preacher, highly commended the language for such uses. Eliot thought Mr. Cotton, of Plymouth, his own superior in the mastery of it. Only after two years
JOHN ELLIOT
THE APOSTLE OF THE INDIANS
NASCIT 160+ OBIT 169g
THE APOSTLE ELIOT.1
study did he venture to preach in it, but even then he would not offer prayer in it. On the 28th of October, 1646, on a hill in Nonantum, Eliot first preached to the chief Waban and some of his subjects in their own tongue a discourse from Ezekiel, xxxviii. 9, of an hour and a quarter in length.
1 [This cut is made, by permission, from a photograph of a portrait owned by Mrs. William Whiting, of Roxbury, which bears the following inscription in the upper left-hand corner : " John Elliot, the Apostle of the Indians. Nascit. 1604. Obit, 1690," - which constitutes the only direct evidence of its authenticity. If authentic, it must have been painted in this country, for Eliot never returned to England. It would have been nat-
ural for Boyle to have employed some one to portray the missionary in whose labors he had taken so much interest. In 1851 the late IIon. William Whiting, M.C., found the painting in the shop of a dealer in London, who seemed to have a notion that the " Indians " were East Indians. He could give no account of the source from which the picture came, having purchased it with others. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
His prayer was in English, as he scrupled lest he might use some unfit or unworthy terms in the solemn office. This prompted an inquiry from his interested but bewildered listeners, whether God would understand prayer offered to him in the Indian tongue? His method in subsequent visits, when he gained more confidence, was to offer a short prayer in Indian, to recite and explain the Ten Commandments, to describe the character, work, and offices of Christ as Saviour and Judge, to tell his hearers about the crea- tion, fall, and redemption of man, and to persuade them to repentance. He then encouraged them to put any questions that rose to their minds, prom- ising them answers and explanations. Some of their queries were so apt and pertinent, indicating much acumen, that their good friend was often puzzled to satisfy them. Cotton Mather, in commending Eliot's style in sermoniz- ing, said : " Lambs might wade into his discourses on those texts and themes wherein elephants might swim." Such a style must have been equally suited to his white and red auditors. Some of the leading men of the colony, magistrates and ministers, occasionally accompanied Eliot on his preaching visits, and however they may have fallen short of his enthusiasm and hopefulness, they gratefully appreciated his devotion and zeal.
From the very entrance upon his work, Eliot set before himself an aim and plan, as the prime conditions of any successful effort for the sure and permanent benefit of the natives, which put him and other Puritan, and indeed all Protestant, missionaries to the Indians into the broadest possible diver- gence from the methods of the Jesuits. These latter sought to interfere as slightly as possible with the native habits, the wild ways, the freedom and impulses of the savages. As a general thing all the French colonists, lay and clerical, associating with the Indians, compromised themselves and their own civilization by meeting the Indians more than half way, by living with them on casy if not equal terms, adopting their free habits, indulging their humors, and scrupulously avoiding all crossing their inclinations or shocking their prejudices. The Frenchmen did not bind the savages to fixed resi- dences, nor compel them to live in houses, to wear white men's clothing, to be scrupulous about cleanliness, or dainty in their food. They shared the natives' wigwams, their loathsome cookery, not troubled much by contact with their filth, vermin, and immodesty. A few simply ritual ceremonies, a repetition of prayer or chant, and the baptismal rite turned the doomed heathen into a lovely Christian, and set him in equality with the Frenchman. All didactic, moral, intellectual training was regarded as needless or unes- sential. The simplest assent to the chief and to a few subordinate doctrines or dogmas of the Church was all sufficient. A savage might, under the stress of circumstances, pass through the saving, and, so to speak, the con- verting and Christianizing, process within ten minutes, or even in one. Quite otherwise did Eliot apprehend the conditions of his exacting work, if it was to have any measure of assurance for success. He aimed to establish com- munities of the Indians in fixed settlements, exclusively their own, with en- tirely changed habits of life, dependent no longer upon hunting and roaming,
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
but pursuing industrious occupations, with lands cleared and fenced, mod- estly clothed, living in houses, regarding propriety and decency. Ultimately they were to have local magistrates, mechanics, teachers, and preachers of their own race, with all the comforts and securities of the towns of the white men, and organized and covenanted churches. He wrote, " I find it abso- lutely necessary to carry on civility with religion." After deliberate exam- ination of several localities, Eliot made choice of a region which still bears its original name, Natick, for his fond experiment for the subjects of his care, who came to be known as "the praying Indians." A considerable company of the natives was gathered here in 1651. Eliot kept the General Court informed of all his proceedings, and sought its sympathy and aid. It is curious to read on the Records enactments by which portions of our wilderness territory, the whole of which had so recently been regarded by the savages as in their unchallenged ownership, were bounded off, as hence- forward to be their own for improvement. There does not seem to have been much heartiness in this legislation, the kind purpose of which alternated with measures of apprehension, caution, and restraint. There was always a party in the colony, not wholly composed of the "ungodly," or the unfeel- ing and self-seeking classes, who looked with distrust, indifference, or avowed hostility upon the work of Eliot and his supporters. Such persons thought they had come fully to understand what an Indian was in blood and fibre, in native proclivity and irreclaimable savagery. Indeed, some of them saw in specimens of the first alleged converts to the white man's faith and ways satisfactory evidence either that the Indian could not really be transformed and renewed, or that he was not worth the labor spent on his conversion.
The experiment at Natick, the first of a series of a dozen others made with degrees of completeness in plan in several places, was, like most of them, under the special care of Eliot. He was modest, unassuming, deferential, ready to yield his own preferen- ces, and ever cautious, while seek- Nalich August & 6: me , se ing wisdom from others. At one 1671 interval he seems to have had encouragement of full rewarding success. While religiously faith- with the comfort of the church ful to all the exacting routine of duty in his Roxbury parish, his rule was to visit Natick once a fortnight, visiting in the alternate week the wigwam of Cutshamakin, in Dorchester, in all weathers; riding on his horse eighteen miles by a way through woods, over hills and swamps and streams, which his journeys opened into a road. He carried with him heavy and miseella- neous burdens. Though his own beverage was water, his diet the simplest. and he abhorred tobacco, he was willing that the Indians should in some cases have wine, while he himself replenished their pipes. He always had apples, nuts, and other little gifts for the pappooses. He had acquired that fine
1 [The letter to which this is the subscription inet, " Miscellaneous," 1632-1795, p. 9, and it is is in the Massachusetts Historical Society's cab- printed in Mass. Hist. Coll. vi. 201 .- En.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
accomplishment of being a graceful beggar of something from everybody, - his own comfort and needs dropping out of thought in his care for others. The cast-off clothing, and even much that had not come to that indignity, of his own parishioners and friends and the widest compass of neighbors, was solicited, and generally was borne on his horse's shoulders or crupper, to eke out the civilized array of his red pupils. Without over- wrought enthusiasm, and with meek patience and slow, steady advances, Eliot met all the obstacles which he looked for in dealing with an intracta- ble race. With the same mild virtues he parried the distrust and opposition of many around him. Even some sincere but misgiving lookers-on thought he was anticipating a work which should be deferred till the time was prov- identially reached "for the coming in of y" fulness of y Gentiles." The worldling complained of him for injuring the trade in peltry with the Indians. The magistrates were by no means always faithful in keeping even the letter of their covenants, and were cool as to the spirit of them. Meanwhile the Indian pow-wows, magicians, sorcerers, medicine-men, were secretly jealous, sometimes actively hostile. The sachems were deprived of tribute from their subjects. King Philip, hearing of the work across his borders, positively refused to entertain the missionaries, to listen to their teaching, or to allow his subjects to be approached by it. And he spoke in bitter contempt of the English creed and religion. Roger Williams wrote, in 1654, that in his recent visit to England he had been charged by the Narragansett sachems to petition Cromwell and the council in their behalf, that they should not be compelled to change their religion. King Philip, taking hold of one of Eliot's coat-buttons, told him he cared no more for his religion than for that. This desperate hard-heartedness in Philip prompted Cotton Mather to speak of him as "a blasphemous Leviathan." Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, forbade any proselyting work among his Indians.
The bounds for the Indian town of Natick -" the place of hills"-were drawn by the Court in 1652. Over Charles River, which ran through it, sometimes fordable, sometimes swollen, the natives built a strong arched foot-bridge, eighty feet long, and eight feet high, its piles laden with stonc. The rude builders were especially proud of their work, which stood firm, while in the next freshet an English bridge near by, in Medfield, was carried down the stream. Three wide parallel streets, two on one side and one on the other of the river, ran through the town. The territory was portioned into lots for houses, tillage, and pasturage. Fruit-trees were planted, with walls and fences. A palisadocd fort enclosed a meeting-house fifty feet long, twenty- five wide, and twelve high, built of squared timber, in English fashion, by the natives, with two days' aid from an English carpenter. The space within was to be used for a school, and for preaching and worship, while the attic, besides a store-room, contained a bed-room for Eliot; for, unlike the Jesuit missionary, he insisted on his own privacy, and brought with him food pre- pared by his wife, as his English stomach would not bear the diet and culi- nary work and apparatus of the natives. His average Indian auditory was
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
. about an hundred, a few whites being generally present. The place soon began to wear the air of industry and thrift, with a show of comfort. The Indians were indulged in their antipathy to the English style of houses and lodgings, but cleanliness and decency, for which the natives were utterly and unblushingly wanting all sense, were rigidly insisted upon. Eliot established over them a theocratic and Jewish form of municipal government, by rulers of tens, fifties, and an hundred. They came to have magistrates and school teachers, of both sexes, of their own race. They entered into a solemn religious covenant, Sept. 24, 1651, " with God and each other, to be governed by the Word of the Lord in all things." The most earnest efforts were made for the primer and catechetical teaching of the children in English, and also in preparing youth, by a dame and a grammar-school at Cam- bridge, for entering Harvard College, so that there might be well-instructed Indian and English preachers in both tongues.
Eliot, by letter and report,1 steadily kept the society and its officers in England informed of the progress of his holy work. His letters, hopeful and genial, are also frank, candid, and not greatly over-colored. A series of now very rare tracts and essays were printed at the time, which modestly take their titles from the stages of advance, - as "The Day Breaks," " The Dawn Advances," "The Clear Orb appears and mounts to the Meridian." 2 The crowning aim for which the devout and single-hearted Indian Apostle was laboring - with no undue expectancy, well knowing that it must be de- layed and toiled for till it came with its own assurance of ripeness and joy - was that he might live to find all the needful sacred conditions fulfilled in which he might gather " a Church of Christ" after the Puritan fashion, composed of regenerated and covenanted Indian men and women, with the seals of the sacraments, and a baptized flock. This required " a company of saints by profession and in the judgement of charity." The strict observance of the Sabbath, family prayer, grace at meals, Bible-reading, a conviction of their sinful and lost state, spiritual experience of renewal, and a sincere purpose to lead a godly, consistent life were the means and stages of the culminating result. The Indian pastor must rival in ability, attainment, zeal, and piety the English minister, and, putting himself in communion with sister churches, his own flock must be equal to them in all gospel relations. The brethren and sisters, when thus covenanted, would have a strict watch and ward over
1 [Various letters of Eliot to the corporation are printed in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc , November, 1879. There are others in Birch's Life of Robert Boyle .- ED.]
2 [The bibliography of this series of tracts can be followed in Dr. Henry M. Dexter's ex- haustive " Bibliography of Congregationalism," appended to his Congregationalism as seen in its Literature, 1880. A very valuable series of copies is recorded, with notes by Dr. Trumbull, in the Brinley Catalogue, p. 52, &c. Cf. also Field's Indian Bibliography.
Sabin, of New York, has reprinted some of VOL. I .- 34.
them, and several are reprinted in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. iv.
Dr. Trumbull's Origin and Early Progress of Indian Missions in New England was privately reprinted in 1874 from the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc. Single tracts have been printed or reprinted in different places, as Eliot's " Dying Speeches of several Indians," in the Sabbath at Home, 1868, p. 333, and in the Prince Society's edition of Dun- ton's Letters ; the "Clear Sunshine," in Thomas Shepard's Works, ii .; and Eliot's Brief Narrative, 1670, by Marvin of Boston, &c. Sce Dr. Trum- bull's chapter in the present volume. - ED.]
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
each other, jealously guarding themselves against reproach or scandal, keep- ing all wrong-doers in awe, attracting the well-disposed, and proving them- selves a body of the elect.
The wisest and most sincerely earnest and good among men, in all their private aims and public plans, have always found their accomplished results to fall widely short of their purposes; and in such disappointments of experience, all the noble and carnest effort that has been spent must be regarded as a moral equivalent to what was looked for as success. It can- not be claimed that on any large public scale, cither of expense or interest, Massachusetts tried to fulfil its pledges or its obligations of humanc, Chris- tian duty to the Indians. Indeed, some of the sharpest rebukes for its neglect and failure in this matter came from the more conscientious and scrupulous of its own people. Stoddard, of Northampton, wrote a lugubrious tract to prove that many of the severest calamities visited on the colony might be referred to the displeasure of Providence because so little had been done for the conversion of the savages. Notwithstanding all the justice of the admission thus made to the discredit of our fathers, it must still be affirmed that in full view of the difficulties of their position and of all the facts of the case, as we look back upon them, the efforts and toils of Eliot and his co-laborers, within the scale and with the means which limited their undertaking, were on the whole the most creditable, well-devised, and hope- ful enterprise of the kind ever put on trial on this continent. The labors of the Jesuit priests among the savages, heroic, self-sacrificing, and constant to death, were, in the view of the missionaries themselves, fully rewarded in their results. But religious Protestants at the time regarded the boasted triumphs of the Church and the Cross among the savages, and all the fond complacency of the priests, with simple disgust and contempt. Not the first step had in their opinion been taken, or even attempted, to secure what they believed to be the true process of saving conversion in the heart and conscience of the savage. He had been taught a few " mummeries," had been sprinkled with water in the outward form of baptism, and then had been left, in habit and way of life, as much of a savage as before. The task to which the Puritan missionary set himself, as conditioning his success, was a far more exacting and complicated one. Full civilization, if it did not with him take precedence of Christian conversion, was the essential accom- paniment of it. Cleanliness, decency, a humanized heart, monogamy, chas- tity, daily labor in some industrious calling, ability to read, and a quickened intellectual activity, could alone serve as a basis for the hopeful material out of which to make Christians. The Puritan was also vastly embarrassed and put at extreme disadvantage by his own creed, and by the requisitions which he felt obliged to make of converts through a training in doctrinal divinity and experimental religion. Calvinism has always proved hard teaching to heathens of any type, and the Calvinism of the Puritans was, as we shall soon sce, offered to especially difficult pupils of it. The proffer to the sav- ages was a gospel of " Good-News," of joy and blessing. Its first message
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THE INDIANS OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS.
to them was that they were all under the curse of the Englishman's God, and doomed to a fearful hell forever. They had not been aware of their dreadful condition in these respects; and between the difficulty of making them understand and realize this their desperate state, and of bringing them to avail themselves of the method which alone promised deliverance from it, the Puritan set himself to a very hard task. Considering these facts in con- nection with the well-devised purposes of Eliot, the patient, persistent, and tentative plans which he pursued for realizing them must be held worthy of the distinctive commendation just assigned to them. Nor can the disas- trous failure of any long result from his labors, - attributable largely to the calamity of King Philip's war, - be regarded as essentially derogating from this commendation. It might be claimed that the Moravians among the In- dians of Pennsylvania had been more wise and successful in their work than was the Puritan Eliot. The Moravians have often been presented as models for Protestant missionaries among the savages. But it is to be remembered that their efforts were made later, with the help of much hard-earned expe- rience ; that the subjects of their noble labors were mainly remnants of tribes of humbled, subject savages, -"women," as their proud barbarian con- querors called them, -and that, if the Moravians proffered the same cssen- tial creed for converts, they used it a little more manageably. But the Moravians gained much by making a common home with their wild pupils, as the Puritans did not.
Though the culmination of his labors in a Christian church, in mem- bership, pastor, and officers composed wholly of Indians, was an object so dear to the heart of Eliot, and many of his converts were importu- nately impatient to realize the promised boon, his own good sense and well- poised discretion deferred the result for four full years. These years he had improved by secluding his converts from the white settlements, and by keeping them to hard labor, while they were diligently instructed. They showed considerable skill in handicrafts and also in municipal administration. In 1656 the Court had commissioned Major Daniel Gookin, a man of noble and lovable character, and Eliot's most attached co-worker, as the general magistrate of all the Indian towns. The income of the English society for converting and civilizing the Indians, - amounting to the then large sum of about seven hundred pounds, - was freely spent in the salaries of mission- aries and teachers, in printing, and in furnishing goods, tools, clothing, &c., for those under training. The first brick edifice in the college yard at Cam- bridge was built by the funds of this society, and was called "the Indian College," being designed to accommodate twenty native pupils. There the Indian Bible was afterwards printed, with primers, tracts, &c. A vessel lad- en with utensils and tools for Natick, sent over by this society, was wrecked on Cohasset rocks, but some of the freight was saved. Eliot told his bewildered converts that Satan, in his spite, wrecked the vessel, while God in mercy saved some of the cargo. Eliot's salary from the society rose from twenty to forty, and finally to fifty pounds.
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On the very eve of the occasion for instituting the church at Natick, " three Indians of ye unsound sort, had got several quarts of strong water." The natural consequences followed. Of this Eliot says, "There fell out a very great discouragement, which might have been a scandal to them, and I doubt not but Satan intended it so. But the Lord improved it to stir up faith and prayer, and so turned it another way!" Serene and mighty is that assuring trust which can thus allot the bane and blessing of human life to two agents, a lesser and a Mightier !
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