American Heroes (8 page)

Among the Indians, wealth was not merely a matter of indifference. It was, in fact, something to be avoided by anyone who prided himself on his merits. According to Cadwallader Colden, the chiefs of the Iroquois nations were generally poorer than the common people. For in order to attain their eminence they had to demonstrate their indifference to worldly goods by giving away all the presents and plunder they obtained from friends or enemies. “If,” says Colden, “they should once be suspected of
Selfishness
, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men and would consequently loose their authority.”

It may be that some of the observers I have quoted were idealizing the Indian. Perhaps you will think that they rationalized laziness into a virtue. Yet it was a laziness that Henry Thoreau also practiced: like the Indian, Thoreau was too busy being himself to spend his time in pursuit of wealth. And if my chroniclers idealized the Indian, they were idealizing something they had seen themselves. Most of them had lived among the Indians and knew what they were talking about. Indeed, the man who knew the Indians most intimately was the one who has given us the noblest savages of all. George Catlin found in the Indians of the Far West all the attributes that our earlier observers discovered in the eastern tribes. “I have watched,” says Catlin in the florid prose of his day,

Here, as in the other remarks by other eyewitnesses about other Indians, we have a series of characteristics that most Indians of North America seem to have shared.

These common characteristics, I believe, indicate that Indian ways of life in North America, however diverse, all produced men who attached the highest possible value to the individual. Indeed, the diversity of Indian life was fostered and encouraged by this very exaltation of the individual. Men who valued individual freedom so highly would not create any large or effective political organization of their own, nor would they be content to live under one created by white men. They preferred their own small and ineffective organizations, preferred them because they were small and because they were ineffective. They were individualists, intransigent and incorrigible.

I do not mean that the Indian was possessed of some mysterious essence to which we can give the name “individualism.” I use the word merely to tie together the different aspects of Indian life that we have been examining. They all add up to a single quality, which has been given various names. The Massachusetts General Court, for example, as we have seen, called it “a malicious, surley, and revengeful spirit.” But the more positive epithet of “individualism” will also apply.

By whatever name we call it, and however it was produced, this quality was preeminent among the Indians of North America, and it may help us to understand not only why the Indian refused to join us but also why we have admired and hated him for his refusal. The Indian in his individualism displayed virtues to which Americans, and indeed all Christians, have traditionally paid homage. An indifference to the things of this world, a genuine respect for human dignity, a passionate attachment to human freedom—these are virtues we all revere. We should be flattered, I think, if someone said of us that “the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent; that no one…on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” But these words were not written about us or our ancestors. They were written about the Indians (by Robert Rogers) and published eleven years before the Declaration of Independence.

They fit the Indian better than they fit us. The Indian therefore is both a challenge and an affront to us. We see in him what we might be if we carried some of our avowed principles to their logical conclusions. And what we see is disturbing. For we do
not
wish to be like the Indian. We do
not
wish to see our nation disintegrate into a thousand petty republics; we do
not
wish to be so free that no superior authority will make us behave. Nor do we intend to abandon whatever riches we have laid up in this world. It may be as difficult for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but most of us would welcome a chance to make the attempt. And so we are irritated, annoyed, and even infuriated by men who exhibit our values better than we do.

I do not suggest a mode of accommodation. We do not in fact have room for such incorrigible individualists within our civilization. And yet that civilization will have been impoverished beyond repair if the time ever comes when we cannot admire the Indian in his diversity, his dignity, and his intransigence, more than he ever had reason to admire us.

—1958

J
OHN
W
INTHROP
'
S
“M
ODELL
of Christian Charity” has probably enjoyed as much attention from historians as from Winthrop's shipmates aboard the
Arbella
in 1630. It offers an explicit statement, convenient for quotation, of the idea that the Bay Colony was in covenant with God, a chosen people, a new Israel. It has accordingly become the very emblem of the Puritan quest, the manifesto in which Winthrop proclaimed the place of Massachusetts as a “city upon a hill.”

The document deserves the attention it has received and perhaps a little more. Historians have generally related it to the events that followed it. It represents the ideal by which the later actuality is measured or the key by which to explain the sense of mission that engaged first New England and then the United States. The validity of this interpretation is not in question, but a look at the context in which Winthrop was operating may enrich our understanding of what he was doing in his shipboard sermon.

The “Modell of Christian Charity” was an explication of the love that flows from regeneration in Christ, and of the hope that this love would inform and sustain the holy experiment on which Winthrop and his companions were embarked. More immediately it was an appeal for subjection to authority. God himself, Winthrop said, had ordained that “some must be rich some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” This was the lesson, the “model,” which the rest of the sermon or essay was designed to uphold. The passengers must have expected some iteration of the lesson, for it was the central platitude of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century social and political thought, invoked whenever the occasion seemed to suggest a need for reinforcing authority. The founding of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts Bay was surely such an occasion. Its success, in Winthrop's view at least, would depend on the willingness of the participants to join in loving subjection to the men they trusted to lead them. But Massachusetts Bay was not the first English colony in America, and the voyage of the
Arbella
was only one of a long line of voyages in which Englishmen boarded ship on dangerous errands that they thought would redound to the glory of God and country. By the same token it was not the first time that the leader of a voyage or colony appealed to Christian charity in order to foster subjection to authority and to discourage the dissension that must imperil the mission.

Winthrop makes no mention of the “Modell of Christian Charity” either in his journal or in his surviving correspondence, and the only known copy is not in his hand. Though there seems no doubt that the authorship is properly ascribed to him, the circumstances under which he may have delivered it aboard the
Arbella
are therefore uncertain. Given the theme, it seems likely that it preceded or accompanied the taking of the sacrament among the passengers during one of the Sunday shipboard services. Whether or not that was the case, the communion of Christians in the Lord's Supper was often the occasion for appeals to brotherly love in voyages or colonizing enterprises.

Christians were supposed to have a special love for one another, as Winthrop pointed out in the “Modell,” and Christian love found its highest symbolic expression in the sacrament. It was accordingly of special importance that no one partake of the sacrament while entertaining hostile thoughts or intentions toward his neighbor. William Perkins, the standard authority for Puritans, made the point in his
Cases of Conscience
that the sacrament “is a Communion, whereby all the receivers, joyntly united together in love, doe participate of one and the same Christ. And therefore, as no man in the old law might offer his Sacrifice, without a fore-hand agreement with his brother; so no Communicant may partake with others at this Table, without reconciliation, love, and charitie.”

As communion was a time for reconciliation, reconciliation might also be a time for communion. Before setting out on the high seas for strange lands, captain, crew, and passengers might take the sacrament in celebration of their mutual love and in hope of concord and amity in the voyage. Atlantic voyages in the sixteenth, as in the seventeenth, century could present a formidable challenge to anyone's charity toward those with whom he was obliged to rub elbows day and night. Men might be aboard ship without interruption for as much as three months and, of course, even longer on voyages into the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. A “voyage” might be an expedition of several ships, but most of the ships themselves were small, some of them only thirty or forty tons, and the size of the crew was extremely large by modern standards in proportion to the size of the vessel (as many as one man for every two or three tons), partly because sailing vessels of that day required large crews, partly because masters anticipated that many would die during the trip. Fifty men crowded aboard a vessel of a hundred tons barely had standing room on the decks. As the weeks aboard wore on, tempers grew short, and it required firm discipline to prevent flare-ups of violence. Yet seamen were scarcely the mildest and most tractable of men. The history of countless voyages shows that they frequently refused to take a ship where they were ordered. Indeed, it would appear that a wise master did not give orders without ascertaining in advance that his men were willing to carry them out.

Precisely because a long sea voyage pressed human patience to its limits, a successful leader had to take advantage of every possible means of maintaining harmony and agreement in his followers. The great captains of the day were men who knew how to command loyalty, obedience, and even love under the most trying conditions. When dissension did break out, they knew how to deal with it swiftly and surely. Some have suffered in reputation, and perhaps rightly, because they were capable of swift, decisive, and utterly ruthless action. Francis Drake, on his way round the world, had a friend beheaded because Drake suspected him of creating a faction.

Prevention was better than such drastic cures, and it is not unlikely that the leaders of a voyage took some pains to exhort their fellow voyagers to peace and harmony. The records of voyages seldom tell us much about the initial stages when such speeches would have been most appropriate. Unless some unusual event occurred, all we get is the date of the vessel's or fleet's departure, the winds they encountered, when they made the Azores or Madeira or the Canaries or Cape Verde, and so on. But occasionally one gets a glimpse of the commander instructing his men to “love one another,” as in John Hawkins's orders to his fleet as they left the Canaries in 1564 for Guinea and the Caribbean. Sebastian Cabot's instructions to Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor in their search for a northeast passage in 1553 began with an admonition that the officers of the expedition “be so knit and accorded in unitie, love, conformitie, and obedience in every degree on all sides, that no dissention, variance, or contention may rise or spring betwixt them and the mariners of this companie, to the damage or hinderance of the voyage: for that dissention (by many experiences) hath overthrown many notable enterprises and exploits.”

There is more detail in an episode on Sir Anthony Sherley's privateering expedition to the West Indies in 1596, because Sherley fell sick at Cape Verde and thought himself near death. Gathering his “captains, masters, and officers” about him, he made

Edward Fenton on a voyage to South America in 1582–83 carried two chaplains, and on the first Sunday aboard one of them, John Walker, preached “of concorde and the coming of the holy ghost.” Although Walker repeated his admonitions to love and concord in a later sermon, the voyage failed for lack of these virtues. Fenton was a poor leader, given to quarreling himself and unable to prevent it among his men. Robert Dudley on a voyage to Guiana a dozen years later was more successful, perhaps because he was aware of the need for love and concord. According to the account of one of his captains, Dudley inaugurated his expedition with a ceremony designed to establish harmony:

Dudley later became a Catholic and may already have leaned that way—he named a cape on Trinidad after the “divine Mary.” John Hawkins, on the other hand, was something of a Puritan. But the need for Christian charity on a sea voyage was neither Puritan nor Catholic. It was a condition of survival.

The founding of a new colony was as hazardous an enterprise as the voyage to it, and one to which concord and amity were equally crucial. The expedition that founded the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, nearly foundered at the outset in the dissension among members of the governing council, but it was not for lack of exhortations to and affirmations of the kind of love that Winthrop later demanded. Before the expedition had fairly established itself at Jamestown, Captain Christopher Newport, in command of the ships, played Winthrop's role in an attempt to foster love and unity. According to the most detailed surviving account, Newport being

Like many another love feast, this one did not endure for long. Two years later Robert Gray, in a sermon entitled
A Good Speed to Virginia
, was still pleading for love: “All degrees and sorts of people which have prepared themselves for this Plantation must be admonished to preserve unitie, love and concord amongst themselves: for by concord small things increase and growe to great things, but by discord great things soone come to nothing.” Virginia remained on the verge of coming to nothing for a good many years. As late as the 1630s Governor Harvey and his council were continually at loggerheads. But like other Englishmen they knew that the solution must lie in Christian charity. On one occasion in 1631 when they determined to bury the hatchet, they joined in a lengthy declaration of love that began by crediting God with having “inspired the spirit of peace into our hearts and calmed those thoughts and purposes of contention and bitterness, whereby distraction hath happened to our councells and consultations.” Henceforth “all jarrings, discords and dissentions” would be “wholly laid aside, love embraced, and all be unanimously reconciled.” To this end, they exhorted themselves,

None of these exhortations and rituals in Virginia served quite as high a purpose as Winthrop's, and none reached his level of discourse. Stephen Foster has brilliantly exhibited the creative application that Winthrop made of accepted Christian doctrine in the “Modell.” The point here is to suggest not only that Winthrop was developing a conventional doctrine but also that he wrote or spoke in a context where that doctrine was regularly called upon for an immediate practical purpose, a purpose that Winthrop, too, embraced even as he exalted it into something more than the success of a voyage.

The New England Puritans had a creative genius for adapting old forms to new conditions. Out of a variety of local institutions—parish, borough, manor—they created the New England town. Out of English common law and assorted biblical injunctions, they created a systematic code of laws. John Winthrop, like any good captain, knew that his expedition could founder on dissension. In New England his special gift lay in bringing disagreements to a happy issue. In the “Modell of Christian Charity” he did what he could to forestall trouble. At the same time he turned a captain's exhortation into a statesman's proclamation of the new Canaan.