Joe is a book showing the underside of rural life among the poor and ignorant in late 20th century Mississippi. The protagonist Joe is a drunk and aggressive man with few concerns about anyone else besides himself but who has an inherent sense of right and wrong and a basic morality of when you can and cannot cross the line of morality/honor. He befriends a teenager, Gary, who has been abused his whole life by an alcoholic, violent, murderer who is father of Gary and four other children, one killed, one sold, one prostituted, and one runaway. The wife/mother is overwhelmed by violence and intimidated by her husband, so completely ineffectual. Joe realizes over time this abuse and slowly begins to do something about it, by educating Gary in his ways or drinking and whoring but also in allowing him the independence of work, making money, and having his own truck. Teaching him to be a man. In the end Joe sacrifices his own well being and independence and freedom for the sake of teenage Gary and his younger sister.
Throughout the book the author provides a background of the peace and quiet and sameness of nature that contrasts with the activity, violence, and artificial actions of human beings. We see this in the epilogue. The author highlights the savagery of humans throughout the book. For example, of the characters, the only one with any common sense is Gary; his mother is crazy, his sister rebellious and hates her father, his younger sister is overwhelmed and internalizes the aggression imposed upon her, his father is a violence criminal, and Joe is a drunkard.
It is a story about survival: survival of the fittest in the natural environment including human environment of animalistic humans. It is a coming of age story, of a boy who learns about life, becomes a man.
Joe, who has nothing to live for, finally discovers something to live for in Gary. Joe realizes the inherent misfortune of Gary’s life, and he becomes a father figure for Gary.
Other themes: Human relations ultimately insignificant according to the backdrop of natural environment; Inherent evil and misfortune of life, little to live for; just a glimmer of hope in the inherent evil and misfortune of life; ignorance of humans in the rural South at the end of the 20th century, which leads to suffering and tragedy.
In sum, Joe is all of the above, but mostly it is a book about the overall insignificance of human affairs in the wider reality of nature, which overwhelms humans and often forces them to act like civilized animals, people who have developed machines and artificial substances and ways of doing things to cover, or enhance, the basic animal tendencies that they still have. The epilogue reveals the author’s overall point of view. There is a greatness and grandeur in nature that dwarfs humans. Modernization has elevated humans but at the consequence of irrational beings that have way too much power and cannot achieve the tranquility and inherent contentment of the past. Morality has been dwarfed by people living in the moment seeking some sort of meaning and contentment but not being able to find it, so they turn to artificial substances and machines to make them feel powerful, better. There is a basic sense of morality that you don’t hurt an innocent, that you try to be fair to others, your equals, and if you can’t keep from hurting, can’t be fair, you will be punished by meaninglessness and hopelessness but also by other humans. It appears to be a godless society, but as the epilogue reveals, there is a basic natural truth that exists that humans can understand and admire.
John Filson, in his 1784 portrait of “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” appended to The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, declared that “curiosity is natural to the soul of man.” With these words Filson sparked the beginning of the legend of Daniel Boone, the explorer and frontiersman who more than any other American was responsible for the penetration and settlement of Kentucky. Filson, a schoolmaster who wanted to bring fame to Kentucky and fortune to himself, purported to record Boone’s own story, though in the process Filson added his own words and ideas, to create an image of the “natural man,” Daniel Boone, which continues even today. Boone is a good example of fact and folklore coming together to garble the historical reality of one person’s life.
Indeed, historians and biographers of the American frontier often have to use anecdote and traditions to recount lives. Carl Sandburg did this in his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln. With such sources, a historian can often assume based on a critical perspective that stories might originate with the person under study, hence stories of Boone might have originated with Boone himself, or his family, and that they contain a kernel of truth. The documentary evidence for Boone’s life is sporadic, so that Boone and his children’s stories are perhaps autobiographical, hence valid evidence to reconstruct his life.
Filson uses such folklore though he is at times carried away with it, presenting episodes in the life of Boone as actual occurrences rather than somewhat remote distorted possibilities. Tradition has it that Saucy Jack, a Catawba Indian, lost to Boone in a shooting competition. Saucy Jack’s pride was hurt, and his anger, being nourished by drink, spilled over into threats on Boone’s life. Squire Boone, Daniel’s father, decided to deal with Saucy Jack before something happened to Daniel. Saucy Jack fled to avoid the wrath of Squire Boone. Daniel recounted this story to Filson, and Filson used it in his book. But whether the story was fact or fiction seems to get lost in the narrative: it might just be a story. But then again, it might be a good story that tells of the character of Squire Boone.
Such stories build the character of a man resistant to authority who sought the wilderness as a release from civilization. He admired the ways of the indigenous inhabitants and was more comfortable in the wilderness than with his roles in white society as father, husband, soldier, landowner, and business person. Later, when Boone was living his final years along the Missouri River, and after he died, historians more content with images than reality created a romantic, frontier hero.
John Filson had Daniel Boone say in 1784 that “it requires but little philosophy to make a man happy.” In this simple statement we see the origins of the fascination Americans have had with Daniel Boone. From the security of civilization, it is exciting indeed to imagine oneself pushing the limits of the frontier into the wilderness. Boon did precisely this, but without the romantic courage and suffering that has made its mark on American novels and films about the frontier. Armchair explorers cannot help but assume that such a man would stand taller and appear with more bravery than his contemporaries and descendants.
Filson’s Boone tells us that the explorer is but a normal person made heroic by events, a person who explores not to push forward the boundaries of civilization, who in fact dislikes what civilization represents. Rather this is a man who explores to make a living, because of wanderlust, because he loves solitude, because he fears some of the responsibilities of civilized living, and chiefly because, in Boone’s words, of his “love of Nature.”
Besides Boone, there were countless explorers and hunters who went into the wilderness as the forerunners of civilization. Some are well known. Some are unknown, and are remembered only by a name or passage in a book. One example is a hunter and frontiersman of the Arkansas Territory in the early 1800s, around the time of Boone, whose name was Lee, otherwise little known except that he was a hunter and guide for the natural Thomas Nuttall when Nuttall journeyed up the Arkansas River in 1819. I have told the story of Lee in my book, The Land Between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. If interested, you can purchase the book here: The Land between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819: Lawson, Russell M.: 9780472114115: Amazon.com: Books
When I wish to find out about a person from the past, the first thing I look for, to wrap my mind around so that I feel like I might know this person, is an image, a portrait or photograph. But Tecumseh lived before the days of photography and, according to Glenn Tucker, in a recent biography, Techumseh, A Vision of Glory, “Tecumseh would never allow a white man to paint his portrait, and no Indian undertook it.”
So Tecumseh joins a large list of famous and not so famous people from the past for which no image from life exists. As my mind seeks to know this person, lacking an image, I must go to other sources: recorded descriptions of him, literary sources, traditions. But why is a physical likeness important? A portrait based on life allows the observer to gleam personality traits and characteristics by gazing at the image. The lack of such a portrait leads to so much speculation and imagination. In my own writing and research I have spent years coming to know people from the past for which there are no images from life: Jesus of Nazareth and Christopher Columbus, for example; I have even written books about people, contemporaries of Tecumseh, one of the them a French scientist named Berlandier, another an American frontiersman named John Evans, for whom no portrait survives, which has forced me somewhat reluctantly to describe them without quite knowing what they looked like. Proponents of the old pseudo-science of physiognomy used to claim that by examining the facial and cranial features of an object of inquiry the observer could gain important insights into character. I could not do this with the objects of my inquiry. Nor with Tecumseh. So, I must rely on other sources to paint a visual portrait in my mind.
My mental portrait begins, therefore, with any kind of personal connection I can make with Tecumseh. The first of which is that there is evidence, not conclusive, that he was part Muskogee Creek, his mother having been descended from the Muskogee Creeks of the American Southeast. I teach at an institution, Bacone College, founded in 1880 on the lands of the Creek Nation in Muskogee, OK. Everyday I teach students of varying tribal backgrounds, especially the Creeks, about history and philosophy. I was born and raised in Tulsa, OK, which was also part of the Creek Nation. The Muskogee Creeks have been a part of my life for the three score years, though subconsciously; not until I took my present job at Bacone College in Muskogee did I realize how much the Indian heritage meant for me, a person born and bred in Oklahoma, which until 1907 was associated with Indian Territory, and still retains so many connections with the Indian past that I hitherto had largely ignored. Although I am not Indian, I have been around Creek Indians my entire life; perhaps Tecumseh had some of the same physical and emotional traits as these people.
The next step in my mental portrait: Tecumseh’s mother (perhaps) was Muskogee Creek, but Tecumseh himself was born in Ohio in 1768, his parents having moved from Alabama in the previous few years. The second connection I can make with Tecumseh is based on my frequent driving of Interstate 70 through the American Midwest. Tecumseh was born near Springfield Ohio on the Mad River, about where Interstate 70 crosses the Mad River, which I have driven over countless times on my way to and from New England, and recently, to and from Canada, as I have traveled back and forth from Oklahoma to New England, where my wife’s family lives, and back and forth from Oklahoma, where my family are, to Canada. On such long drives of over 700 miles my mind seeks diversion, and I find it in thinking about what this area would have been like in 1768, just a few years before the beginning of the American War for Independence. This was a frontier land under competition by whites and Indians; it should have been land shared by all, but human acquisitiveness and lust for power made it otherwise.
The third connection I can make with Tecumseh as I research his life, was that he was raised in the surroundings of continual violence between American frontiersmen and the Shawnee and other tribes. His father, for example, was murdered by whites when he was a young boy, which provided him with an initial childhood reaction to hate war, though war would in time consume him. I have never experienced such tragedy as Tecumseh did, but as a child growing up during the Vietnam War of the 1960s, I grew to hate war as well, and ever since my adolescent years, watching on television the images of war in a far-off country, I have spoken out against, and despise, war.
The fourth connection I can make with him is more difficult, as he sided with the British in the War of 1812, and I was born and bred an American.
But I can empathize with his cause, to unite his people in the face of aggression, to seek a way to gain what is right and just for his people in the face of centuries of dishonesty, violence, broken treaties, and broken promises. I have taught at a college where half the students feel the same way that Tecumseh felt, and I, a white Caucasian, everyday have to meet the challenge of what my ancestors did to the Indians, and I ask myself the question, am I responsible for the mistakes of my ancestors? And my answer is unclear, except that I taught at a small college, Bacone College in Oklahoma, which is dedicated to helping educate the American Indian to help them embrace their future in an America that is no longer tainted so much by prejudice and violence. Perhaps that I, a white male, taught at such a school, which for 145 years was oriented toward helping the Indian, is an answer to my question.
The fifth connection I can make with Tecumseh is that I have repeatedly driven Canadian Highway 401 from Windsor to Hamilton to St. Catharines and back, and I drive over a flat, fertile land, well-watered, where grapes and grain grow. Near where I drive, on the Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, is where Tecumseh met his death facing overwhelming American forces in October, 1813. For some reason the mere fact that I drive across this land where nearly 200 years ago this man died violently stirs some emotion, some connection, in me, and I feel I know him a bit better for seeing where he met his end.
The sixth and final connection I make with Tecumseh is that I have studied Protestant and Catholic missionaries to the First Nations of Canada, particularly in Ontario, and I found, in my research, the following account by the American missionary Jedidiah Morse: “Tecumseh, before his untimely death, had conceived a plan of collecting all the Indians of N. America on some portion of the continent, not inhabited by white people, there to dwell together under their own government and laws, to enjoy their own customs and religion, inherited from their ancestors—to live in a state of independence; to sell no more of their lands to the white people; to cultivate, by all means, peace with them; to wage no other than necessary defensive wars; to quit roving and hunting for subsistence; to divide their territory into farms; and to live, as do the whites, by agriculture and the arts. In this way, and by these means, he conceived that Indians might recover what they had lost, rise again into importance and influence, and once more assume their rank among the nations of the earth. This plan, though no adequate means of accomplishing it exist, is a noble one, and worthy the great and patriotic mind of its author. Had he lived, and in earnest attempted its accomplishment, it probably might have been easily shaped, and, by compromise, have been brought, to coincide with that which is now contemplated by the government of the United States.”
What is remarkable about his comment, penned by the American scientist and clergyman Jedidiah Morse in 1821, is that just eight years before, in 1813, Tecumseh would have been considered the inveterate enemy of any patriotic American, which Morse was. Now just a few years later he lauds this man, a Tory and an Indian, as reflecting the same principles that he, Jedidiah Morse, has been espousing for decades. And these principles were that the Indians of America deserved the freedom to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own destiny, in a continent the dominant government of which espoused the same principles, that freedom and equality are the paramount rights of all peoples, everywhere, on the earth.
Let me conclude with a final anecdote, taken from the many sources on Tecumseh, that relates what his character was like, and also provides us with a fitting connection to another person honored in Canada, General Isaac Brock. According to Benjamin Drake, in his Life of Tecumseh, written in 1841, when the two men were contemplating the attack on American forces at Detroit during the War of 1812, the following event happened:
“Previously to general Brock’s crossing over to Detroit, he asked [Tecumseh] what sort of a country he should have to pass through, in case of his proceeding farther. Tecumseh, taking a roll of elm bark, and extending it on the ground by means of four stones, drew forth his scalping knife, and with the point presently etched upon the bark a plan of the country, its hills, rivers, woods, morasses and roads; a plan which, if not as neat, was for the purpose required, fully as intelligible as if Arrowsmith [the great mapmaker] himself had prepared it. Pleased with this unexpected talent in Tecumseh, also by his having, with his characteristic boldness, induced the Indians, not of his immediate party, to cross the Detroit [River], prior to the embarkation of the regulars and militia, general Brock, as soon as the business was over, publicly took off his sash, and placed it round the body of the chief,” which was a distinct mark of honor.
(The foregoing is the gist of remarks I made at the “Tecumseh and Brock Portraits Unveiling” at Brock University, Ontario, October 15, 2010)
A historical investigator par excellence, Jeremy Belknap, who lived in late eighteenth-century New Hampshire, posed this question to his many readers in a two-volume work, the first of its kind in American publishing history, The American Biography. He began his two volumes, which was filled with biographies of the first explorers and the first English colonizers of America, with an interesting essay, Preliminary Dissertation. on the Circumnavigation of Africaby the Ancients; and its probable Consequences, the Population of some Part of America.
This question of who first came to America had exercised the minds of European and American intellectuals and historians since Columbus’ four voyages to America ending in 1504. The Europeans were astonished to find a new continent, a New World, other than the three continents taught by the ancients, Europe, Asia, and Africa. And to find this new place, America, inhabited by people hitherto unknown, was even more astonishing.
Ancient writers had long speculated on the possibility of lands to the west of Europe and Africa. Plato placed his imaginary Atlantis there. Now to actually prove the existence of such an unknown land and people required European intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and theologians to discover how and when such people came to America. And had no one from the Old World ever crossed the Atlantic or Pacific to visit and perhaps influence the development of these people?
The great European intellectual Michel de Montaigne wondered about the Americas in his essay, Of Cannibals. Thomas More imagined a Utopia across the Atlantic. Francis Bacon imagined a superior culture in New Atlantis. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as the English historian William Robertson speculated on the first visitors from the Old World to the New World. Thomas Jefferson hypothesized that people had migrated from northeast Asia to northwest America in the distant past. Others wondered if the indigenous people could have been descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.
Of great interest among the intellectuals of North America was a stone in Massachusetts with ancient writing inscribed upon it: the Dighton Rock. Intellectuals from Cotton Mather to Ezra Stiles tried to decipher the strange script. Stiles believed it was of Phoenician/Carthaginian origin. He wasn’t alone in his interpretation.
One of the leading scholars of the eighteenth century, William Robertson, had hypothesized that the ancient Phoenicians had the seafaring ability to cross the Atlantic in the centuries before Christ. There was much literary evidence in support of such a conclusion. Most noteworthy was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who in his Histories recorded a story of ancient Phoenicians about six centuries before the birth of Christ voyaging south from the Red Sea along the African coast into the southern hemisphere, where the sun was always to the north (rather than the northern hemisphere, where the sun is always to the south). As they sailed west then north around Africa into the Atlantic, they apparently had the navigational ability to parallel the African coast tacking into the northwesterly trade winds, thereby returning through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. If the Phoenicians could do this, then why not cross the Atlantic with the benefit of the trade winds into America? Carthaginians, Phoenician colonists in North Africa, also had the ability to sail far into the Atlantic, and there are various ancient sources recounting stories of their voyages finding unknown lands. Would the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, had they arrived in America, had any impact on the indigenous people by which to remember them? This is an unanswered question.
More modern researchers into this question, such as the Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl, have discovered evidence that the Egyptians and the people of Iraq, the Mesopotamians, built reed ships out of the papyrus reed. Heyerdahl made some dramatic voyages, one successfully crossing the Atlantic in a reed vessel, to show the possibility that ancient Egyptians could have come to America. Heyerdahl, in another much publicized voyage, built a reed boat on the Tigris River and sailed down the river from the Persian Gulf to Indus River. Heyerdahl and others of his ilk are cultural diffusionists, convinced that ancient societies shared knowledge all over the world. Why else would there by pyramidal like structures in America, Egypt, and Iraq, than by communication between cultures?
Some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks had the ability to sail the Atlantic. An example is Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles France), three hundred years before the birth of Christ, who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Atlantic, sailing north to a place called Thule (Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, or maybe even America).
Others argue that before Columbus the Irish could have made their way to America. Fanciful evidence is the story of St. Brendan, an Irish monk who according to legend about fourteen hundred years ago sailed with his fellow monks in an Irish curragh (small boat made of seal-skin), where they discovered Paradise, saw a Crystal Castle (iceberg), and met a friendly whale who told them the directions. Timothy Severin, a modern explorer, built an Irish curragh and repeated the feat, sailing from Ireland to America.
Beyond historical evidence is the imagination. What would Phoenicians three thousand years ago who came to American shores have experienced? Would they have interacted peacefully with the indigenous inhabitants. Would they have introduced their polytheistic pantheon of deities to the Americans? Would Baal have been worshipped about the campfire in the northeastern American forest of thousands of years ago?
Let your imagination run wild reading a fictional account of some of the information presented in this blog post. “The Search for the Bronze Amulet” is a fictional historical fantasy about eighteenth-century seekers of the bronze amulet of Baal, left by Phoenicians along the New England coast centuries before. The fun can be experienced by purchasing the paperback on Amazon at this link: The Search for the Bronze Amulet: Lawson, Russell M.: 9798246856833: Amazon.com: Books
The Search for the Bronze Amulet is historical fantasy fiction, the story of a young Congregational minister (Jonathan Tucker, called Tuck) after the American Revolution who takes a position as pastor to impoverished fishers and their wives on the Isles of Shoals, off the Maine/New Hampshire coast. He is very uncertain about his call to minister to these people. The islanders are extremely poor and very superstitious. He does his best to gather the flock, and begins to have strange dreams….
…. of a ship blown off course that is about to sink; the captain of the Roman vessel tells his slave, a Phoenician nicknamed Punic, to take the helm, and the ship arrives safely at an island. Punic is a priest of the god, Baal; he wears a bronze amulet devoted to the god. Over the course of several dreams/nightmares, Tuck seems to be taking on the persona of Punic. In the dreams the Romans eventually kill Indians who come to the island; the Roman leader suspects Punic of being in cahoots with the natives; he is crucified, and the bronze amulet is left in the ashes.
Meanwhile, Tuck is intrigued by a recluse, Matthew Randolph, who lives on one of the islands; Randolph seems to know a great deal about philosophy, religion, and history, is a skeptic, and has a “museum” as he calls it on the island where he keeps various treasures he has discovered on the isles. Tuck is also intrigued by a young woman named Etsy, who is the daughter of a fisher, is beautiful, a bit mysterious, very independent, and convinced that the islands are haunted by something that invades people’s dreams.
The story takes a turn south to Boston, where a physician, Ebenezer Norton, is fascinated by all sorts of science and history. He has been corresponding with some of his friends about the Dighton Rock, a rock with strange, confusing hieroglyphics. One correspondent believes that they are Phoenician letters, similar to the Algonquian language. Norton knows that the Algonquians were once led by Passaconaway, a chief reputed to have remarkable powers. But his descendants, having fled north to Canada, were crushed by Robert Rogers and his Rangers in 1759. Norton’s correspondent, Rev. Daniel Cotton, knows of a survivor of that attack on the St. Francis Indians of Canada, a man named Abel Crawford, a drunken pauper who lives in Portsmouth, NH. He says that he will talk to him when he has a chance to see what he recalls about the attack.
Abel Crawford, meanwhile, in Portsmouth, recalls the old days, when he and other Rogers’ Rangers attacked the village of the St. Francis Indians; Crawford had taken away silver and a bronze amulet. He and a few others fled to the White Mountains, where vengeful spirits killed all save him, who fled the mountains to Portsmouth, where he was never the same. He has itched to return to find the treasure, and finally finds a man, called only the Captain, in whom he confides his hopes; the Captain, however, kills him.
Daniel Cotton writes Norton of the news of Abel Crawford’s death, which the two minister/scientists think is suspicious, and they decide to act as sleuths and investigate, Norton travels to Portsmouth. Upon arriving they interview various people who say that Crawford seemed to have had a connection with a recluse who lives at the Isles of Shoals, Matthew Randolph. The two men decide to sail to the Isles to see if they can interview Randolph. There they meet with Randolph, and see Etsy and Tuck.
Meanwhile Tuck has gotten to know Randolph, and has had the time to investigate his “museum,” where he has found an ancient manuscript, written in Greek (which Tuck can read), in which a forlorn Greek, Polybius Marcellinus, traveling with Romans, is holed up in a small rocky hideout on an island; he realizes that he is going to die. All that remains of the Romans is himself and a bronze amulet, which he knows the Indians want. He ends the manuscript calling upon his gods, to no avail. The manuscript shocks Tuck, who realizes that his dreams have a connection with the distant past of these islands. The dreams about Baal and an amulet cause him to question his faith in Christ.
At this point Etsy happens upon Tuck. She can tell that he is frightened. She assumes it is the “curse” and flees; she takes to her rowboat, and is soon out to sea. Tuck waits, and falls asleep as night falls. Etsy, who is adept at rowing on the sea, makes her way to the mouth of the Piscataqua River, and Portsmouth. There she finds a hidden cove she often stays at; unfortunately, there is a man next to a fire, who sees her, and grabs her. It is the Captain. He takes her as a hostage, his intent unclear. She rows him up the Piscataqua. Daniel Cotton, who is pastor at Kittery Point, happens to see her row by; he knows who she is. He calls, she ignores him. He knows something is wrong. Quickly he goes to his friend Norton’s lodging in Portsmouth, and they decide they must do something. They send a letter to Randolph, who upon receiving it decides that she is in trouble. He and Tuck go in pursuit, sailing to the Piscataqua, where they join Cotton and Norton, then proceed up the river to Dover, where they learn that the man and girl have disembarked and are heading north–to the White Mountains! Clearly, the Captain has learned from Crawford where he thinks the treasure might be in the mountains.
They go in pursuit, following the path north to the Ellis River, which leads to the Great Mountain [Mt. Washington], which they ascend. Randolph assumes the lead, now letting everyone know that he has been here before. They separate. Randolph and Tuck make their way, eventually, to a cave. When they arrive, they find Etsy tied up, a captive. Tuck goes to help, but is hit from behind. He enters a dream-world. The Captain also attacks Randolph, and takes from him the amulet, which Randolph has had in his possession all along.
The Captain escapes, Tuck and Randolph (recovered), and Etsy in pursuit. Thunder surrounds the mountains. They reach the Western Notch, on the western side of the Great Mountain. There they see the Captain, on a ledge, surrounded by wolves. The amulet is around his neck. The wolves attack; the Captain falls from the ledge to a river (the Saco) below. Just then a flash flood rages through the Notch, destroying everything in its path. Randolph helps Etsy and Tuck to safety but is swept away. Tuck and Etsy, with the help of a Penacook Indian, Indian Jack, pass through the Notch, following the Saco downstream, looking for bodies, a sign: nothing. They assume Randolph died along with the Captain. The amulet is lost.
Tuck and Etsy return to Isles and his parish. He is no longer haunted by dreams. A freak wave has destroyed Randolph’s hut on White Island. Tuck and Etsy over the course of the journey have fallen in love; their future is known.
The book concludes at the Western Notch. Indian Jack leads axe-men and road-builders through the Notch to build a road. Wolves are about. He knows that the spirit of Passaconaway had sent the wolves to destroy the Captain, to keep anyone at bay who threatens the peace of the mountain wilderness.
My wife comes from a family of New England Episcopalians. She is a cradle Episcopalian. We were married in the Episcopal Church. I converted to Episcopalianism and its parent belief, Anglicanism. However, with all of this tradition and important life experiences to support our beliefs, we have strayed from the Episcopal Church. Why? Because it has strayed from us.
Case in point: The Episcopal Church, an offshoot of the English Anglican Church, lauds its greatest theoretician, philosopher, and theologian, the Elizabethan Richard Hooker, who wrote the ponderous The Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. This is an erudite and very difficult book to read. Few people have read it, I think; nor have Episcopalians, I gather from the evidence of my own experience participating in the Episcopal Church for twenty years.
There is a reason why, however, during the past four centuries Hooker’s work has been called the sine qua non of Anglicanism and Episcopalianism. The only other three books that provide the basis for the Episcopal Church are the Old Testament, the New Testament, and The Book of Common Prayer.
Hooker wrote the book to defend the union of Church and State represented by the English monarchy, as well as to argue why Anglicanism is a more fundamental representation of Christianity than the Puritans of England, the followers of John Calvin.
Hooker also provided a basis for Christian morality in general and the moral precepts of the Anglican Church in particular.
The reason why I said at the outset that the Episcopal Church has strayed from the Episcopal liturgy, ritual, and beliefs that I had come to know is because the Episcopal Church has strayed from Richard Hooker’s arguments in the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. The Episcopal Church today is so focused on gender transitions and sexual choice that it strays far from what the church once stood for, and in so doing contradicts the chief point that Hooker made in the Laws.
Hooker’s arguments against the Puritans can be used especially well to condemn the postmodern Episcopal Church. In general, Hooker criticizes the Puritans for focusing too much on personal beliefs, for focusing too much on the present moment, for deciding that whatever they feel or think in time is in accord with God. He argues that they seek power as the moment, circumstance, and whim occurs. The result is inconsistency.
Hooker had a wonderful view of the errancy of individual human behavior and how a standard—the Scripture, Book of Common Prayer, and Church—can provide constancy and stability in our lives. “Nature worketh in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a fan to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintain that which once we have done, sharpeneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to reason for it.”
He wrote further, “nature teacheth men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.” Some things (truth, morals) are obvious to all humans, but some things in Scripture are not, hence we rely on the wise to interpret them for us.
Hooker argued that the foundations to know what is true are three: Reason, Experience, and Tradition. Of reason, he wrote: Reason not feeling is key to knowledge; one must focus on “the nature of that evidence which scripture yieldeth.” The Holy Spirit, he implies, speaks to us through Reason. Feelings lead us to see how different we are from one another, thus it helps foment division. But “nature, Scripture, and experience . . . have all taught the world to seek for the ending of contentions by submitting itself unto some judicial and definitive sentence.” God, Hooker argued, prefers to have disputes settled in an orderly fashion by impartial judges who might err, have erroneous conclusions, that in time will be settled correctly, rather than to have continual disorderly disputes. God here is willing to be patient with humans to in time discover the truth. God is the author of peace not confusion; he wishes us to be patient in our discovery of what is true, and to yield to peace and order not confusion and disorder.
Are the current moral fads of the past twenty to thirty years so pressing, so obviously true, that an entire worldwide church would change its traditional path to follow a postmodern path?
Hooker wrote pointedly and truthfully: “For my purpose herein is to shew, that when the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.” Even more powerful was his argument that people who dispute the current order will always have hearers because of human restlessness and dissatisfaction, unlike those who defend the current order.
Also, a wonderful condemnation to the restlessness and rampant change of our times is this: of God’s laws we are generally ignorant, knowing only bits and pieces of the whole. Humans perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect. The key to discovering the way to moral goodness is by following “the natural way of finding out Laws by Reason” so “to guide the Will unto that which is good.” To expand, he believed that the voice of reason and authority of teaching over time is the way to know the Good. Humans inquire for preservation, simply to know, and as a means to know how to act. Humans know what is true and right by examining all things in relation to themselves over time. The deep understanding of our soul or mind is the First Law, the basis for understanding all subsequent laws and actions. Intuitive natural understanding teaches us “axioms and laws natural concerning our duty.”
Therefore, humans who behave most closely to the apriori truths of nature most closely imitate nature, hence mirror the truth, that is God. There is a universal morality and truth.
Hooker argued for a kind of society based on simple human reason, like that formed by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower Compact. Hooker wrote, twenty-five years before the voyage of the Pilgrims: “To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereunto; that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured.”
Richard Hooker ultimately argued that tradition, experience, and reason–not the whims of the moment, what is popular today—are the basis of order, the basis of morality, the basis of government, and the basis of the Christian Church. Today we see governments, and even churches, forgetting such wisdom. The Episcopal Church used to be a stalwart for tradition and order against the whims of the moment and the tides of change. But no longer. Now the Episcopal Church has become a Postmodern Church rushing along on its happy path into oblivion.
Captain John Smith was arguably the greatest of the English explorers, discoverers, and colonists of America. He was as well the first American historian. His human and natural histories include: A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia Since the First Planting of that Collony, published in 1608; A Map of Virginia, published in 1612; the Description of New England, published in 1616; New Englands Trials, published in 1620; The True Travels, published in 1629; the Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, published in 1631; and his most ambitious effort, The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. The General History has quite a story to tell, of journeys and battles, of harrowing escapes from enemies intent on torturing their captives, of explorers penetrating lands and waters hitherto unseen by Europeans, of dramatic episodes involving the American Indians. With so many possible themes—of adventure, romance, discovery—with which to open his book, it is instructive to see how Smith chose to open his General History. The first paragraph reads:
“This plaine History humbly sheweth the truth; that our most royall King James hath place and opportunitie to inlarge his ancient Dominions without wronging any; (which is a condition most agreeable to his most just and pious resolutions:) and the Prince his Highness may see where to plant new Colonies. The gaining Provinces addeth to the Kings Crown: but the reducing Heathen people to civilitie and true Religion, bringeth honour to the King of Heaven.”[1]
Contained in this first paragraph of the General History are the three fundamental assumptions that guided the life and activities of John Smith, and indeed of all the English explorers who journeyed to America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, during the Elizabeth and Jacobean ages. Smith identified himself, as well as the English, as a conqueror, a colonizer, and a commissioner: a conqueror who will “reduce heathen people,” a colonizer who will “plant new colonies,” and a commissioner who will “bringeth honour to the King of Heaven.” Further, conquest, colonization, and commission are “just and pious” works that, rather than “wronging any,” will bring “civilitie and true Religion.” Smith argued, in short, that the work of conquest and colonization is the work of the Great Commission, which was the commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples, as recorded in the Gospels, to go, and spread the Gospel to all nations. God directs the English to conquer and colonize a land already inhabited. But in so doing they do not wrong anyone because in carrying out the Great Commission they are carrying out God’s will, which cannot be wrong or evil. God’s will is that the English spread the Gospel to people hitherto ignorant of Christ, thereby bringing Good News of peace, happiness, love, and life to a people, it was presumed, who do not have them, and bringing as well a new culture, a civilization that far surpasses the silvan culture of the American Indian. Smith’s assumption, like those of his contemporaries in Jacobean England, was that civilizing a people goes hand in hand with Christianizing a people.
To use civilization and conversion as the ultimate ends to justify conquest and colonization seems disingenuous to say the least, a crass example of an expedient moral system that defends evil because it results in an ultimate good. Forcing others to convert to Christianity was not Smith’s style, and English discoverers anyway tended not to force religion down the throats of disbelieving Indians. Even so, it often appears that, of the three apparent reasons for European colonization, God, Glory, and Gold, God was least important, mere window-dressing, something that sounded good in theory but was in reality little practiced.
If, however, we allow the words of the English to explain their motives and assumptions, and refrain from judging not lest we be judged, we find that the narratives of English colonization repeatedly cite the Great Commission as the ultimate end for the means of conquest and colonization.
Captain Smith was not, of course, ordained and commissioned by the Anglican or any other Church to spread the Gospel according to the tenets of the Great Commission. But Smith did believe that Jesus’s commandment to his disciples to go, and spread the Gospel to all nations, applied to English colonizing efforts. Smith was, we might say, an ad hoc commissioner who, because of his Anglican beliefs, felt compelled not only to journey to America and colonize the land, but to do so because the Great Commission commanded it, and, as a consequence, to bring knowledge of the teachings of Christ to the American Indians. Smith was joined in this endeavor by other explorers, colonizers, and scientists, such as the voyagers who founded Roanoke in the 1580s, and the men of the Martin Frobisher, Humfrey Gilbert, and George Waymouth voyages. Smith is the best known of the early American explorers, and a person that on the surface would not appear to be inclined toward the concerns of the missionary to spread the knowledge of Christianity to others. But the Anglican worldview had quite an impact on Smith, and he responded with a strong sense of the importance of the Great Commission in the work of colonization.
During Smith’s time, scholars and theologians took the words of the Great Commission literally, at face value. Jesus’s Commission required commissioners who were willing to travel, explore, discover, and engage the peoples and places of hitherto unknown lands. Commissioners spread the word to an unknown people in an unknown world of unknown geography, flora, fauna, and natural history. Some were commissioned by monastic orders or church agencies. Others were ad hoc, commissioners who in the process of exploring, discovering, fighting, investigating, and studying also spread the teachings of Jesus.
The Church of England was involved in the Great Commission from the true beginning of English activities in North America under Queen Elizabeth I. The Church commissioned some missionaries to go to America in an official capacity; yet many other missionaries were self-appointed, commissioners simply because they were Anglicans. Martin Frobisher, for example, soldier and adventurer, made three voyages to North America in the 1570s seeking the Northwest Passage. He made contact, and had pitched battles, with the native Inuit people. One contemporary account of his second, 1577, voyage, explained that Frobisher and his men sought, “that by our Christian study and endeavour, those barbarous people trained up in paganism, and infidelity, might be reduced to the knowledge of true religion, and to the hope of salvation in Christ our Redeemer.” The ordained agent in this goal of spreading the Christian message was Robert Wolfall, an Anglican priest, who was chaplain and missionary with the Frobisher voyage to Canada in 1578. Wolfall, according to contemporary chronicler Richard Hakluyt, “being well seated and settled at home in his owne countrey, with a good and large living, having a good, honest woman to wife, and very towardly children, being of good reputation amongst the best, refused not to take in hand this paineful voyage, for the onely care he had to save soules and to reforme these infidels, if it were possible, to Christianitie.” Wolfull was busy on the voyage with homilies, prayers, and communion: “Wolfall,” Hakluyt wrote, “made sermons, and celebrated the Communion at sundry other times in severall and sundry ships, because the whole company could never meet together at any one place.” There is no record that Wolfull actually converted any of the Inuit to Christianity, though he did counsel Frobisher’s men and performed the “divine mystery” for the crew.[2]
Wolfull was by and large a chaplain, and the relations between the English and the Inuit were more of conflict than peace. A decade later, however, in another part of North America, another commissioner, not ordained but ad hoc, had friendlier relations with the Native peoples, and enjoyed more positive results. Scientist Thomas Hariot accompanied the Grenville voyage, sponsored by Walter Raleigh, to Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, in 1585. Hariot wrote A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, of the Commodities and of the Nature and Manners of the Naturall Inhabitants: Discouered bÿ the English Colony there seated by Sir Richard Greinuile Knight In the yeere 1585. Hariot was a naturalist and mathematician, a learned man who communicated, through interpreters, with the native Algonquians about their religious beliefs and tried to impart his knowledge of Anglicanism in turn. He described the Indians as intelligent, having an anthropomorphic and a polytheistic system, including a belief in Heaven and Hell. They were, he wrote, quick to abandon their beliefs in the face of more compelling ideas. Christianity and the Bible fascinated them. “Through conversing with us,” Hariot wrote, “they were brought into great doubts of their owne [religion], and no small admiration of ours, with earnest desire in many, to learne more than we had meanes for want of perfect utterance in their language to expresse.” Hariot, not a priest but devoted to the Great Commission, wrote that “manie times and in every towne where I came, according as I was able, I made declaration of the contentes of the Bible; that therein was set foorth the true and onelie GOD, and his mightie woorkes, that therein was contayned the true doctrine of salvation through Christ, which manie particularities of Miracles and chiefe poyntes of religion, as I was able then to utter, and thought fitte for the time. And although I told them the booke materially & of itself was not of anie such vertue, as I thought they did conceive, but onely the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke over all their bodie with it; to shew their hungrie desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.”[3]
Hariot believed that the Indians were attracted to Christianity in part because English science and technology so impressed them that they admired all of the possessions and beliefs of the English. That the Indians succumbed to diseases of which the English appeared to be immune was also impressive. The chief “called ‘Wingina’, and many of his people would be glad many times to be with us at our praiers, and many times call upon us both in his owne towne, as also in others whither he sometimes accompanied us, to pray and sing Psalmes; hoping thereby to bee partaker in the same effectes which wee by that meanes also expected.”[4]
Hariot’s Briefe and True Report implies the interaction of two cultures imparting godly knowledge, one to the other. Of course, one was attempting to colonize, to discover, to exploit, while the other was attempting to survive and thrive in a place they already possessed. During the reign of Elizabeth, the English turned from exploration to colonization, from bringing the Gospel to pagan peoples during voyages of discovery to settling among them and Christianizing them. Such a process was marred by sin. The promoter of colonization and Anglican priest Richard Hakluyt wrote in the Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation that the English failed to establish the colony at Roanoke because they were driven away by “the hand of God,” which “came upon them for the cruelty and outrages committed by some of them against the native inhabitants of that country.”[5]
Such was the typical response of an Elizabethan Christian who believed in God’s active Providence. Failure was obviously a product of God’s will, and failure could best be explained by sin. Hakluyt’s comment implied a larger question: Was it valid to conquer, colonize, and bring the Great Commission to the indigenous inhabitants of America?
The English, and Captain John Smith, answered in the affirmative, in part because the Elizabethan and Jacobean English believed that England was an Elect nation, in part because of their tremendous sense of God’s Providence at work in their own lives and in the world at large. The English Reformation and founding of the Church of England under Henry VIII, its repression under Mary Tudor, and growth under Elizabeth I, had convinced many English that God particularly blessed England, which would carry out His will. God’s providential role in English voyages of discovery and the English assumption that the Great Commission was of necessity the driver of such voyages can be seen in many of the narratives of voyages of discovery from that time. Edward Hayes, for example, who wrote the account of the 1583 voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, argued that planting “the seed of Christian religion . . . must be the chiefe intent of such as shall make any attempt that way”–”whatsoever is builded upon other foundation shall never obtaine happy successe nor continuance.” He admonished adventurers who prosecuted such voyages to beware such journeys for material rather than spiritual gain. Hayes associated the fulfillment of the Great Commission to all corners of the world with the Second Coming of Christ; hence he believed that God had chosen the Elizabethan age as the time to begin to prosecute the Commission in earnest. Likewise a contemporary of Smith, James Rosier, who voyaged with and penned accounts of the journeys of Bartholomew Gosnold and George Waymouth, wrote of the ultimate goal of the Waymouth voyage: “a publique good, and true zeale of promulgating Gods holy Church, by planting Christianity, [was] the sole intent of the Honourable setters foorth of this discovery.”[6]
Smith’s actions and writings reveal that he agreed that England, the Elect Nation, had a particular role to play in the Great Commission of converting a people ignorant of Christ. He defended the English conquest and colonization of America in his book Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of NewEngland: “Many good religious devout men,” Smith wrote, “have made it a great question, as a matter in conscience, by what warrant they might goe to possesse those Countries, which are none of theirs, but the poore Salvages. Which poore curiosity will answer it selfe; for God did make the world to be inhabited with mankind, and to have his name knowne to all Nations, and from generation to generation: as the people increased they dispersed themselves into such Countries as they found most convenient.”[7] To Smith, the Great Commission is a historical plan, a commandment of the past guiding people in the present and into the future. Jesus came to earth when the population was not great enough, at that time in the first century, to spread the message of the Gospel to all people. But as time passes and the world’s population increases—and England’s population increases—people have the human and material resources to carry out the Commission. The English colonization of America is therefore part of a great plan. Not to journey to other lands, not to extend the Gospel to other peoples, is to disobey God, indeed to reject God’s plan for history, which in Smith’s time was an even greater sin that using intimidation and violence by which to bring about God’s will.
Part of God’s historical plan is civilizing the human race. Smith wrote, in Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, that, “had the seed of Abraham, our Saviour Christ Jesus and his Apostles, exposed themselves to no more dangers to plant the gospell wee so much professe, than we, even we our selves had at this present beene as Salvages, and as miserable as the most barbarous Salvage, yet uncivilized.”[8] It took the courage of other great men, sojourners like Abraham and the Son of Man himself, Jesus, to conform to God’s plan in the face of great danger, even death. Smith and his contemporaries, such as the French explorer and colonizer Samuel Champlain, referred to the Indians as salvages, which appears on the surface to be a a misspelling or inaccurate transliteration of savages.Salvage is, rather, a rendering from the Latin, silva, referring to those who live in the forest.[9] Forest-dwellers rather than city-dwellers will be less sophisticated, lacking accoutrements of civilization such as literacy and metallurgy. Forest-dwellers are not necessarily savage, though Smith was not afraid to use that word; but he more often described the Indians by the less judgmental salvages. He believed that God’s plan, the Great Commission, aims to bring salvages from their ignorant state of pastoral simplicity into a civilized world, the world, that is, of the English and other Christians. God of course first brought knowledge of His Son to the civilized Roman Empire, to the sophisticated Jews. From here, over the centuries, Christianity spread outward to less civilized peoples in northern and eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia; now, in the early seventeenth century, Christianity was spreading to the uncivilized salvages of America.
How actively involved was Smith himself in bringing the Gospel to the Indians? There are many examples in Smith’s writings of his attempts to convince the American Indians of the truth of the Christian God. “Our order was daily to have Prayer,” he wrote, “with a Psalme, at which solemnitie the poore Salvages much wondered.” “To divert them from . . . [their] blind Idolatry,” Smith and his companions “did our best endevours, chiefly with the Werowance of Quiyoughcohanock [Popohanock], whose devotion, apprehension, and good disposition, much exceeded any in those Countries, with whom although we could not as yet prevaile, to God as much exceeded theirs, as our Gunnes did their Bowes & Arrowes, and many times did send to me to James Towne, intreating me to pray to my God for raine, for their Gods would not send them any. And in this lamentable ignorance doe these poore soules sacrifice themselves to the Devill, not knowing their Creator; and we had not language sufficient, so plainly to expresse it as make them understand it; which God grant they may.” Smith believed that his words and actions illustrated the power of God in his life, as he wrote “That God that created all things they knew he [Smith] adored for his God: they would also in their discourses terme the God of Captaine Smith. ‘Thus the Almightie was the bringer on, The guide, path, terme, all which was God alone’.”[10]
Smith never felt that the Indians showed aggression as a counter to the Great Commission. In Advertisements he explained that the Indian attack on Jamestown in 1622 did not occur because the Virginians were Christian; rather, the Indians wanted to plunder the accoutrements of white civilization. Indians would kill to acquire and steal, but not to counter Christianity. Indeed, he wrote, the Indians were attracted to white civilization. Smith implied that to bring Christianity to the Indians was warranted because it did not repel them and they would not kill because of it.????
Smith supported the New England Puritans in their work to establish religious societies and convert the natives. God has decided, he wrote, “to stirre up some good mindes, that I hope, will produce glory to God, honour to His Majesty, and profit to his kingdom.” Smith had himself journeyed along the coast of New England in 1614, and believed that the land was reserved by God for some special purpose, that is, English colonization and the fulfillment of the Great Commission. He thought it was possible that God had purposefully spread disease throughout New England prior to the Pilgrims’s coming, preparing the way for the Lord, as it were. The surviving natives of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts would benefit from the English goal of “civilizing barbarous and inhumane nations to civility and humanity.” Indeed, the English owed this work to the New England Indians; it would otherwise be a “want of charity to those poore Salvages, whose Countries we challenge, use, and possesse.” Personally, Smith felt that it was his Christian duty to pursue this work. “Our good deeds or bad,” he wrote in Advertisements, “by faith in Christs merits, is all wee have to carry our soules to heaven or hell.”[11]
Smith wrote Advertisements toward the end of his life, when he was reflective about his accomplishments and role in history, and considered what were his greatest achievements. Significantly, he dedicated Advertisements to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York. In this his final work, he wished to show his dedication to the Anglican Church, prefacing his book with a similar statement of commitment to the Great Commission as he had prefaced the GeneralHistory. He hoped that the “Plantation of New England” would lead to “the increase of Gods Church, converting Salvages, and enlarging the Kings Dominions.” He called the two archbishops his “Fathers and Protectors unexpectedly.” Smith felt compelled to defend himself for doing whatever he could to begin and sustain the Anglican Church in Virginia during the two years he was there. He wrote: “Now because I have spoke so much of the body, give me leave to say something of the soul, and the rather because I have been often demanded by so many how we began to preach the Gospel in Virginia, and by what authority, what churches we had, our order of service, and maintenance of our ministers, therefore I think it not amiss to satisfy their demands, it being the mother of all our plantations.” The Jamestown colonists established Church as they knew it the best way they knew how: “When I first went to Virginia, I well remember, we did hang an awning (which is an old sail) to three or four trees to shadow us from the sun, our walls were rails of wood, our seats unhewed trees till we cut planks; our pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighboring trees; in foul weather we shifted into an old rotten tent, for we had few better.” “This was our church, till we built a homely thing like a barn, set upon cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge and earth; so was also the walls; the best of our houses (were) of the like curiosity, but the most part far much worse workmanship, that neither could well defend wind nor rain, yet we had daily Common Prayer morning and evening, every Sunday two sermons, and every three months the holy Communion, till our minister died. But our prayers daily with an homily on Sundays, we continued two or three years after, till more preachers came.”[12]
Contemplating the continuing growth of Anglicanism in England, Smith worried that such would not be the case in New England, and counseled readers of his Advertisements in what he considered to be the true approach to Christianity, both in England and in America. Smith thought that the strength in Christianity lay in its unity to a common creed and unified authority, both of which were found only in “one God, one Christ, one Church”–of England of course. Dissensions from the Church splintered the belief, making it prey to non-Christians.[13]
The Stuart kings who granted charters for colonies made the Great Commission a priority of colonization. For example when James I granted Virginia a new charter in 1612, he declared the purpose of the colony was “for the Propagation of Christian Religion, and Reclaiming of People barbarous, to Civility and Humanity.”[14] The Virginia Company declared their intention, in True and Sincere Declaration of the Purposes and Ends of the Plantation “to preach and baptize into Christian religion, and by the propagation the Gospell, to recover out of the arms of the Divell a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt up unto death, in almost invincible ignorance.”[15] The 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, published during the reign of Charles II, prayed: “GOD, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, we humbly beseech thee for all sorts and conditions of men: that thou wouldest be pleased to make thy ways known unto them, thy saving health unto all nations.”[16]
Alexander Whitaker, the so-called Apostle of Virginia, who pastored to Smith at Jamestown, wrote Good News from Virginia in 1613, proclaiming in the Dedication that Virginia is a “godly Plantation.” Whitaker compared the English fighting to spread the Gospel in the New World with the early Apostles spreading the Word in the wake of Pentecost. God’s Providence underlies the English colonization of Virginia. Whitaker argued that good works are the foundation for the colony’s success. Good works are a sanctifying process for the English, who are not unique in their ability to be converted to an understanding of the gospel. The American Indians, Whitaker wrote, although hitherto worshipers of Satan, are like Europeans descended from Adam; “they have reasonable souls and intellectual faculties as well as wee,” and are as convertible to Christianity as the English were in the distant past of their idolatry. “The promise of God,” he wrote, “is without respect of person.” Like the promise God made to Israel, if the English conform to God’s wishes then He will bless their endeavors.[17]
John Smith shared Whitaker’s view about the importance of good works, and the role of Providence in human affairs. “If you but truly consider how many strange accidents have befallen those plantations and my self,” he wrote in Advertisements, [you] “cannot but conceive Gods infinite mercy both to them and me.” Smith saw himself as a playing an important role in acting upon the Great Commission. God’s “omnipotent power onely delivered me to doe the utmost of my best to make his name knowne in those remote parts of the world.”[18]
Of course, published works are always suspect as a guide to feelings and personal motives, and historians are rightly suspicious to put too much value in the words of a man so concerned with his personal reputation as was Smith. At the same time, people of Jacobean England often wore their hearts on their sleeves, and Smith in particular was a passionate man who could scarcely hide his feelings of anger, despair, hope, and faith. As his published works, and those of his contemporaries, are all that we have to go on with which to reconstruct his life and work, it is best to scrutinize his words and to get under his skin, as it were, to discover who was the real John Smith, and what were his motives. I believe that historians who empathize with the past, to engage in a dialogue with past humans, can reach a level of understanding that echos, fairly accurately, what really happened.[19]
At the same time one must always be on guard against unintentional anachronism. It is all too easy to judge people in the past by means of what happened after their deaths, and what their actions led to in time. This is particularly true of the relationships between Europeans and the American Indians. The horrible things that happened to American Indians cannot be forgotten: the spread of disease among them, brought by the invaders; the aggression in words and actions of the invaders toward the Indians; the destruction of a way of life over the course of centuries. Humans do not, however, always know what their actions will result in. Do you and I know what our words and behavior will lead to in ten years, twenty years, or further in time? No, and neither did Smith and his contemporaries. Smith could not peer ahead in time to see a future United States of America, a future of Indian despair, a future of what has come to be called “cultural genocide” perpetrated by whites against the Indians. He can hardly be held to blame. His worldview was circumscribed by his experiences and the experiences of the English up to that time. He was born right after the Spanish Armada and grew up knowing how precarious was England’s position in the world. He was born at a time when Elizabeth I was attempting to solidify the foundation of the Church of England against a strong Roman Catholic presence and growing Puritan presence in England. In his world, Christians were still struggling to compete against each other as well as other religious systems, the believers of which were aggressive and just as convinced that they knew the truth. The Great Commission was still very much a commandment yet to be realized. Smith lived before Biblical exegesis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought people to doubt the infallibility of the Bible as well as the constancy of Divine Providence in human affairs. To Smith, God was watching his actions even as He compelled time forward and Christ was the Savior welcoming a valiant man home after the work of his life was complete. Civilization as Smith knew it was Christian—there were few if any alternatives. Jesus commanded the spread of His Word and who was Smith or any one else to challenge Him? The Indians were not civilized, that is, not Christian, did not make proper use of the land, and it was inconceivable to Smith that they would want to be left alone. As he wrote in the General History: “But we chanced in a Land even as God made it, where we found onely an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of the knowledge of gold or silver, or any commodities, and carelesse of any thing but from hand to mouth, except bables of no worth; nothing to incourage us, but what accidentally we found Nature afforded. Which ere we could bring to recompence our paines, defray our charges, and satisfie our Adventurers; we were to discover the Countrey, subdue the people, bring them to be tractable, civill, and industrious, and teach them trades, that the fruits of their labours might make us some recompence, or plant such Colonies of our owne, that must first make provision how to live of themselves, ere they can bring to perfection the commodities of the Country.”[20]
In short, John Smith had little reason to hide his true motives or deceive his readers in the General History and his other works, for he wrote in the shadow of God’s grace, and could scarcely evade the searcher of hearts. He lived his life aware of Providence and aware that at some point he would have to account for his deeds. England was an Elect Nation that was clearly appointed by God according to His pleasure that at this time in human history the English were to settle America, make it productive, Christianize the native people, and bring them into the orbit of English civilization.
John Smith’s writings provide a perfect inside look into the motives for exploration and colonization, in which we find that alongside the expansion of English power and wealth is the spread of Christianity. Brute force and the pursuit of wealth and power were insufficient justifications; the teachings of Christ were after all the cornerstone of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. Smith’s writings shows that the spread of Christianity had to be a foundation in the mix of English exploration and colonization.
The Christian/Anglican worldview was so much a part of each person’s fundamental assumptions about life and work that the English explorers were, like religious leaders in England, completely wedded to the idea that the expansion of English power had to be accompanied by the Great Commission, that it was a fundamental justification for expansion and conquest. The Great Commission here was not merely a convenient excuse, window-dressing to justify more nefarious motives, but was rather a raison d’etre for exploration and colonization.
[1] John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, in Works, 1608-1631, Edward Arber, ed. (Birmingham, 1884), 278.
[2] Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries: ThePrincipal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; reprint ed., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972), 190; William Stevens Perry, The History of the American Episcopal Church 1587-1883, vol 1 (Boston, 1885), 7.
[3] Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London: Privately Printed, 1900), 57, 58.
[6] “A Report of the Voyage of Sir Humfrey Gilbert, Knight, 1583, by Master Edward Haies” and “A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, 1605, by James Rosier,”in Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608, ed., Henry S. Burrage (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1906), 180, 181, 183, 388.
[7] John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters, in Works, 1608-1631, Edward Arber, ed. (Birmingham, 1884), 934.
[19] For more on this approach to historical inquiry, see my The American Plutarch: Jeremy Belknap and the Historian’s Dialogue with the Past (Praeger, 1998).
For two hundred and thirty-seven years, American politics has been vitriolic, even more so in the twenty-first century, where anybody anytime anywhere can post or speak their mind in online media, television, the news, &c, making nonsensical accusations of misogyny, homophobia, racism, fascism, and every type of vitriolic hatred directed toward the political candidate that they have deemed unqualified and unsupportable.
Or, they can make reasonable and rational blog posts. 😉
Donald Trump has received an extraordinary proportion of such vitriol, and for what reason? I would assume that most people who voted for/supported Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris are not leftwing Socialists and those who voted for/supported Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are not corrupt baby killers. Nor are most people who voted for/supported Trump right-wing extremists.
Many people voted for Donald Trump not because they think he is the best possible candidate, rather because of the available candidates, they respect his stance regarding the sanctity of human life, the extreme power of political parties, the corruption of career politicians, the corruption throughout American life, immigration, drug abuse, the decline of the family, and the ridiculous extremes we have seen in many moral issues.
Moreover, once Trump garnered the Republican nomination (three times), he did what most such nominees do, that is, toned down the rhetoric, and began to have a more statesman-like attitude toward international trade, domestic order, paying the federal debt, kick-starting the American economy, fighting crime and lawlessness, and securing America’s place in the world. I don’t believe America is the “policeman of the world,” as FDR wanted to make us. But I do believe that America is the country that, of all countries in the world, has had the best motives for securing world peace and prosperity.
To be President of the United States is an awesome responsibility. I believe it is possible that Trump is a self-made man who late in life has decided to serve his country and give back to others. Believe me, most of my adult life I have watched Trump on talk shows, being interviewed about this and that, hawking his books on money, etc. I have never really respected him.
I also have never been convinced that this country was founded upon the principle of career politicians having constant control of our federal system. There is so much political corruption and political cronyism. Perhaps it is good to elect a person with much life and business experience but little political experience. Some of our greatest presidents were such people.
I have had my doubts about Donald Trump, and still do, but I consider the alternative–Clinton, Biden, Harris–and I continue to believe in giving him a chance to see if he can succeed as President. I’m not convinced he is as horrible as many Americans believe. If we have a historical perspective, we would find that even the great Lincoln was accused of being an evil man, a gorilla, an ignoramus, both before he was elected president and during his presidency. Indeed the Federalists portrayed Jefferson as the epitome of evil. Democrats thought that Teddy Roosevelt was a lunatic. Republicans were convinced Lyndon Johnson was destroying American youth in an unwinnable war. Democrats thought that Reagan was about to end humanity with his attitude toward nuclear weapons.
Nowadays, we have the unfortunate situation of constant social media filling our eyes and ears with absurdities. It is hard to know what to believe. I try to have a balanced perspective, and reserve judgment. Let’s see what happens.
Many years ago, when I was in the Boy Scouts, on a particular camping trip in Oklahoma in late autumn, I recall fishing at a small pond, and catching a fairly large bass. For some inexplicable reason I proceeded to experiment with the fish. I took a stick and begin poking it in the eyes, and face, essentially torturing it, and watching it die.
I learned how to fish from my Dad and his parents, my grandparents, who loved to go to area lakes and fish for bass, bluegill, perch, and crappie. They would bait hooks with small fish, minnows, or fat worms, not caring whether or not the minnows or worms cared, then cast the lines in the lake or stream, and wait for the bobber to bob, then descend under water, which meant a fish had taken the bait. The excitement of reeling the fish in was exceeded only by pulling it out of the water, watching it struggling at the end of the hook, and feeling the pride of the catch. Extracting the hook from the fish’s mouth was often difficult; sometimes the fish had swallowed it; other times it was too deep in the mouth. Notwithstanding the hook, the fish was either kept or thrown back—kept if it was fat and healthy enough to eat, thrown back if too small or insignificant. Maiming, killing, discarding the fish was never considered by the fishers.
Children are taught the power, if not the love, of God from the beginning. Any creature below a human is subjected, on a whim, to pain, torture, or death. Flies are swatted, mosquitoes slapped, bees and wasps sprayed with poison, spiders crushed, worms stepped on; besides the disregard for life in the insect world, children are taught as well that the lives of other vermin are unworthy—mice, rats, moles, rabbits, squirrels, frogs, toads, fish, birds, coyotes, foxes, skunks, opossums: it is a mighty list of the animals that are discarded and put to death without a second thought. Hunters build their ego by seeking trophies of various sorts: deer, panthers, wolves, moose, bear, and more. Only a few animals deemed near extinction receive any kind of consideration, usually from government and not individuals.
Because humans in America over the past several centuries destroyed many of the predators that preyed on animals such as deer, there is an overabundance of deer, and hunting is a useful way to reduce the numbers to maintain a balanced ecosystem. Killing for the sake of maintaining nature’s balance is justified, though it can be taken to extremes as well. For example, the federal government pays killers of barred owls in the northwest to reduce their numbers so that the spotted owl will not go extinct. Killing one animal to save another: quite a moral dilemma! I have a very simplistic view about such a situation. I feel that if it is part of God’s plan that one species dominates another, what am I to do about it? Am I to be responsible for the survival of the fittest in the animal kingdom? It seems that humans have imposed themselves already way too much in nature’s original order as created by God, and that continued or increased imposition by humans in nature might be more negative than positive.
It is just one more step, in the disregard for life, for a child to learn that human life itself is subject to individual whims to terminate or discard. Humans have reached a point of moral depravity wherein we must decide if an unborn human in the womb is more or less important than the mother’s ease, freedom, and life. The arrogance of humans has, in fact, advanced even farther than ever before. We have tests to determine the health and viability of the fetus, which if it appears to have defects, can be terminated. Life is so prolific that it has become cheap.
I am a historian, and one of my favorite topics to write on is the Christian missionary experience in America. I have just reissued on Amazon a book about Baptist missionaries in America, particularly in Oklahoma: “Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years.” This is the story of Bacone College, founded as Indian University in 1880. Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, reached out to the American Indians of Oklahoma and beyond to provide a Christian liberal arts education. The initial goal of the college was to train missionaries, but as time passed the college embrace students from dozens of tribes to provide a primary, secondary, and college education. Bacone College recently closed in its 145th year due to mismanagement and poor decision-making by administrators and trustees. But its legacy remains for those thousands the school educated over so many years. It was a school that showed that missionary work to the American Indian did not have to be brutal and heart-rending, rather a good, productive experience that many alumni looked fondly back on. The narrative is told with an emphasis on the stories of those students over the many decades: their learning, their writings, their general experiences in this small college in Creek Nation, Oklahoma. See https://www.amazon.com/dp/0977244806
Another book I’ve written, which is forthcoming in August 2026, to be published by Bloomsbury, is “American Catholics.” Beginning with North America’s contact with three imperialist powers (Spain, France, and England), this narrative account tells the story of how Catholicism became and continues to be part of the basic religious and cultural fiber of North America. The book follows a narrative chronological and thematic format, focusing on people, events, practices, social and cultural phenomena, and institutions. People discussed include the well-known, such as Christopher Columbus and Junipero Serra, and the not-so-well-known, such as Juniper Berthiaume and Jean Louis Berlandier. With 32 chapters divided into 7 parts and all drawing on primary sources, this book engages with topics such as the overwhelming violence against Indigenous people and the religion’s role in wars, politics, and modern-day culture–but also, in the basic love for the American Indians that most Roman Catholic missionaries had. See https://www.amazon.com/American-Catho… In my extensive research on missionaries, I have discovered that they were generally good people who simply wanted to introduce people to God–nothing more. An example is Daniel Little, a Protestant clergyman in 18th century Maine. Naturalist, scientist, pastor, missionary, Daniel Little became known as the “Apostle of the East” by his contemporaries and admirers for his many missionary journeys along Maine’s eastern frontier. He spent much of his life ministering to the English settlers and Indians of the Penobscot valley. See https://www.amazon.com/Apostle-East-J… Find out a side to American history that is often portrayed negatively but rather is positive and a joy to learn about. Happy reading!
The American Plutarch 