Ebony and Ivy (4 page)

Britain's rulers had also learned the strategic value of academies
during their wars for territory, thrones, trade routes, and people. The medieval and early modern universities—Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209) in England; St. Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495), and Edinburgh (1582) in Scotland; and Trinity College (1592) in Ireland—had been swept into the religious and political conflicts that gave birth to Great Britain. Hundreds of Oxford students dropped their books and began drilling with arms on campus during the English Civil Wars, 1642 to 1651. The crown and Parliament engaged in repeated purges of hostile students and faculty to bring the colleges into the service of their competing political causes. A clandestine Puritanism thrived at Cambridge despite monarchist efforts to make the faculty and scholars conform to the Church of England. Dissenting theology spread from Emmanuel and Sidney Sussex to other colleges in the university, including Trinity and Corpus Christi.
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Universities facilitated England's colonial campaigns in Scotland and Ireland, and they played a similar role in the Americas. The English sought to open a college during the formative years of Virginia. In February 1615 King James I directed his bishops to hold collections for “the founding & endowing of an ample Colledge” among “those Barbarians” of Virginia. Raising a college was part of a layered English strategy to maintain religious orthodoxy among the colonists and to check the power of the confederacy under Chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. Thomas Dale, who brought Pocahontas's delegation to England the following year, and the Reverend Alexander Whitaker, minister to the colony, pleaded for the charter by reminding the crown of its obligation to evangelize and educate Indians. Dale had unsuccessfully tried to get the colonial government moved to Henrico, a James River outpost named for Henry, Prince of Wales. He courted the college to secure his investment, accelerate the conversion of the local Indians, and help turn Native people into tenants who could bolster commerce and security.
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After King James commanded “the College to be erected in Virginia for the conversion of Infidels,” the Virginia Company apportioned ten thousand acres in Henrico to endow the Indian academy and a larger university. By 1619, when the first enslaved Africans
were traded into the colony, supporters had raised more than £2,000 in Britain for the colonial school, collected donations for a library and other necessities, and drawn up basic regulations. The company dispatched carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, and farmers to begin building the campus and cultivating the grants. More than three hundred people under the direction of George Thorpe settled the lands—some fifty of them missionaries tasked with “the reclaiming of the Barbarous Natives.” The Reverend Patrick Copland, a Scot and an experienced East Indies missionary who had met Thomas Dale in Asia, agreed to be rector of the college, receiving shares entitling him to three hundred acres of Virginia land.
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Conflicts over territory and trade had already fractured relations between Christians and Indians. On April 18, 1622, Copland delivered a thanksgiving prayer in London for Virginia, where he was soon to resettle. A ship that returned to London that July carried reports that Chief Opechancanough, who came to power after the death of his brother Chief Powhatan, had attacked the colony on March 22, massacred dozens of inhabitants, and destroyed the settlement. In 1624 Edward Palmer of London left lands in New England and Virginia to support a college on a Susquehanna River island, but his executors mismanaged the fund and nothing came of his design. King James revoked the Virginia Company charter that year and imposed royal government, an upheaval that ended the first attempt to organize a Protestant college in America.
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Nonetheless, the seeds of the English universities were already being planted. In its first quarter century New England received more than a hundred Cambridge alumni and more than thirty graduates of Oxford. Even young Trinity, in Dublin, was training personnel for the colonies. John Winthrop Jr. graduated from Trinity before his father—the first governor of Massachusetts Bay—departed for North America. John Sherrard left Providence Island in the West Indies to study in Dublin. The brothers Samuel and Increase Mather both earned advanced degrees from Trinity.
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In 1636 the Massachusetts General Court chartered a “colledge” in Newtown (Cambridge) and three years later named it in honor of John Harvard, a young minister at the First Church in Charlestown. In 1638 Rev. Harvard died of tuberculosis, leaving half his estate, about £780, and a library of more than two hundred books to further the training of the ministry. He was the son of two modest Puritans: Robert Harvard and Katherine Rogers of Southwark, London. Katherine Rogers was the daughter of a Stratford-on-Avon cattle merchant and alderman, and Robert Harvard was a butcher and tavern owner. In 1627 John Harvard had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees before leaving with Ann Sadler, his wife, for Massachusetts. Several Emmanuel graduates, including Thomas Shepard and Richard Saltonstall, were founders of the colonial school.
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Shortly after the establishment of Harvard, Puritan ministers began sending missives to England that chronicled the spread of the Gospel in America.
New England's First Fruits
, the initial pamphlet, identified the nascent college as a symbol of Christianity's success. Readers learned that Puritan ministers were preaching to the Indians, Native people were embracing the true God, and the English were winning the Indians' affection and esteem by treating them “fairly and courteously, with loving termes, good looks and kind salutes.” Known as “Eliot Tracts”—for the missionary John Eliot—these communications were written as the colonists achieved military dominance during the four decades between the Pequot Massacre in 1637 and King Philip's War in 1675. They included passionate vignettes of Indians accepting Christianity, coming to fear eternal damnation, seeking protection from disease and death by adopting the colonists' religion, and advertising their conversion by mimicking English customs and attire.
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British colonists did not blush over the strategic benefits of spreading their faith. Depopulation and political crises within the Indian nations emboldened the English. Mortality rates among the seaboard communities reached as high as 90 percent. “God and
Jesus Christ, God and Jesus Christ help me,” Nishohkou's two-year-old child screamed before dying from the bloody flux (severe dysentery) that also had stricken his mother and siblings. “Father, I am going to God,” Nishohkou's three-year-old said before expiring. Rev. Eliot reported that Nishohkou made a confession of faith. “That Winter the Pox came, and almost all our kindred died,” Ponampam recalled of the events that caused his mother to take him at eight years of age and move closer to the colonists. The government of God “is now beginning to be set up where it never was before,” the Reverend Richard Mather promised his British readers. “The greatest parte of them are swept awaye by the small poxe, which still continues among them,” a grateful Governor John Winthrop wrote of the epidemics. “God hathe hereby cleared our title to this place.” He estimated that fewer than fifty Indians remained in the immediate vicinity of the colony, and added that these remaining people had been penned and subjugated.
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Puritan expansion also benefited from a new institution: a missionary company vested with extraordinary privileges and authority. In 1649 Parliament created the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. The mission of the “New England Company” was to accelerate the Christianization of the North American Indians, and it served as a model for the later Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (1709).
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It was a momentous year for Protestants. In 1649 the defeated and dethroned King Charles I was tried and executed, and Parliament dispatched the warrior Puritan Oliver Cromwell to slaughter the Irish into submission. New England was a bastion of support for Cromwell, his army, and the short-lived English republic, and, as Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth, Cromwell hatched failed plans to seed Ireland and Jamaica with sympathetic and sturdy spiritual radicals from Massachusetts. The New England Company could hold and solicit funds, establish schools, and supply teachers and ministers. British subjects eagerly endowed the corporation through their wills, with rents from lands, and with
yearly subscriptions. British colonists added to the company's treasury, which paid for everything from the tuition and board of Indian students to the printing presses that ran off thousands of copies of the Reverend John Eliot's Algonquian Bible, or “ye Indian Bible,” the Algonquian catechism, and other primers and literature. Puritan divines sent testimonials on the advance of faith in America, and anyone in London could examine accounts of the corporation's revenues and expenditures.
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John Eliot's Algonquian translation of the Bible, published in 1663
SOURCE: Massachusetts Historical Society

A wave of Christian ministers, first from British universities and then from Harvard, evangelized Native communities. Harvard president Henry Dunster, an experienced missionary, encouraged Indian education, augmented the charter to include the evangelization of Native people, and broke ground for a new school. The mission included “the education of the English & Indian Youth of this Country in knowledge: and godliness.” In 1655 his successor, Charles Chauncy, opened the Indian College, the first brick structure on Harvard Yard, at a cost of nearly £400. The two-story building sat next to Old College and across from Goffe College—each new building was designated “college”—which neighbored the president's house. It had study chambers, halls, and rooms for twenty students. Harvard offered free education to Indians and encouraged English students to learn Algonquian.
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In defense of the Indian College, Rev. Chauncy recalled the scholarly tradition of the church. He berated colonists who opposed schools and cultivated an ignorance that encouraged sin. Among the greatest failures of the New Englanders was the corruption of Native peoples, to whom Christians had traded guns and liquor with deadly consequences, he charged. A few years later the president reported the progress of two young Indian boys, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacoomis, who were attending the grammar school in Cambridge and whom Chauncy personally examined in Latin. In 1665 Cheeshahteaumuck graduated from Harvard, its first and only Indian graduate during the colonial period.
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In New England and Virginia, the English brought Indian children into schools to learn the ways of the Christian God and to swear loyalty to the English and their government. When the idea of removing children met cool receptions, they brought whole Native families into English villages. The Massachusetts General Court offered Indian parents a new coat every year that their child apprenticed in a Christian house. Rev. Eliot promoted these relocations to attack beliefs and break up traditions that acted as barriers to Christianization or offended English sensibilities. “Divers of the Indians Children, Boyes and Girles we have received into our
houses,” the 1643 report declared, “who are long since civilized, and in subjection to us.” From 1651 to 1674, Eliot organized fourteen “praying towns”—communities of converted Indians, governed internally but under English supervision—where thousands of Native people lived apart from their unredeemed clans.
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The vanished Indian College at Harvard, as drawn in 1936 for Samuel Eliot
Morison's
Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century
SOURCE: Harvard University Press

The year that the Indian College opened, Harvard's governors revised the by-laws and regulations. Students had to wear their gowns or cloaks whenever they left their rooms, and their grooming and comportment had to be consistent with English custom for learned men. At Harvard and William and Mary, Native students also dressed in English clothes, marking their cultural submission. The English sought to correct Indians' appearance, speech, and beliefs. Master of the Latin school in Roxbury, Eliot prepared the most promising Indian youth in English, Latin, and Greek. Admission to Harvard required the ability to “make & speake or write
true Latin in prose” and proof that one was “Competently grounded in the Greeke Language.” The faculty forbade all Harvard boys from speaking English even in casual exchanges, a regulation that was freely and routinely violated. What was burdensome to English students proved transformative to Native boys.
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