Goals and Functions of Puritan Missions to the Indians

Abstract

Some modem historians have accepted uncritically the Puritans' own evaluation of their function as agents of altruism with respect to American Indians. A more careful examination of the data, especially those concerning John Eliot, John Winthrop and Edward Winslow, suggest that political and economic motives, as well as religious aims, underlay Puritan missionary activities. Resultant disaffection with the Puritans on the part of many New England Indians helped delay English expansion in some areas for more than a century. The political functions of Jesuit missions to the Indians have been described frequently and are accepted by historians without demur. Different functions have been attributed to the Puritan missions of seventeenth century New England (see Mather 1694: 134-147). Reviving the traditional rationale of the Puritans themselves, recent historians of their missions present them without differentiation or substantial qualification as agencies of altruism (0. Winslow 1968: 96; Vaughan 1965: vii-viii). I have given special attention to Alden T. Vaughan's New England Frontier, attending on the one hand to its internal logic, and on the other to the degree of correlation existing between what the book said was in source documents and what I found in those documents. Vaughan's study seems defective to me both in its inherent credibility of argument and in its reportage of the sources, and his conclusions seem rather to be refuted than supported by his evidence. *Paper read at the 17th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Cornell University, October, 1969.