The Ambivalent Uses of Roger Williams's A Key Into the Language of America

Abstract

The Ambivalent Uses of Roger Williams's A Key Into the Language of America J. Patrick Cesarini (bio) Two recent scholarly developments have gradually transformed the study of early American literature, though their respective emphases, methods, and purposes have been quite distinct. On the one hand, under the broad rubric of "transatlantic studies," a growing number of literary scholars have rediscovered the 'Englishness' of early American literature. Rather than conceiving of their subject as the "early" (that is, as the inferior or embryonic) stage of a later, fully developed, national literature of the United States, such scholars have instead reconstructed the various ways in which writing in and about colonial America both shaped and was shaped by the developing British national and imperial "scenes" in which it performed.1 On the other hand, and facing as it were in the other direction, a number of "ethnohistorical" scholars have returned to the voluminous early American literature about Indians, in order not only to reassess what Indians meant for the "American mind" (in Roy Harvey Pearce's words) but, just as importantly, to recover what the European settlement and conquest of America meant for its indigenous peoples. Combining anthropological, historical, and literary analysis, ethnohistory-or what Arnold Krupat has called ethnocriticism-attends to the native "voice in the margin" of Anglo-American Indian writing, in order to reveal the ways in which Indian subjects and worldviews both accommodated and resisted the efforts of imperial discourses and policies to comprehend them.2 While the transatlantic and ethnohistorical reconfigurations of early American literature have largely proceeded in isolation from one another,3 I want here to explore a unique moment in the history of early America, when questions about Indians became caught up in the transatlantic literary, spiritual, and political relations between English colonies and the English metropolis. I am referring to the period from 1630 until the later decades of the seventeenth century, when Protestant writers on both sides [End Page 469] of the Atlantic engaged in a protracted debate about the relation between New English colonization and the conversion of Native Americans. Most scholars agree that New Englanders did not seriously begin their mission to the Indians until the 1640s, but the mission's rhetorical life began with the Great Migration, more than 10 years before, when the Puritan founders of Massachusetts declared that a "principall end" of the new colony was to "wynn" the American natives over to Christianity. Massachusetts Bay's early failure to follow through on that declaration, combined with the variety of political and theological differences between New and Old England that emerged throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, created both a skeptical climate in London regarding any "newes from New-England," and a need on the part of Puritan settlers to convince their metropolitan brethren and overseers that New England remained English, however new.4 Yet although New England tried to shore up its theologico-political legitimacy among English skeptics, in part by renewing its lapsed commitment to Indian salvation, most students of the Puritans' Indian mission have treated the mission's transatlantic drama-when they have treated it at all-as relatively unimportant, compared with the mission's American drama, its depiction of a "dialogue in the wilderness" between Indian and New English minds.5 Without denying the centrality of the American context for an understanding of the mission's significance for Indians and colonists, in the following pages I demonstrate that the mission's English context played a greater role in shaping both the mission's writing and its conduct than has been acknowledged so far. Here I focus on the charged moment in 1643, when the reality of New England's mission seemed at last to catch up with its transatlantic rhetoric, but when, at the same time, the mission encountered its most resourceful competitor in Roger Williams, arguably the best known of New England's troubling exiles. It may seem surprising to call Williams a competitor with "orthodox" New England for the pursuit of Indian souls, for Williams's single, remarkable book on the Indians, A Key Into the Language of America, has almost always seemed antithetical, in its assumptions and...