Abstract
In a well-known and in many ways remarkable passage in A Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689, Locke sketched the following example of intolerance:
An inconsiderable and weak number of Christians, destitute of everything, arrive in a Pagan country; these foreigners beseech the inhabitants, by the bowels of humanity, that they would succour them with the necessaries of life; those necessaries are given them, habitations are granted, and they all join together, and grow up into one body of people. The Christian religion by this means takes root in that country and spreads itself, but does not suddenly grow the strongest. While things are in this condition peace, friendship, faith, and equal justice are preserved amongst them. At length the magistrate becomes a Christian, and by that means their party becomes the most powerful. Then immediately all compacts are to be broken, all civil rights to be violated, that idolatry may be extirpated; and unless these innocent Pagans, strict observers of the rules of equity and the law of Nature and no ways offending against the laws of the society, I say, unless they will forsake their ancient religion and embrace a new and strange one, they are to be turned out of the lands and possessions of their forefathers and perhaps deprived of life itself. Then, at last, it appears what zeal for the Church, joined with the desire of dominion, is capable to produce, and how easily the pretence of religion, and of the care of souls, serves for a cloak to covetousness, rapine, and ambition.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), p. 43.
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 2.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English, Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 239.
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (New York: Penguin Books, 1968). Clausewitz indicates the intrinsic connection between war and the mental state of enmity: see Bk I, I.13, Bk I, I.18 and famously Bk I, I.28.
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Given its importance in the legacy of Native-English history, many accounts of the war have been offered. See for a useful synopsis of this literature Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 155–59. The traditional name of Philip (who had requested an English name) was Metacom.
Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1999), p. 1.
See Daniel Richter’s Before the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 264, 279–91) for a discussion of the war and its place in the dynamic of planter settlements and imperial reassertion of authority, which eventually set the stage for the American Revolution. The war led Charles II to re-examine Massachusetts’s sovereign charter and to begin to reassert royal authority; by 1686 the New England colonies would be folded back under the crown. See also Mandell, 2010, for the detrimental effects on the colonial victors, pp. 137–38.
See Kupperman, Indians and English, for an analysis of the nature of this encounter during the first decades of contact and colonisation. She objects to designating persons as already falling into well-defined groups and prefers to tell the story as one ‘about individual people caught up in novel situations and trying to operate by timeworn methods’ p. 1. In contrast, G. E. Thomas, ‘Puritans, Indians, and the Concept of Race’, in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (March, 1975), pp. 3–27, stresses the inherently racial and discriminatory attitudes of the English from the outset in their contact with the Indians.
Quoted in Philip Ranlet, ‘Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War’, in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 79–100, p. 87.
See Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier, Puritans and Indians 1620–1675 (3rd Edition, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). Vaughan takes note of this important evolution as well: ‘[T]he earlier Puritan policy had eroded badly by 1675. For several interlocking reasons, the majority of the settlers had lost their former determination — however imperfect — to treat the Indians fairly’, pp. xxxi–xxxiii.
See Yasuhide Kawashima, Igniting King Philip’s War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001), esp. pp. 35–50, for a helpful analysis of the very complex issues surrounding land, its usage and transfer.
See also Charles M. Segal and David C. Stineback, Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), for discussion of the unique relationship between the Indians and Puritans, in particular, their similarity in imbuing land with spiritual significance because nature was a ‘psychic realm’ suffused with spirits or God: for example, pp. 35ff.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, ‘“Subjects … Unto the Same King”: New England Indians and the Use of Royal Political Power’, in Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 5 (2003), pp. 29–57, p. 44.
Our modern use of the term ‘sovereignty’ accentuates the feature of a political body’s independent self-rule. Yet the status of independent decision-making can obtain only because of a collective commitment among sovereign bodies to recognise a set of rules to respect boundaries and independence. Sovereignty implies a level of commonality through equal juridical status to make independence operative. See, for example, Stephen Krasner Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 14–20. I thank Eric Grynaviski for drawing my attention to this reference.
Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America, Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
Perry Miller, The New England Mind, from Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 23.
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 12, note 2.
James Axtell, ‘The Scholastic Philosophy of the Wilderness’, in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 29, No. 3 (July 1972), pp. 335–66, p. 356.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Ingrid Creppell
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Creppell, I. (2014). Moral Logics of Enmity: Indians and English in Early America. In: Glaser, E. (eds) Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43988-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02804-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)