PC Myth: The Puritans were racists
Excerpts from The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Thomas E. Woods. Jr.. Ph.D.
The colonists also had to devise some kind of policy toward the American Indians they encountered, and some were more successful, and more just, than others. Few would deny that the American Indians have been the victims of injustice and maltreatment over the course of American history. But those injustices have led many Americans to believe that the colonists had nothing but contempt for the American Indian, and sought merely to expel him or “steal” his land. But by its second decade Harvard College welcomed Indian students. Colonists could and did receive the death penalty for murdering Indians. Indian converts to Christianity living in the “praying towns” of New England enjoyed considerable autonomy.
Today the Puritans’ desire to win the natives to Christianity is often met with impatience and smirks. But consider the greatest of the Puritan missionaries, John Eliot, who lived from 1604 to 1690. What Eliot did in order to spread the Christian faith among the Indians almost defies belief. The Algonquins had no written language. So Eliot learned the spoken language of the Massachusetts Algonquins, developed a written version of their language for them, and then translated the Bible into that language. If Eliot and the Puritans had simply wanted to oppress the natives, they could have come up with an easier way.
It is not true that the Puritans possessed a sense of racial superiority over the Indians. They certainly did consider themselves culturally superior, though it is not clear what else they were supposed to think when they met peoples who did not use the wheel, possessed no written language, and were, in effect, living in the Stone Age. But race did not enter into the question. Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island, believed that the Indians were born white, a view that was generally shared by the Puritans; the effects of stains and the sun were said to have darkened their skins.
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It is not true, as most people believe, that the Indians had no conception of land ownership and did not understand what they were doing when they sold their land to the Puritans. No evidence has ever been found of any New England tribe that thought of all land as common property.
Scholars in recent decades have softened their earlier judgments about the harshness of Puritan treatment of the natives. But the research of specialists typically takes a long time to make it to the texts written by generalists. For instance, some overviews of European history still portray the Middle Ages as backward and barbaric, when medieval scholars know full well the contributions of the Middle Ages to European civilization, particularly in the origins of modern science, the development of the university system, and the fruitfulness of medieval intellectual life. The same is true of scholarship on the Puritans and the Indians: the generalists continue to speak badly of the Puritans, while specialists often conclude that the Puritans’ record is considerably better than people have been led to believe. This is true also in studies of the Puritan-Indian wars. “In generalists’ eyes,” explains historian Alden Vaughan, “the Puritans provoked every clash and intended—indeed sometimes accomplished— genocide. Specialists, whether of military history or of related topics, viewed the causes of the English-Indian wars as less simple, less unilateral, and the outcomes, though appallingly lethal, never genocidal.”
No, the Puritans didn’t steal Indian lands
The Puritans are widely reputed to have stolen Indian land, defrauded the Indians, or committed genocide against them in the Pequot Wars. This myth, believed to this day by the vast majority of Americans, is evidently impossible to overturn despite all the scholarship that refutes it. The Pequots, who were never a large tribe to begin with, continued to be listed as a distinct group living in Connecticut through the 1960s. Moreover, while the king had issued colonial land grants, the Puritan consensus, evident in their words and their actions, was that the king’s charter conferred political and not property rights to the land, which Puritan settlers sought by means of voluntary cession from the Indians.
The colonial governments actually punished individuals who made unauthorized acquisitions of Indian lands. As for initial settlement, Roger Williams obtained title from the Indians before settling in Providence; Plymouth obtained title after settlement. Even this distinction is minor enough, since Indian consent to the Plymouth settlement was immediate. Connecticut and New Haven followed the pattern established by Williams in Providence. English settlement in the Connecticut Valley was positively encouraged by some tribes in the 1630s, who hoped the English might prove a useful obstacle to the ambitions of the Pequots, a hated tribe that had begun to force its way into the area. Once settled, these New England colonies went on to purchase whatever additional land they desired.
Each colony negotiated with the Indians, who were all too happy to sell land —a commodity that they enjoyed in great abundance, particularly considering the sparseness of the North American population at the time. “In return,” writes legal scholar James Warren Springer, “the white man offered metal knives, hoes, and other implements of rare value to a neolithic society; in lieu of these the Indian might ask for cloth, clothing, jewelry, and other luxuries to brighten his life. The native often took the initiative in such transactions, for he coveted the white man’s goods as keenly as the settler yearned for more land.”
The Puritans recognized Indian hunting and fishing rights on lands that the Indians had sold to them. In fact it would have been foolish for the Puritans not.