Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Little, Ann M.

9780812239652: Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Early American Studies)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812239652 ISBN 13: 9780812239652

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England.

In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire.

Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Ann M. Little is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University.

Introduction
Onward Christian Soldiers, 1678

In 1678 Samuel Nowell preached an artillery election sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged New England men to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier, not only a Spiritual Souldier but in the true proper sence of the letter." His warning was timely, and prescient: Nowell preached in the wake of King Philip's War (also known as Metacom's Rebellion), a united Indian uprising that lasted from 1675 to 1676 in southern New England and persisted on the eastern frontier until 1678. Unlike previous Indian wars and threatened uprisings, King Philip's War was not waged by just one Indian tribe or by one leader, as the name implies, but by nearly all of the Algonquians living near the English settlements of New England. From the Narragansett and Wampanoag of Rhode Island to the Eastern Abenaki of Maine, Indians made common cause against English settlers. At the time that Nowell warned his flock that they must be soldiers for their faith and for New England, the war had barely ended in Maine. The eastern frontier was worrisome for another reason—namely, because it harbored another enemy to Protestant New England. Early English explorers and French Jesuits had made competing claims on Maine's waterways, land, and peoples, from the Saco River northeast to the mouth of the Kennebec. Already in this latest war, Maine settlers notified their governor in Boston that they had spied French men among the Abenaki, aiding them in their efforts to drive the English back into the sea. Thus with New England on the brink of more than eighty more years of war with Indians and the French, Nowell urged New England men to be girded for battle, ready to advance and defend the frontier of English Protestant settlement. Perhaps this is why Nowell preached so insistently that military readiness was on a par with spiritual preparedness: after all, "the Battle is the Lords."

Nowell's sermon title was significant. The Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with English men in the New World, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unchallenged leader of his family and of his people in war and peace. Also like Abraham, the authority of English men was based on their sex, their religion, and their ethnicity. But over the years of English settlement, Abraham's enemies in New England had manifested themselves with a vengeance. Algonquian and Iroquois peoples threatened the safety of his household and mocked his pretensions to dominate New England: "you dare not fight, you are all one like women," they taunted in battle, and then stripped the bodies of the dead and took English captives alive into the wilderness. Although the English had won both major New England Indian wars (the Pequot War, 1636-37, and King Philip's War), by 1678 they still did not dominate the northeastern borderlands militarily, politically, or economically. Moreover, warfare between the English and Indians was devastating for Indian and English communities alike, characterized as it was by attacks on small settlements, the burning of individual homes and farms, and the constant involvement of so-called noncombatants like women, children, and the infirm. Although victorious over King Philip, English men might still be stung by comments like those of John Wompus, an Indian who judged that English men "had acted all one like children" in the late war, and their inability to protect their homes and families from fire and captivity meant that "New England hath Lost the day & yt is knowne in old England." Furthermore, subordinates within the English community—even within their own families—threatened the governorship of their households and of New England itself. Wives ran away, and daughters taken into captivity in colonial warfare sometimes became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England.

This book tells stories about the people who lived in New England, New France, and Indian country, from the establishment of the first permanent English colony in New England to the end of the Seven Years' War. It argues that ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways in which these people understood and explained their experience of cross-cultural warfare. In fact, they had a great deal in common when it came to warfare in particular, since in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European and Indian cultures were organized around a gendered hierarchy that privileged manhood and reserved politics and war for men almost exclusively. This book is part of a trend in recent scholarship to move away from an emphasis on cultural difference and instead analyze the implications of the many similarities between Indians and Europeans. Questions of similarities and differences in women's lives have been a point of contention for feminist scholars, and many have labored for decades to move beyond the essentialism of early feminist assumptions that the experience of womanhood was universal and transhistorical. Recent important early American women's histories illustrate the dramatically different experiences of Euro-American, African American, and Indian women, as well as signal the ways in which a gendered hierarchy structured the lives of all women and men in the Atlantic world. Despite these differences, some assumptions about gender (and especially about men's roles in their societies) were also strikingly similar in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. It was a universally understood insult throughout the early modern Atlantic world to call a man a woman. Nowhere in colonial America would being called a woman be understood as a compliment or a neutral comment on a man's competence or worthiness.

These important similarities notwithstanding, Indian and European observers in the colonial period focused on their differences when talking or writing about each other, and as the colonial period wore on, they became even less willing to acknowledge their similarities. However, historians must not take these observations at face value. Portraying one's enemies as utterly strange and different—as savage, irrational, weak, or foolish (as opposed to oneself: civilized, rational, strong, and wise)—undoubtedly served the psychological needs and political agendas on all sides, although only English-speaking peoples had the technology and literacy rates that would help spread their version of the truth throughout the North American colonies and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Finally, this book attempts to reconstruct the colonial Northeast as a borderlands whose religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike. Just as a mythology of difference served the various political agendas of Europeans and Indians in the northeastern borderlands as they embarked on nearly a century and a half of almost uninterrupted warfare, so the nation-states that arose in peacetime hired surveyors, cartographers, and historians to impose boundaries and create a new mythology of difference—one that has created segregated histories for Canada, the United States, and Native America.

Power relations in the northeastern borderlands, as in the wider early modern Atlantic world, were based in large part on gender inequality, an idea that was gaining renewed social and political importance in the first century after Columbus's discovery. Scholars of early modern Europe have identified a major shift in gender politics in the Reformation era, when both Protestant and Catholic religious reformers turned to male heads of household to assert more control in the ordering of society in the face of diminished church authority. At the time of the Columbian encounter, Native American and African cultures also privileged men over women, especially in the realms of political and military leadership. While Indian and African women usually retained more economic power than European women did, all four continents that formed the basin of the Atlantic world used gender as a fundamental tool in the hierarchies that ordered their many and diverse societies. Furthermore, historians of Native Americans have recently argued that the stresses and conflicts that European colonization brought to Indian country may have exacerbated tensions between Indian men and women.

The borderlands of colonial New England, New France, and Indian country are a promising place to understand the workings of gender and power, as it was a place where all families—Native, English, and French—were undergoing rapid changes. Indian families and communities were pressured not just by the changes brought by Europeans in the form of new technologies, trade goods, and political and military conflict. Many Indian communities—some of them otherwise untouched by the European invasion of the New World—were devastated by Old World diseases to which they had no inherited resistance. Indian families were faced with threats on all sides to their traditional ways of life, as they were pressured by the new environmental, demographic, and political realities of the colonial world. Most Native peoples used a variety of strategies to adjust to an increasingly European-dominated politics and economy, such as joining other tribes, living in missionary towns, fighting against European encroachment, or seizing and adopting European captives into their families. Whether they chose to accommodate to or resist European invasion, the colonial world fundamentally altered Indian families. Similarly, with imbalanced sex ratios in the immigrant European population and without the powerful institutions that shaped late medieval and early modern Europe—the manor house, schools, and guilds—colonial Euro-American households were stressed by having to assume a number of social functions for which they were frequently inadequate. In New England, households in tandem with town and colony government—what was known as "household government"—became a legally defined and empowered "second estate" charged with ensuring the proper ordering of society. In the fledgling agricultural villages and towns along the St. Lawrence River, where the sex ratio among French settlers remained extremely imbalanced through the seventeenth century, female religious orders like the Ursulines and the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame attempted to fill the gap in social services by running poor houses, hospitals, and schools in Qu�bec, Montreal, and Three Rivers. French men frequently turned to intermarriage with Indians or English captives, as well as keeping Indian and English servants and slaves to populate their households. However, instead of allowing for the reproduction of an ideal European social order, these m�tis families and families with war captives embodied many of the tensions and instabilities of life on the northeastern frontier.

Because of the many challenges their families faced, these cultures used ideas about gender and family life to explain and justify their political and military conflicts with one another. Time and again, Indian, French, and English people found each other wanting in the particular roles they assigned men and women and the ways they managed their households. No other men were as manly as their men, no other women understood their honorable place in the community like their women, and no other children were being raised properly in the North American borderlands. I must be clear about the nature of my argument: I do not argue that the French, English, and Indian people warred on and killed each other because they hated the ways in which their enemies organized household and family life. Other historians have demonstrated clearly and convincingly that material reasons drove the competition for the conquest of North America—agricultural lands and hunting grounds for furs were in fact the great prize for whoever could dominate New England, Acadia, and the St. Lawrence River Valley militarily and politically. Gender and family differences were, however, central to the language and ideology of conquest and were the key principles upon which theories of difference were constructed in the colonial northeastern borderlands, and the English were especially garrulous in making their arguments. Their justifications for warfare, and for conquering and removing Indians and French Catholics, were not coincidentally developed at the same time that other Atlantic world societies were justifying the mass enslavement and exploitation of African labor for similar material goals.

The historiography of cross-cultural gender relations that informs this book was pioneered by women's historians, many of whom in the past twenty years have shifted to a more theoretical focus on the nature of gendered power. Pathbreaking studies of extraordinary sophistication not only historicized women's experiences by showing how the nature of women's work, their roles in family life, and the ideals of womanhood changed over time; they also opened new doors for considering the ways in which gender and class, or gender and race, worked together to structure power relationships in colonial America and the early national United States. This focus on gender—its historical and cultural specificity, and how it changes over time—has also led to a burgeoning literature on early American masculinity and the ways in which manhood was constructed, experienced, and challenged by others in different places, times, and cultures. This study both draws on and adds to both of these literatures on early American men and women, showing how in one specific region rent by warfare and intercultural conflict we can see the same broad changes that characterized the entire colonial Atlantic world.

At the same time that women's historians were broadening their focus to include evaluations of gender and power, ethnohistorians openly challenged the eurocentric historical narratives of the past four centuries. In the 1970s and 1980s, ethnohistorians urged the profession to abandon its traditional approach to American Indian history, which treated Native peoples more as environmental or meteorological forces rather than as human beings whose decisions were rational and could be explained through traditional historical methodology and anthropological approaches to understanding Native cultures. Native Americans were not the irrational, inscrutable, wild creatures most often described in colonial documents, nor did they simply die off, fade away, or retreat to the margins of colonial society as Europeans and the Euro-Americans achieved the demographic advantage. Like women's historians, ethnohistorians insisted that colonial history was unintelligible without a consideration of inter-Indian and Euro-Indian power relations. Through varying strategies of forming trade and military alliances, warfare with Europeans and other Indians, migration, segregation, and intermarriage with Euro-Americans and African Americans, Native peoples chose different paths at different times to preserve and even strengthen their numbers, power, and prestige.

One of the principal aims of this book is to draw together these two rich and fruitful literatures and use them together to interpret the complex world of colonial Ne...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.