American History Series: Race Relations In Colonial New England

Speaking of the Christian Question, I am reading a book now on the cultural history of Colonial New England, which I will be reviewing here in a few days.

The following excerpts come from Joseph A. Conforti’s book Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America:

“Strangers to Puritanism participated in the creation of colonial New England. In Puritan usage, stranger might identify someone as non-English, non-Christian, non-Protestant, or non-White. Most commonly, stranger referred to all non-Puritan inhabitants, whether white, black or Native American …”

“English newcomers viewed aboriginal people as savages. Indeed, the fear of “Indianization” imposed limits on cultural exchange, including foodways. Dread of Indianization shaped public policies, which included banning intermarriage and laws, like the one passed in Connecticut in 1642, that established severe punishments for “persons [who], depart from amongst us, and take up their abode with the Indians, in a profane course of life …”

“New England authorities and settlers typically welcomed the extermination of Indians as God’s handiwork that served the biblical command to multiply and subdue the earth …”

“Colonial New Englanders attributed the Indians’ fate to providential design. “It pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness,” noted Governor Bradford with gratitude. A Puritan poet boasted that epidemics constituted God’s “fatal broom” that provided his people with “elbow room.” This providential explanation for what historians define as ecological imperialism was not confined to Puritan New Englanders. Thomas Gorges, the Anglican deputy governor of Maine, found coastal Natives cooperative because “the Lord sent his avenging Angel and swept the most part away.” Disease, land hunger and religious triumphalism propelled colonial settlement of native land. …”

I found that interesting and revealing.

Even in New England, White racial consciousness was stirred by the circumstances of Anglo-Protestant settlement. The ancestors of Yankees welcomed the demise of the Indians. The Puritans celebrated epidemics as “God’s fatal broom” sweeping the local Algonquin Indians out of New England.

The Pequot War and especially King Philip’s War and all the captivity narratives that came out of all the wars with the French and their Indian allies created a sense of White identity in New England. In fact, the colonial American abhorrence of miscegenation has roots in Puritanism. New England once had slavery and anti-miscegenation laws like the Southern colonies.

What happened to New England?

The answer is that early colonial New England was settled by the Puritans in a time before the rise of liberalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Puritan culture was extremely literate and emphasized education in a way that was without parallel in the other American colonies. When the disease of liberalism began to sink into England after the Glorious Revolution, it sunk its deepest roots in New England which had built institutions like Harvard University where it was imported and festered.

Note: As we shall see, Christianity is often blamed for what modern philosophy has wrought. In particular, the history of New England shows how much better the place was before they read Locke.

16 Comments

  1. “What happened to New England?”

    Without intelligent maintenance all systems decay.
    With the succession of generations the lessons of their ancestors are lost.

    Simply summed, spoiled brats living on the success of their ancestors.

  2. If i don’t remember wrong, in New England there were Prayer towns were indians lived separated from British settlers, even if they were educated to christian religion.

      • Interesting comment, Dear Arrian.

        Apparently the wall of Wall Street did succeed in keeping the Indians out, but, not those interlopers who would come after…

        • Peter Stuyvesant did his best to keep jwz out of New Netherland , NY and NJ, but the powerful jwz banks in Holland forced the governing board to command the acceptance of jwzish immigrants.

          “Stuyvesant was in particular antisemitic, loathing both the Jewish race and religion.” Wiki

          • See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski#In_popular_culture

            “1978 – In Charles Bukowski’s novel Women, the main character, Henry Chinaski, vomits on Peter Stuyvesant’s burial vault cover before a poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church [in Lower Manhattan].”

            Might have mentioned that here, at Occidental Dissent, many years ago. When I learned of it, it made me think Bukowski was Jewish. Have just now seen, at Wikipedia, that his maternal grandmother’s surname was Israel.

  3. Modern Puritans have no compunction about a Final Solution to the deplorable kulak untermenschen question.
    Internal enemies are more formidable than external because they walk among us and speak with forked tongue.

  4. The best of them went back when civil war broke out in England. When The New Model Army of Cromwell’s won the war, many more went back to England.

    That depleted New England of leadership. Then Calvinism in England self destructed by rallying around the Westminster Standards, written by a cabal of heathen lawyers. Calvinism was never popular again after that. It disintegrated.

    Looking for an alternative to rally around, there was nothing. They fell prey to Freemasons controlled by Jew Bankers in London.

    But it was the Common Schools that completely destroyed Puritanism. The first American government schools. By that time, the best remaining New Englanders escaped to the west. Puritan had become Yankee. Loved of none, hated by all.

  5. I read that in early colonial America Injuns often behaved like the Negroes who would soon replace them. They would just hang around White villages all day, drunk, unemployed and looking for trouble.

    • Ben Franklin’s autobio, he talks about indian behavior, worse than blacks.
      To say ‘drunk indian’ is a redundancy.

      • Mark Twain, who seemed to be a moderate by the standards of his day on blacks, wrote an essay called The Noble Red man, which drips with ant-Injun hatred. Do a google search if interested.

  6. As recently as 2000 there were still a few small towns in northern New Hampshire where the population and demographics were almost identical to what they were in the census of 1800!

    • I think the great cold of 1815/16 forced out many of the founding stock, they left and moved to the Midwest. “The year without summer” drove grain prices up 1200%, putting many people on the verge of starvation.
      Then waves of poor Irish and Scots were brought in, to serve the giant textile mills.

  7. Could we say that Liberalism made its decisive breakthrough in New England once that area no longer experienced intimate threat of colored heathen invasion – that is, after the end of the last French and Indian War in 1763?

    That is the usual course of liberalization – when the society is no longer under acute threat the mental and physical arms are laid down.

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