“Thus craving the benefit of your Prayers, in this day of Gods Visitation…”

-Jos Winslow, May 1, 1676

In reading Increase Mather’s account of “the Warr with the Heathen,” a sense of unreal gothic delusion permeates the entire, scrupulously told tale. Increase honestly reports the strengths and failings of friend and foe alike, declaring that in so doing he hoped to imperfectly emulate the authors of the Old Testament who related the stories of the kings and judges of ancient Isrаel. Throughout the book—which gives a melancholy view of a demon-haunted, candlelit world, where the many “monstrous births” of deformed children would have us moderns pointing the finger of incest, such occurrences are instead related as the retribution due the children of iniquity at the hands of a wrathful God.

The Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New England makes for a rich horror setting, leaving the reader in no wonder that Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft and other New England-based authors have come by such a haunted understanding of the horrific.

Throughout the brief and sharply written text the reoccurring affirmation that the “plantations,” [the most common term used by Increase for a Christian habitation] of New England, constituted the legacy of the actual Isrаel of old, socially transubstantiated by the Puritans out of Old England. These settlements had been justly planted in the Christian way of thinking, but yet faced godly and ungodly furies in a land not yet emerged from evil. The clearest concept that issues from the pen of Mather is that the natural world—particularly the forested world—is evil, and it is the duty of Christians to plant themselves in such heathen lands and transform the landscape into the nearest image of the physical land of Isrаel as possible, while convincing the native inhabitants to give up their customs, disarm, and become good Christians.

Of course, this entire notion goes against the modern notion of ecology and conservation. To get into Mather’s shoes the reader must understand, that to him, the natural world of forest, mountain and swap was the Devil’s very den, the hellish opposite of the godly Garden of Eden that man was supposed to thrive in. Where the reader might best relate to Mather’s view is via its similarity to the postmodern feminist view, that security and conformity are good, and that wildness and masculinity are evil.

Below are some quotes concerning Increase Mather’s vision of New England, a land where, ironically, his father’s generation would have perished, had not the heathen fed and cared for them in their first few winters. This was not meanly forgotten, but honored by Increase and his fellows in various allusions to their domination over the Indians being a kind of benign shepherding. In the passage below note how the Christian notion of submitting heathen people for their own good strikes the same paternalistic notes as the postmodern liberal contention that non-white citizens must be coddled, protected, housed, fed and educated by a white-directed state.

“Even so, when Philip was in the hands of the English in former years, & disarmed by them, they could easily but would not destroy him and his men…they kept this Land not from him but for him…”

“…the Land, which the Lord our God hath given to us…”

The Puritans were not alone in claiming that the raging epidemics that killed over 90% of the Indians who came into contact with them where, in actual fact, the Angel of the Lord, smiting heathens to make way for the New Isrаel. Anglicans, Catholics and Quakers further south felt the same vast relief to see natives dying in disease-ravaged masses.

“…a general conversion of the Indians is not to be expected before the seven Vials are poured forth upon the Antichristian state, nor before the conversion of the Jewish [1] nation…before the calling of the Jews.”

“…amongst those [Indians] who have been for ages past, without God, and without Christ, and strangers to the common-wealth of Isrаel…For as for many of their Converts, inasmuch as they are become Vassals [2], not only to the Heresies, but to the Persons of those who have Proselyted them, they are as Christ said concerning the Proselytes of the Scribes and Pharisees, twofold more the Children of Hell.”

“That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God our Father hath given to us for rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Isrаel [3] which is seated in these goings down of the Sun…”

“…the wonderful Providence of God, who did…lay the fear of the English, and the dread of them upon all the Indians. The terror of God [4] was upon them round about.”

“…the blessed design of their fathers, in following the Lord into the Wilderness, whilst it was a land not sown.” [5]

“But they were coming, the Indians, whose cruel Habitations are the dark corners of the Earth, lurked in the swamps.” [6]

“…such as are false Worshippers, such as Idolatrous Quakers, who set up Altars against the Lords Altar.”

“Now doth the Lord Jesus begin solemnly to fulfill his word, in removing candlesticks out of their places, because of Contentions, and loss of first Love. Surely when those places [7] are destroyed where Churches have been planted, Candlesticks are removed out of their place.”

1. The real genetic Jews, who were not considered as representing the spirit of Isrаel.

2. Note the very Islamic tone to this statement, with conquest and faith intertwined. He goes on to credit the Dutch Christians of New York with translating the New Testament into an Indian language. One can see the roots of Mormonism in much of the subtext of this chronicle.

3. Later in the war narrative Increase even refers to a Christian church as a synagogue.

4. Epidemic disease, including smallpox, influenza, and measles, which, in the Christian mind did recall the plagues God sent down upon Egypt.

5. Land that had not been cultivated was unholy, unclaimed, and became rightfully Christian once cleared and planted with seed. This destruction of a rich habitat that had sustained perhaps 100,000 Indians as managed old-growth forest before the epidemics was at the core of the Indian war cause, and would continue to be the ground the white-red war was truly fought upon until the extermination of the buffalo in the 1880s. At its core the hundreds of European and Indian conflicts across North America were struggles between free-living and domestication, not just of the person but of the habitat. That any intelligent economist could see this Christian worldview as giving birth to anything other than a centralized, top-down, managed economy, is astonishing.

6. The Indians of New England who did not join Christian churches, were, like the escaped servants and slaves of the Carolinas, relegated to the most inaccessible and least hospitable areas, though this was not apparent to the English mind. To an Englishman, particularly a Church conregationalist, it was unthinkable to live in such physical discomfort and want. The English slave mentality desired security over all else and could not fathom the will to live free and hard. However, there were whites, as we find out later, who had run off with these Indians. The increasing numbers of white slaves who ran off to live with Indians, or who were captured and adopted by the Indians, began forming the basis for an American Liberty Ethos, an urge to freedom that had no trace in previous English society, where freedom was expressed either as criminality of the low classes, or the rights of the upper class to exploit the low.

7. Evan a heathen such as I am moved by this image of each congregation being a candlestick in a demon-haunted, nighted world. The meaning of the word plantation as a place where people are planted, sown and reaped, grazed and sheered, fed and milked, for a greater purpose is honestly and effusively put forth by all period chroniclers. It is only with the formation of the Founding Fathers cult by revisionist historians in the late 1800s that one sees an attachment of the ideas of freedom exemplified by Indians and escaped white slaves to “pilgrims,” and other "freedom seeking" religionists. In fact, the Puritan and Quaker plantations of the north began and were operated in the same fashion as the cavalier plantations of the south, the signal difference being that the Northerners also congregated in towns and cities, for they were planting souls, not tobacco, and as the tobacco plant needs fresh soil, religion needs fresh souls. Equating the various separatist protestant cults with an urge for liberty is perhaps the most blatant lie infecting our sense of American history as it has been handed down to us. To dispel the myth all that is required is a reading of the honestly self-indicting documents of the men who lived and wrote in the age under study.