Free American Heroes by Edmund S. Morgan

became Americans were the product of many different mixtures that had resulted from the successive conquests of England by Anglo-Saxons, Romans, Danes, and Normans. The invasion of America had no such result; the Indian refused to mix. One might have supposed that among the many different tribes, some would have joined the invaders and others not, but this was not the case. The Indians were almost unanimous in preferring their own way of life to that of the new arrivals. And for the historian this is perhaps the most important single fact, the fact that justifies considering the Indian in the singular instead of the plural.
    Of course, part of the Indian’s refusal to mingle must be blamed on the English American: it was a failure to absorb as well as a failure to be absorbed. The French in Canada, though they never really assimilated the Indians, came closer to it than the English Americans. The French lived with the Indians, married Indian women, taught them to say prayers, and were able to bring a fair number of Indians into a moderately French manner of living. The Spanish were still more successful, though perhaps because they were dealing with a different, and for the most part more technologically advanced, set of Indians. The Spaniards were able to devise colonial institutions that incorporated these Indians. Often, to be sure, they incorporated them as slaves, but slavery can be an effective, even though a crude and cruel, way of absorbing another people. Perhaps, then, the trouble lay with the American rather than the Indian. It will be worth examining briefly what kind of efforts the Americans made to absorb the people whose territories they invaded.
    Absorption, if successful, would undoubtedly have meant, first of all, Christianization. The English Americans considered Christianity to be the most important single advantage of their civilization over the barbarism of the Indians. To convert an Indian into a Christian would be to convert him in the most important possible way, from a savage to a civilized man. To undertake this task was the announced purpose of many English settlers in coming to America, and there were a number who stood fast in their intentions after arriving here. The number was small, in comparison with those deployed by the Spanish and the French, but the measure of success achieved was even smaller. The French and Spanish enrolled hundreds of Indians in the Catholic Church for every one claimed by English Protestants.
    The reason, according to the English, was that the French and Spanish missionaries were content to set the Indians to kneeling, kissing the cross, and reciting a few unintelligible prayers. English Protestantism, and especially the Puritan brand of it, demanded a higher standard of piety. The Indians must not only say the right words; they must know what they meant. This evidently proved an insuperable obstacle to the Puritan missionaries. It was either impossible to make the Indians understand Puritanism, or if you did get them to understand, to make them like it. A succession of notable men from John Eliot to Jonathan Edwards labored long and hard in the attempt but with pitifully small results.
    It was not that the Indians were intolerant or bigoted. They were quite willing to listen to stories about the Englishman’s God, but they showed a surprising indifference to the rewards and punishments that He was said to dole out. Henry Timberlake, a lieutenant serving with British forces in the Carolinas during the French and Indian War, says of the Cherokees that in religious matters every one of them felt “at liberty to think for himself,” with the result that a great diversity of religious opinion existed among them. Timberlake tells of the efforts of a Reverend Mr. Martin to convert this tribe. Martin, he says, having preached “till both his audience and he were heartily tired, was told at last, that they knew very well, that, if they were good, they