Book Review

Canada and the United States

Until recently, there have been two basic categories of historical writing about the seventeenth-century Puritan missions to the Indians of southern New England. The first is institutional histories describing managerial, fiscal, and ecclesiastical issues related to the organization of the missions. The two seminal studies in this category are William Kellaway's The New England Company, 1649–1776 (1962) and Alden T. Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620–1675 (1965). The second is ethnohistorical studies, or works that attempt to illuminate the missions from the Indians' perspectives. The key works in this category include a dissertation and several articles from the early 1970s by Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975), and James Axtell's The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985). Works in the former vein have tended to depict the Puritans as well meaning and generally charitable toward the Indians, while those in the latter have suggested that, on the whole, the Puritan missions were driven by righteous disregard for the welfare and culture of the Indian population. Richard W. Cogley's book is an effort to revive the earlier, institutional approach. This is not to imply that Cogley has nothing to say about Indians. Rather, it is to suggest that Cogley's primary purpose is not to shed new light on such contested ethnological matters as the meaning of Christianity for Native converts.

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Although the work touches on all the missions in seventeenth-century New England, its focus is the missions organized by the most active and energetic Puritan missionary, John Eliot. As it turns out—and this is, in itself, an important contribution of this carefully researched and well-documented study—Eliot was involved in virtually every missionary initiative in southern New England, except perhaps the famous Mayhew mission on Martha's Vineyard.

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