Reviewed by Neal Salisbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 613 words from this article are provided below; about 782 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Neal Salisbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. By Rachel Wheeler. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. 332 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Neal Salisbury, Smith College
The Mohican Indians present a rare opportunity for early Americanists interested in native peoples' experiences with Christianity. In 1734 some Mohicans gathered to form the Congregationalist mission town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, while, seven years later and thirty miles away, the Mohicans of Shekomeko, New York, invited Moravians to live among them. The fact that members of the same tribe simultaneously practiced two variants of Christianity provides the potential for a rich comparative study, a potential that Rachel Wheeler successfully exploits in her new book.	1
Stockbridge and Shekomeko arose on the common foundation of colonialism as it was playing out in Mohican homelands between the Hudson and Housatonic rivers. Wheeler briefly describes how epidemics, conflicts with the Mohawk Iroquois, imperial wars, disappearing game animals, and encroaching settlers led to significant Mohican losses of power, people, and land by the 1670s. Thereafter officials in New England and New York pressured them to part with additional lands while depopulation from diseases continued apace, now reinforced by the ready availability of alcohol. With their very survival as a people at stake, Wheeler argues, many Mohicans during the 1730s and 1740s looked (often warily) to missionaries as means of preserving their identities and communities in a new colonial setting.	2
Wheeler presents Stockbridge as a story of Anglo-Mohican exchanges in which the two peoples' assumptions about and expectations of one another differed sharply. For Housatonic Mohicans the English offered tools for survival—a secure land base, husbandry, literacy in English, and the Christian God as an efficacious source of spiritual power. And by sealing an alliance with the English, they could serve as what Wheeler terms "cultural intermediaries" (7) between their interior Indian allies and the colonists, thereby restoring a role the Mohicans had formerly played among tribal nations. For their part Massachusetts officials, missionary John Sergeant, and nearby English settlers expected the Mohicans to be "reduce[d]" to "civility" (31) both as individuals and as a New England township in return for being allowed to settle on what they viewed as English land (which in fact the Mohicans had only recently ceded to the colony!). Not surprisingly, mutual suspicions and accusations abounded. Sergeant complained that the Mohicans resisted civilization, while the Indians lamented that most English hardly lived up to "civilized" ideals as they plied Indians with liquor, found ways to seize land even within the bounds of Stockbridge, and otherwise made clear that hardening racial distinctions took precedence in their minds over equality among Christians.	3
Despite its inauspicious beginnings and continued intercultural tensions, Stockbridge persisted. Wheeler argues that it did so above all because it became the undisputed center of Mohican political life. Non-Housatonic Mohicans either moved there or acknowledged its leadership. And in its role as cultural intermediary, Stockbridge forged neutrality agreements with several Indian communities to the north and west that, Wheeler suggests, spared the town from attack during the imperial wars of the 1740s and 1750s. Wheeler also gives a measure of credit for Stockbridge's survival to Jonathan Edwards, who served as its missionary-pastor from 1751 to 1757. She points out that Edwards's sermons there emphasized the equality before God of all peoples rather than the special relationship between God and the English. Edwards was also a sharp critic of English abuse of the Stockbridge Mohicans and more generally of the weak English commitment to Christianizing northeastern Indians, which, he believed, effectively left them to conversion by, and alliance with, the Catholic French.	. . .

There are about 782 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.