| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

John Eliot's Mission to the Indians before King Philip's War. By Richard W. Cogley. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. xiv, 331 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-674-47537-2.)

Few scholars today argue that John Eliot's mission benefited New England Indians, but that is the thrust of Richard W. Cogley's new book. Denying that the mission was part of a larger hegemonic enterprise, Cogley suggests instead that it offered Indians "a way of counteracting English domination." His two-pronged approach combines an appreciation of the genuineness of Eliot's religious purpose with a narrative of the development of praying towns for Indian converts. The book is as much a study of the character of the man as an account of his mission. 1

Its greatest success lies in its sympathetic portrait of Eliot. Cogley demonstrates that the minister's religious scruples—not Bay Colony officials' indifference—delayed the start of evangelization. Eliot subscribed to an "affective model" of conversion, believing that Indians should initiate the process after observing the colonists' practice of Christian virtue. Only when five sachems submitted to Massachusetts authorities in 1644 could the explicitly noncoercive proselytization begin. Eliot also had to reconcile his missionary impulses with his evolving millennialism. Not until he came to believe, at least temporarily, that Indians could play a role in the Second Coming could he enthusiastically prepare them for its arrival. . . .

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