Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The good Moravians who had led them hither had no grand or novel ideas of a state, and perhaps their success in civilizing the Indians was largely due to the fact that they formed for them no high civic ideal, but seem to have made them as like German peasant-folk as they could where neither Kaisers devoured them in wars nor lords in peace, and where the intermittent persecutions of their white and red brethren could have but poorly represented the continual oppressions of Fatherland. They taught their communities to sow and reap, they instructed them in humble and useful trades; they inculcated the simple policy of thrift, the humble virtues of meekness and obedience. But if the political ideal of the Moravians was lowly, their religious ideal and their discipline was lofty and severe, — so severe, indeed, that it had in time of great peril and necessity barred their union even with the early Lutherans. They had sought these lately savage men, not with the awful prophets of doom, and the sword of the Lord sharpened against them, nor had they come among them as the equally zealous and devoted Jesuits did, to take their imaginations with the picturesque splendors of ritual. The ardent faith of the Hussites and the meek goodness of Herrnhut were the arms with which they surprised these wild, wily hearts, and conquered them for heaven, making their converts lay down the savage, not in creed only, but in life also, and put on the Christian with all the hard conditions of forgiveness to enemies, of peace, and of continual labor. Never since Eliot preached to the Indians in New England had efforts so sincere and so fortunate been made for their conversion, and never had civilization been so strictly united with conversion. For once the unhappy race, whom romance has caressed, and sentiment has weakly compassionated, but from whom our prudent justice has always averted its face, was here taken by the strong hand of love and lifted to the white man’s level, and saved for earth as well as for heaven. It appears that the converts yielded an implicit submission to the advice and laws of the Moravians, who assumed no superiority over them, who married among them, and who shared equally with them in their toils and privations.

  Chief among these teachers was the brave, steadfast, and pious David Zeisberger, a learned and diligent man, and an apostle of zeal and love not less than Eliot’s. He was born in Moravia, but his early life was passed at Herrnhut, whither his parents repaired at Zinzendorf’s invitation; and he was eighty-seven years old when he died, in 1808. Of these years he had spent sixty-two in unceasing labors among the Indians, without reward save such as came to him through the sense of good work well done; for he always refused to “become a hireling,” and never took pay for his missionary services. He was the author of a German and of an English grammar of the Onondaga language, and a dictionary in that tongue containing near two thousand pages, as well as a Delaware grammar and spelling-book; he was translator of innumerable hymns and sermons for the use of the Indian congregations; and he was well versed in different native dialects. He was a man of simple and abstemious life, of a most benevolent heart, and a courageous and undaunted temper. We need not refuse to know that “he was of small stature, with a cheerful countenance,” that “his words were few, and never known to be wasted at random or in an unprofitable manner.”

  The Rev. John Heckewelder, who imparts these facts, was himself only second to Zeisberger in the length and ardor of his labors among the Indians. He was born of Moravian parents in England, but came to this country when a young man, and spent nearly his whole life in the companionship of Zeisberger, and in the work which engaged him. He left a daughter, born in one of the Indian villages on the Tuscarawas, who survived until last September at Bethlehem; and he bequeathed to our literature a work on the history, character, and customs of some tribes of the North American Indians, which was received with great favor and great disgust by differing North American Reviewers of other days. I have here availed myself freely of his Narrative, the statements of which there is no reason to doubt, whatever may be thought of his philosophy of Indian life. He and Zeisberger arrived among the first in the Muskingum country in 1772, and continued there throughout ten years of its occupation by the Christians, being later joined by Brothers Edwards, Sensemann, and Jungmann, and others.

  The Christian Indians who appeared on the banks of the Tuscarawas in 1772, and who built Schönbrunn, were two hundred and forty-one in number; a little later came a congregation of Mohicans, and on the same river, some miles to the southward, founded the village which gives my history its great tragic interest, and which they named Tents of Grace, or Gnadenhütten. In 1776 Zeisberger and Heckewelder, at the prayer of the Delaware chiefs, laid out a third village, which they called Lichtenau, near the heathen town of Goschocking, and stationed a Missionary there, that the wives and children of these chiefs might hear the preaching of the Christian faith. All these communities now prospered and grew in the likeness of civilization exceeding that of any of the border settlements. It was yet ten years before the first white man had fixed his place west of the Ohio; a few hunters held Kentucky against the Indians north of the river, and sustained with that region the primitive relations of horse-stealing and scalping; in Virginia, the frail and lonely settlements creeping westward made friends with the desert and produced a population nearly as wild as its elder children and quite as fierce and truculent. In the mean time the old-world peasant-thrift and industry, moving the quick and willing hands of the new Christians, made those shores of the Muskingum glad with fields and gardens. The villages were all regularly laid out and solidly built upon nearly the same plan. The chapel stood in the midst, and the streets, branching away from it to the four quarters, were wide and kept scrupulously clean, and cattle were forbidden to run at large in the public ways. The houses of the people were the log-cabins common to all pioneers in the West; but they were built upon foundations of stone, and neatly constructed within and without, and their grounds were prettily fenced with palings. The chapels, for their greater honor and distinction, were built, not of the ordinary trunks of trees, but of logs squared and smooth-hewn, and they had shingle roofs, and were surmounted with belfries, from which the voice of evening and of Sabbath bells floated out over the happy homes, and took the heathenish heart of the wilderness beyond.

  The people were for the most part farmers, but some exercised mechanical trades. There was neither poverty nor wealth in the state, but all lived in abundance upon the crops that the generous acres yielded them, and the increase of their flocks and herds; and at a time when none but the rudest fare was known to their Virginian neighbors, any of them could set before the guest who asked their hospitality a meal’s victuals (as Heckewelder quaintly phrases it) of good bread, meat, butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate, with such fruits and vegetables as the season afforded. They dressed decorously, and not after that heathen fashion which took the fancy of the younger of the white settlers; the men wore their hair like Christians, not shaving it as the savages did, nor decorating their heads and faces with feathers and paint in their vain manner; and the women doubtless wore the demure caps and linen fillets, which it is said the good Count Zinzendorf once passed a sleepless night in contriving for the Moravian sisterhood.

  The government of the villages was akin in form and spirit to that of all other Moravian communities. By an ancient usage of the church in Bohemia and Moravia, each minister received under his roof and into his family two or three acolytes or assistants, whom he educated in certain offices of piety and religion, such as visiting the sick, catechizing the young, and caring generally for the moral welfare of the people. When the church was revived at Herrnhut, the minister ceased to receive the acolytes into his family; but they still continued a part of the social and religious government, and in all the missions of the Brethren, being chosen from among the converts, they were particularly useful and active. They were of either sex, the men being charged to oversee the Brethren, and the women, who must always, according to the Discipline, be “respectable, prudent, and grave matrons,” having particular care for the helplessness of widows, and the innocence of youn
g maidens. They were never ordained, but they gave their right hands to the Elders as a pledge that they would be faithful in duty. In the Muskingum towns, the authority rested in a council composed of these acolytes and of the missionaries, subject to the mission-board at Bethlehem, and this council enacted the laws under which the people lived. Heckewelder gives the substance of their laws, which were eminently practical in most things, and were remarkable, as will be seen, for embodying some principles of legislation supposed to be entirely the fruit of modern reform. These enactments, which were accepted by the whole congregation at Schönbrunn, and applied afterwards to all the other towns, declared that God only should be worshipped among them, that the Sabbath should be hallowed, and that parents should be honored, and supported in helplessness and age. It was made unlawful for any convert to be received without the consent of the teachers; and neither adulterers, drunkards, thieves, nor those that took part in the feasts, dances, or sacrifices of the heathen, were suffered to remain in the Christian towns. The people renounced “all juggles, lies, and deceits of Satan,” affirmed their will to obey the teachers and acolytes, and to live peaceably together, and not to be idle or untruthful in anything. None should strike another; but if any were injured in person or property, the wrong-doer should make just atonement. “A man,” the statutes continue, “shall have but one wife, love her, and provide for her and the children,” and she shall be obedient to him, take care of the children, “and be cleanly in all things.” The young were forbidden to marry without their parents’ permission; and no one might go on a long hunt or journey without first informing the teachers or assistants. All persons were enjoined not to contract debts with traders, and none could receive goods to sell for them without leave of the council; all should contribute cheerfully of labor and substance to the public work of building school-houses and churches, and other enterprises of the community. There was a law, also, forbidding the converts to use witchcraft or sorcery in hunting, as the heathen did, the Moravians esteeming it perhaps wicked, or perhaps only a foolish and unbecoming thing for Christians; and among these Indians the first prohibitory liquor law was rigorously enforced. They allowed no intoxicating drink to be brought within their borders; and if strangers or traders chanced to have such drink with them, the acolytes took it in charge, and delivered it to them only on their departure. Some time after the adoption of these rules, when the Revolutionary War broke out, and a war-party sprang up among the Delawares, the native assistants, of their own motion, enacted that “no one inclining to go to war, which is the shedding of blood,” or that gave encouragement to theft and murder by purchasing stolen goods of warriors, could remain among them.

  Offenders against any of the laws were first admonished, and, upon repeated offence, sent out of the towns.

  The reader must have noted how little these stern and simple enactments flattered any savage instinct. Under them, a people fiercely free became meek and obedient, changed their wild unchastity and loose marital relations for Christian purity and wedlock; left their indolence for continual toil; learned to forego revenge, and to withhold the angry word and hand; eschewed the delights and deliriums of drunkenness; and, above all, in a time and country where all men, red and white alike, seemed born to massacre and rapine, set their faces steadfastly against war, and did no murder. The success of the good men who effected this change seems like a poet’s dream, in view of what we know of Indian life; and it must indeed have been a potent bond of love which so united their converts to them that the order of the villages was only once disturbed from within, and was then restored by the penitent return to the church of those who had been seduced by the heathen. Doubtless the hold of the Moravians upon the Indians was strengthened by those ties of marriage and adoption which they formed with them; but, after all, their marvellous triumph was due to the fact that their efforts were addressed to the reason of the savages, and to humanity’s inherent sense of goodness and justice. I confess that this alone interests me in the history of Gnadenhütten, and lifts its event out of the order of calamities into a tragedy of the saddest significance. Not as Indians, but as men responding faithfully and sincerely to the appeals of civilization and Christianity, and reflecting in their lives a far truer image of either than their destroyers, its people have a claim to sympathy and compassionate remembrance which none can deny.

  In spite of many vexatious disturbances from the incessant border frays, the prosperity and happiness of the Christian towns were so great that their fame spread throughout the whole Indian country, and the heathen came from far and near to look with their own eyes upon the marvel. They lost their savage calm when they beheld these flourishing villages peopled by men of their kindred and color, each dwelling in his own house with his wife and little ones in peace and security, and in such abundance as the wilderness never gave her children. They saw with amazement the spreading fields, and all the evidences of thrift and comfort afforded by flocks and herds, and the free hospitality which welcomed them as guests, and feasted them as long as they cared to linger; and though they doubtless regarded with grave misgiving those points of the Moravian system which required men who would naturally have been naked and idle braves to clothe themselves like white men, and go unpainted and industriously about women’s work of tilling the earth, and which, teaching them how to use the axe and saw and hammer, left them unskilled in the nobler arts of tomahawking and scalping, yet they could not deny that the whole result was exceedingly comfortable and pleasant. They shook their heads, and murmured gloomily over the contrast their own state presented to that of the Christians; and they loudly blamed their chiefs for not listening to the preachers. It was not strange that the Moravians should conceive hopes of converting the whole Delaware nation, both from the effect of their people’s visible prosperity upon the imagination of the savages and from more substantial facts. Converts were made in such numbers that it became necessary to build new and larger chapels at Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten; while, in a council of the whole Delaware nation, it was determined that the Christian Indians and their teachers should enjoy throughout their country equal rights and liberties with other Indians, and that, while all should be free to listen to the doctrine of the missionaries, no heathen Indians should be permitted to settle in the neighborhood of the Christian towns or in any wise disturb them. The Moravians had exacted a pledge of neutrality from the Delawares in the wars between the whites and Indians; in 1776, when the war of our Revolution began, they stood firm upon the maintenance of this pledge; and in the national council it was determined to keep faith with them. Schools for the children were maintained in the villages, and instruction was given from elementary books prepared by Zeisberger; and the religious activity of the ministers never ceased.

  In the midst, however, of these happy and successful labors, the storm which was gathering to the eastward burst upon the whole country, and at last involved the Christian communities in ruin.

  There had never been peace between the white settlers and the other Indian tribes, and now, at the outbreak of hostilities between the Colonies and England, the Delaware borders burned with warfare, the rumor of which beset the timid Moravian flocks with terror. In spite of the protection of the Delawares, they trembled at the threats of the tribes that accused them of secret alliance with the Americans; and they were especially afraid of the Monseys, — once a truculent and bloodthirsty people, but now extinct as the Spartans, — and, alarmed at the advance of a Monsey war party upon Schönbrunn, they abandoned that village and fled to Gnadenhütten, first taking care to destroy their beloved chapel, lest it should be desecrated by heathen powwows and dances. But the Monseys passed harmless by Schönbrunn, and in three days the Christians came back; though they finally abandoned the place, and drew nearer the Delaware capital of Goschocking, in Lichtenau. Here, with the fugitives from Gnadenhütten, which had been in like manner abandoned, they enlarged the chapel, and pushed forward their work of conversion and civilization. In time they retur
ned to the deserted villages, and rebuilt Schönbrunn, which had been destroyed; but as new dangers threatened, and the Delawares seemed about to swerve from their neutrality, even Lichtenau was vacated, and the united congregations founded a new town, which they called Salem. Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten were still inhabited; and the converts continued obedient to their teachers; laboring as their wont was, and enjoying seasons of prosperity and happiness with longer and longer intervals of disturbance. The war parties of the Wyandots had free passage to and from Virginia through the Delaware country, and the pioneers made their avenging forays over the same ground; the Christian villages were thus overrun by warlike guests, to whom they dared not deny their hospitality, and they came to be regarded with an evil eye by either side. The pioneers especially complained that they fed and comforted the murderous bands that preyed upon the borders, and desolated them with warfare as pitiless and indiscriminate as that waged by themselves, and forgot that the Moravians, claiming from the Indians a right earned by their hospitality, saved from blows and death the unhappy captives who were carried through their country, and when it was possible ransomed them, and sent them back to their friends. Indeed, according to the American and Moravian annalists alike, the Missionaries frequently forewarned the settlements of Indian forays, — not as spies in our interest, but as good men abhorring the cruelties of savage warfare, and anxious to avert its atrocities from helpless women and children. The authorities on either side recognized the vast advantage gained to the American cause by the neutrality in which they held the Delawares and the allies of that nation. At the most disastrous period of our Revolution, this neutrality was observed by a body of ten thousand warriors, whom the British vainly endeavored to incite against us, and it was not broken till the great contest had been virtually decided in our favor. President Reed of Philadelphia, in a letter to Zeisberger, thanked “him in the name of the whole country for his services among the Indians, particularly for his Christian humanity in turning back so many war parties on their way to rapine and massacres;” and there is no doubt of the merciful and beneficent attitude held toward us by a people afterwards requited with such murderous wrong.