Missionary theology and the peopling of pre-Columbian America: John Oxenbridge’s “A plea for the dumb Indian” (ca. 1666)

Oxenbridge’s biography

The Reverend John Oxenbridge resided in England for two periods of time (Winship, 2004). The first was from his birth in 1608 until 1635, when he moved to Bermuda, an English colony where his family had investments (Waters, 1890: 84). His adult occupation during his first period of residence in England was as a tutor at his alma mater, Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He lost this job when Archbishop William Laud, a zealous persecutor of Puritans, forced him to resign in 1634. The second was from 1641, when Oxenbridge returned from Bermuda, until his departure for Suriname in 1662. During this period he held several clerical and educational positions; he also published his first book, a series of sermons entitled A Double Watch-Word (1661). Oxenbridge was serving as a minister in Berwick-upon-Tweed when in 1662 the English Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity. Unwilling to comply with the Anglican provisions of the Act, he resolved to settle in Suriname, an English colony where Puritans were welcome. Shortly before his departure, he wrote to the Reverend John Davenport, then in present-day New Haven, Connecticut, and asked him for help in recruiting New England Puritans for Suriname (1868: 190–92).

Oxenbridge was in Suriname by late October 1662, when he wrote another recruiting letter, on this occasion to Ambrose Barnes, a prominent lay Puritan in northern England (Oxenbridge, 1867: 45–46). This short-lived English colony, sometimes called “Willoughbyland” after its founder Francis Willoughby (1614–66), existed from 1651 until February 1667, when the Dutch conquered it near the end of the second Anglo–Dutch War (1665–67). The English promptly reconquered the colony but soon returned it to the Dutch in the Treaty of Breda, the July 1667 agreement which ended the war. Suriname then remained a Dutch colony until independence in 1975 (Parker, 2012).

In Suriname Oxenbridge served as a minister in an English Congregationalist church and probably worked as a missionary to the Arawaks and other Native American groups in the colony. ⁴ He also wrote a promotional tract to encourage English settlement in “Guaiana,” an early modern term for the whole region between the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers. The original manuscript of this promotional tract does not survive, but a portion of it was published in London as a 12-page pamphlet, A Seasonable Proposition of Propagating the Gospel by Christian Colonies in the Continent of Guaiana: Being Some Gleanings of a Larger Discourse Drawn, but not Published. This was Oxenbridge’s second publication in print. ⁵

Oxenbridge probably wrote his “A plea for the dumb Indian” near the end of his five-year residence in Suriname. The length of the full manuscript—254 leaves with roughly 500 words on each of the extant 105 leaves—suggests that he needed several years to compose the work. Moreover, there is internal evidence that he wrote the “Plea” after he completed the promotional tract. ⁶ For these reasons the date of the manuscript’s composition can be tentatively assigned to 1666.

After leaving Suriname in February 1667 Oxenbridge settled in Barbados, yet another English colony, and remained on the island until 1669, when he moved to Massachusetts Bay. There he briefly served as a minister in the Congregationalist church in Charlestown and then, in 1670, succeeded John Davenport, who had relocated from New Haven in 1668, as minister in First Church, Boston. During his time in Massachusetts Oxenbridge published two sermons, his third and fourth publications overall. ⁷ He collapsed in his Boston pulpit in late 1674 and died several days later.

Oxenbridge had arrived in Massachusetts Bay with the full manuscripts of both the promotional treatise, which he called “Colonies” for short, and “A plea for the dumb Indian.” In his will he instructed his executors to give the two manuscripts to John Eliot “or [to] any other they shall so meet” (Waters, 1890: 87). Eliot apparently never referred to either manuscript. Cotton Mather, the celebrated Boston minister, examined the promotional manuscript but said only that it provided “a grateful variety of entertainment” (1702: 3:221), and as already noted, Samuel Sewall had access to the “Plea.” Otherwise no New Englander known to me mentioned either manuscript, and today all that remains are the 12-page published excerpt from “Colonies” and leaves 9–114 of the “Plea.”

Missionary conventions in the “Plea”

Much of the extant content of “A plea for the dumb Indian” is conventional by the English Protestant standards of the day. Oxenbridge expounded at length biblical passages which to his mind promised the conversion of “the Heathen, Indians as well as others” throughout the world (ca. 1666: 14–60). ⁸ In anticipating the redemption of the world’s pagan peoples Oxenbridge stood with nearly all English contemporaries, whether Anglican or Puritan (Sibbes, 1656: 10–11; Sutton, 1632: 377–78; Cotton, 1645: 145). The most notable contrarians were persons who insisted that these biblical promises of global conversion applied to the world as the biblical authors understood it, and that these promises had been fulfilled in early Christian history. ⁹ Again like other mainstream figures, Oxenbridge condemned these contrarians for failing to recognize that the biblical promises extended to the world in its actual dimensions (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 61–70; Durham, 1658: 86–87; Homes, 1661: 226, 250; Willard, 1700: 3, 116; I Mather, 1709: 3).

Also conventional was Oxenbridge’s insistence that Protestant missionaries had to “civilize” Native Americans before they instructed them in Christianity (ca. 1666: 86, 104). “[S]uch as are so extreamly degenerate,” Thomas Shepard, one of John Eliot’s early missionary co-workers in Massachusetts Bay, stated, “must bee brought to some civility before religion can prosper, or the word take place” (1647: 16). Here the English were following their national history as they construed it. Their ancestors had been uncivilized pagans until the Romans introduced civility into Britain, first by Julius Caesar and later, and more effectively, by Claudius; and then the apostles or their assistants introduced the gospel (Vaughan, 1995: 44–49). “If such had not been sent us,” William Crashaw explained, “we had yet continued wild and uncivill, and worshippers of the divell: for our civilitie wee were beholden to the Romanes, for our religion to the Apostles and their disciples” (1610: [C4v]). Thus the Native Americans, like the ancient Britons, had to progress in civility before they could benefit from religious instruction. ¹⁰

Oxenbridge also repeated the standard canards against Catholic missionaries (ca. 1666: 70–75). Catholics, or so English Protestants falsely claimed, never schooled Native Americans in civility, provided proselytes with proper training in the intellectual and moral demands of the Christian faith, or upheld appropriate standards for church membership. ¹¹ Instead they taught Indians a few pious phrases and then baptized them en masse. At this point they either abandoned the natives and “let them run wild into the Woods again to their own Pagan courses” (Oakes, 1673: 58) or else subjected them to further instruction in Rome’s “horrible Errors and damnable Heresies” (Rawson, 1699: A5v).

These points were not simply conventions in English missionary theology; they were also conventions in the English rationale for colonizing the New World. Oxenbridge’s published promotional tract, A Seasonable Proposition of Propagating the Gospel by Christian Colonies, included these very points in abbreviated form (n.d.: 1–3, 5–7). It is only when Oxenbridge discussed the peopling of the pre-Columbian New World, a topic left unresolved in A Seasonable Proposition, that “A plea for the dumb Indian” broke fresh ground.

The settlement of pre-Columbian America

In the “Plea” (78–79) Oxenbridge identified the Native Americans as “Tartars,” an early modern designation for the ancient Scythians described by Greek and Roman authors (Cogley, forthcoming). Oxenbridge was in good company here, for many English contemporaries accepted the Scythian theory (Brerewood, 1614: 95–99; Fuller, 1617: 180–83; Heylyn, 1625: 778–79; [Shepard], 1647: 14; Ogilby, 1671: 39–43; C Mather, 1702: 3:11, 7:67; Harris, 1705: xii–xiv; Hubbard, 1815: 26–27). ¹² Most of these persons, Oxenbridge included, held that the Native Americans’ Scythian ancestors had entered the New World by crossing over the “strait of Anian,” a hypothetical geographical construct situated in the vicinity of the modern Bering Strait (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 78–79; Owens, 1975).

The Scythian theory of Native American ancestry rested on two foundations. The first was the practice of seasonal migration. “The Scythians never had any fixed Place of Settlement or Abode, but changed their Camps as the Season of the Year, Game, Water, or Woods invited them, never staying long in a Place,” John Harris, secretary of the Royal Society, explained (1705: xiii). Oxenbridge (ca. 1666: 55, 79) and Shepard (1648: 32) likewise thought that the Native Americans preserved this Scythian way of life. ¹³ The second was the Indians’ supposed barbarism. “In their grosse ignorance of letters, and of arts, . . . in their incivilitie, and many barbarous properties,” the world historian Edward Brerewood wrote, the Native Americans “resemble the olde and rude Tartars, above all the nations of the Earth” (1614: 97). Phrasing like Brerewood’s appeared in Oxenbridge’s “Plea” and in other English endorsements of the Scythian theory (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 55, 78; Heylyn, 1625: 778–79; Hubbard, 1815: 27). Supporters of the theory, moreover, believed that the first characteristic explained the second, for only with stability of residence could humans develop the institutions of civilized society as well as nurture the literate professional classes needed to manage these institutions. Like the ancient Scythians, or so the English thought, the Indians were uncivilized because they were seasonally nomadic.

Oxenbridge’s support for the Scythian ancestry theory meant that he saw the Native Americans as Gentiles. In early modern English sources, the word “Gentiles” meant “non-Jews” or “non-Israelites” rather than “heathens” or “pagans,” the normal connotations of the term in ecclesiastical Latin and in the Romance languages. The Boston minister John Cotton, for example, distinguished between “Pagan Gentiles” like the Native Americans and “Christian Gentiles” like the Puritans (1655: 209). In keeping with English opinion Oxenbridge thought that the Scythians were descended from Japheth’s son Magog (Gen. 10:2). “This Magog,” the Anglican bishop John Bale wrote, “was the first beginner of the Magogites, whom the Greeks called the Scythians, and we now the Tartarians” (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 78; Bale, 1548: 571; Brightman, 1644: 828–29; Hammond, 1659: 942; I Mather, 1709: 32). On this point Oxenbridge, Bale, and other English figures stood in good company, for from Josephus in the 1st century onward (1737: 36), Western authorities routinely identified Magog as the progenitor of the Scythians. Several advocates of the Scythian theory further claimed that the Native Americans’ Magogite ancestry explained their putative fealty to Satan (C Mather, 1690a: 35; Hubbard, 1815: 26–27). Oxenbridge did not make this additional claim, which was an extrapolation from the satanic Gog and Magog of Revelation 20:7–10, in the surviving portion of the “Plea.”

Into this Scythian America two other peoples came during the pre-Columbian period. One was the Welsh. Like some others in the Anglo-American world, Oxenbridge believed that a Welsh prince named Madoc had discovered and colonized America in the 1170s. The purpose of this legend, which has no recognized basis in fact, was to establish that the English imperial claim to the New World predated the Spanish and French claims. One supporter of the Madoc legend, the Yale president Ezra Stiles, suspected that descendants of the Welsh settlers survived along the Mississippi and elsewhere in the North American interior (1792: 23–24, 26–29). Other supporters, including Oxenbridge, thought that the Welsh pioneers had “sunk and drowned [among] the Indians” long ago (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 58 [quotation]; Hale, 1677: 195–97; C Mather, 1690b: 34; Harris, 1705, xii; [S Mather], 1773: 6). ¹⁴

The other, a remnant of the ten lost tribes of Israel, never assimilated with the Native Americans and remained alive through the present day. Oxenbridge carefully distinguished this position from the lost tribes theory of the Native Americans’ origins. At the time the leading Anglo-American advocate of this particular theory was the English Presbyterian minister Thomas Thorowgood, the author of Iewes in America (1650) and Jews in America (1660), an entirely new work with the same overall point. Oxenbridge considered Thorowgood’s argument “very improbable,” and for good measure chided Thorowgood for his choice of terminology. “I could wish that instead of Jews he had said Hebrews, or Israelites, meaning, the Ten tribes, for so he doth . . . pursue it,” he wrote (ca. 1666: 79–80). ¹⁵

As Oxenbridge reconstructed their postbiblical history, the ten tribes escaped from the Assyrians, the conquerors who had deported them from the northern kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century BCE (2 Kgs 17:3–6). They then settled in various locations in Asia, where most of them still resided as ethnic minorities distinct from the Persians, the Mongols, the Chinese, and other Asian peoples. Some of the lost Israelites, however, continued across Asia and entered America through the strait of Anian. Upon their arrival they discovered that the New World had already been settled by Scythians. In America, as in Asia, the lost Israelites remained unassimilated and observant (ca. 1666: 78–80).

Oxenbridge thought that there were at least three American locations where lost Israelites were presently living. One was the northern portion of the Andes Mountains. Here his authority was Antonio de Montezinos, a Portuguese Jew who had arrived in Amsterdam in 1644 after a period of South American residence as a converso (ca. 1666: 81). Montezinos told the learned Menasseh ben Israel and other Jewish leaders in Amsterdam that he had encountered in the mountains of present-day Colombia a group of Israelites who spoke Hebrew, recited the Shema, followed the Mosaic Law, and claimed descent from the lost tribe of Reuben. Montezinos also said that these Israelites were not Native Americans, and that the two peoples lived apart from one another but occasionally interacted and shared an antipathy for the Spanish. Montezinos’s testimony became available in English translation in Thorowgood’s Iewes in America (1650: 129–39) and in Menasseh ben Israel’s messianic treatise The Hope of Israel (1650: 4–15).

A second was Suriname. Oxenbridge did not claim to have met any lost Israelites in Suriname. Instead he inferred their presence from the existence of Mosaic cultural elements among the local Native Americans. He instanced the institution of levirate marriage, the sequestration of menstruating women, and the practice of mutual foot-washing; he did not include male circumcision, which he did not consider a characteristic native practice (ca. 1666: 80–81). Oxenbridge’s argument here was formally different from Thorowgood’s. Both men thought that there were examples of Mosaic culture among Native Americans. Oxenbridge saw these examples as evidence of a lost Israelite influence on the Indians, and Thorowgood construed them as residual signs of the Indians’ otherwise imperceptible Israelite ancestry. “It is probable to me not that the ten tribes people all these countries,” Oxenbridge wrote in opposition to Thorowgood, “but that some of them have a good portion here, and that by them the Indians have a tincture of Israels customs” (ca. 1666: 80). Oxenbridge took this argument from Menasseh ben Israel, who likewise thought that there were observant Israelites in America, that the Native Americans were Scythians, and that the former had culturally influenced the latter. The difference was that Menasseh, who never left Europe, knew the Native Americans only through reading (Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 81–82; ben Israel, 1650, 25–26, 86). ¹⁶

The remaining location was Mexico City. Oxenbridge’s source here was the Englishman Thomas Gage, a Protestant convert who had once been a Dominican friar in Mexico and Guatemala. Gage reported in 1648 in his published account of his days as a friar that the Native Americans were Scythians and that in Mexico City there was once a central temple with a continuous fire inside it. Gage did not claim that this structure was the product of Israelite cultural influence; Oxenbridge, in contrast, made this inference (Gage, 1648: 72–74; Oxenbridge, ca. 1666: 81). ¹⁷

Oxenbridge first discussed the settlement of pre-Columbian America in his Seasonable Proposition; however, he reached no firm conclusions about the matter. There he called the Native Americans “Gentiles” without specifying their ancestry, and he placed lost Israelites in America without indicating where they lived or whether they observed the Law (n.d.: 1, 6). On these issues the “Plea” marked a breakthrough for him. ¹⁸ As Scythians the Native Americans were “the most wild, unworthy, uncivill and fierce people” (ca. 1666: 55), and as observant minorities dispersed into America, the lost tribes had a role to play in the Indians’ redemption.

The lost tribes and Native American redemption

Oxenbridge anticipated that the twelve tribes would return to the Promised Land in fulfillment of Isaiah 11:11–16, Jeremiah 23:1–8, Ezekiel 37:15–28, and other prophecies about the future reunion of Jacob’s descendants, the ten lost tribes of Israel and the two tribes of Judah (ca. 1666: 105, 106, 112). But before they could return to their ancestral homeland, the twelve tribes had to collectively embrace Christianity. “Israels fullnesse is but the generality or a considerable part of each tribe of Israel coming to the acknowledgement of God in Christ,” he wrote, citing Paul’s pronouncement in Romans 11:26 that “All Israel will be saved” and construing the word “Israel” as a reference to both branches of Jacob’s posterity (ca. 1666: 109). Oxenbridge expected that the twelve tribes would be converted “immediately from heaven” in the same miraculous manner as Paul had been redeemed on the Road to Damascus (ca. 1666: 79).

Given these expectations Oxenbridge could hardly accept Thomas Thorowgood’s argument that the Native Americans were the lost tribes of Israel. To begin with, Oxenbridge carefully kept the size of the lost Israelite population in America within maneuverable limits by claiming that most of the lost tribes had stayed behind in Asia, where they survived as minority populations in areas dominated by other peoples, and then by insisting that the smaller numbers of Israelites in America were ethnically distinct from the Native Americans. Thorowgood, for his part, did not anticipate the repatriation of the lost tribes, perhaps because he recognized that repatriation would simultaneously depopulate Native America and create a massive logistical problem (Cogley, 2007: 45). Oxenbridge, moreover, reasoned that if the lost tribes remained observant they would continue to await the messiah. No less than the Jews, they would then be eligible for miraculous conversion in the Pauline manner. The Israelites could remain observant if they were distinct from the American Indians and the Asian peoples. Thorowgood’s Native American Israelites were not observant. They inadvertently retained some components of their ancient Mosaic past, but they were otherwise idolatrous and certainly were not messianic. He assumed that the lost tribes would have to be converted through conventional and time-consuming Protestant missions and not through miraculous means (Cogley, 2007: 53–54).

There were two reasons why the ten lost tribes of Israel were so important in Oxenbridge’s missionary theology. First, Oxenbridge argued that the fullness of the Gentiles in Romans 11:25 (“blindness . . . is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in” [KJV]) had to include the conversion through conventional missionary means of “a considerable part” of the Native American population (ca. 1666: 109). “The Indians . . . must have their opportunities of visitations made out to them before the Gentiles seasons can be sayd to be fullfilled,” he wrote of the Pauline fullness of the Gentiles (ca. 1666: 110). Hence the miraculous conversion of the lost Israelites in America could not occur until there were enhanced Protestant missions to the Native Americans. Second, Oxenbridge anticipated that the miracle of mass conversion would transpire at a time when Israelites were still living in America, and that this spectacle would induce their Native American neighbors to convert. He based this expectation on two scriptural texts (ca. 1666: 105–106): Zechariah 8:23 (“In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men . . . shall take hold of the skirt of a Jew, saying, ‘We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you’”) and Micah 5:7 (“And the remnant of Jacob shall be amidst many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass”). ¹⁹ Thus the Native Americans would have two opportunities to accept the gospel, the one which preceded the lost tribes’ mass conversion and the one which would follow right after it.

Oxenbridge’s argument in “A plea for the dumb Indian” bore the possible influence of John Eliot, who wrote his major statement on the peopling of ancient America in 1653. Here Eliot argued that the Native Americans were descended from Eber’s son Joktan. This theory meant that the American Indians were Hebrews because Eber was the eponymous ancestor of the Hebrews and, more foundationally, Shemites because Eber was Shem’s great-grandson (Gen. 10:21–25). ²⁰ Thus far Eliot’s argument had nothing in common with Oxenbridge’s case for the Native Americans’ Japhethite, specifically Scythian, ancestry. But like Oxenbridge after him, Eliot also thought that the ten lost tribes of Israel had migrated into Asia, where most of them resided through the present day, and that smaller numbers of them also settled in America, where they remained separate from the Native Americans but occasionally interacted with them. Again like Oxenbridge, Eliot then proposed that the presence of lost Israelites in the New World would hasten the conversion of the Native Americans, for when God poured forth his grace on the Israelites in America, he would simultaneously redeem the Indians among whom they were scattered (Eliot, 1653: 1–20; Cogley, 1999: 86–90). Oxenbridge (ca. 1666: 79) knew the source where Eliot’s argument first appeared in print, Thorowgood’s 1660 Jews in America; however, he did not mention this argument in the extant portion of his “Plea.”

The ten lost tribes of Israel remained important in the Anglo-American sources at least through the early 19th century, the outer limits of my chronological expertise. The perspective of Oxenbridge and Eliot, however, did not endure. Instead of seeing the lost Israelites in America as distinct from the Native Americans, later authors followed Thomas Thorowgood and identified the American Indians as the lost tribes of Israel. ²¹ So dominant did this perspective become that modern scholars often retrofit Eliot into it by wrongly claiming that he agreed with Thorowgood. Oxenbridge might well suffer the same unfortunate fate if his “A plea for the dumb Indian” ever attracts the scholarly interest it deserves.