The Settlers' Empire by Saler Bethel;

Author:Saler, Bethel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Guiding Wayward Settlers Back Home

In the different denominational visions of a new Christian territory, Indians were not the only “heathen” in need of salvation. Protestant and Catholic missionaries also directed their labors at shepherding the growing population of white settlers in the Wisconsin region. Christian clergy’s approaches to Euro-Americans and Native peoples, however, formed two distinctly contrasting threads within this broader, “civilizing” tapestry. Presbyterians and Congregationalists made this distinction explicit by placing their ministerial labors in the West under separate “home” and “foreign” operations: the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions supervised their missionaries’ evangelizing work with Native peoples, and the American Home Missionary Society oversaw ministers’ cultivation of small existing white congregations and the establishment of new ones.120 While other denominations did not split their endeavors so overtly, the differences implied in “home” and “foreign” missions nonetheless collectively characterized the dual approaches to Christian proselytizing during the first intensive period of church organization in Wisconsin over the 1830s and 1840s.121 Religious workers’ missionary efforts both complemented and contributed to the two kinds of temporary federal colonialism governing the young territories of the Northwest—the dual federal approaches of paternalistic rule over Wisconsin Indian peoples while calling for the voluntary attachment of white settlers to the federal union.

Self-appointed moral authorities of civic society, national Protestant associations sought a systemic conversion to “civilized” morals and habits for white Americans as much as for Indian peoples. Along with this external impetus from national church organizations, internal appeals from settlers drew religious volunteers to Wisconsin.122 Recent emigrants from the established states and later from Europe called for pastors to direct both their worship and the establishment of churches. Catholic clergy as well as Protestant ministers answered internal calls from the Wisconsin region. Catholic priests administered mostly to the spiritual needs of Catholic Indian inhabitants as well as the dispersed French Canadian and French Indian trading communities—the main inhabitants prior to the escalating Euro-American immigration in the 1830s. Baptized Catholics would once again become one of the largest denominations in Wisconsin with the surge of European Catholic immigration in the late 1840s. Over most of Wisconsin’s formative territorial period, however, native-born Protestant sects predominated, squabbling with each other and against a minority of Catholic European priests to mold the white settlers of this “peculiarly missionary” region. Indeed, Wisconsin historian Alice E. Smith has suggested that the decade before 1845 be dubbed “the Protestant era in Wisconsin Territory.” In that decade, the majority of new white settlers traced their family histories back across a slow western drift to origins in New England and the mid-Atlantic, and they promoted the Protestant denominations that grounded those roots: Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, Methodist, and Baptist.123

In this sense, early American state formation informally assumed a Christian and an especially Protestant caste for white settlers as well as for Indians. Given that the republican credos of freedom of religion and of opinion more generally precluded government institutions from actively promoting religious thought, national Protestant organizations took it as their charge to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.