William Dean Howells

“ 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. ”

“ Defeat met the renewed efforts at conversion; the influences of the border infected the broken and disheartened people; Zeisberger died; the rigid laws of the community were trampled upon by the borderers, among whom the war of 1812 revived all the old bitterness against the Indians; drink was brought into the village; and, before the removal of the community to Canada in 1823, the spectacle of drunken converts in the streets bore witness, if not to the inherent viciousness of the Indian, at least to the white man's success in tempting and depraving him. ”

“ Day after day the poor mother found the load upon her shoulder grow lighter, and that within her breast heavier and heavier, as if the burden were shifted, till at last those walking at her side saw by his white lips and shrinking visage that the hand of death had touched the child. The cripple, between signs and sounds, made them understand that he desired baptism before he died, and, tenderly lifting him from his mother's shoulder, they consecrated him by the ancient rites of that church of the poor and martyrs. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Yet this offence, at the time of the massacre, had entirely ceased, through the removal of the Christians to Sandusky, and the murder was utterly wanton. Doubtless the slaughter of a few Indians, more or less, was not quite a crime to their tough consciences; in the ethics of the border, according to Heckewelder, it was no more harm to kill an Indian than a buffalo, — a sentiment which with contemporary moralists of our Western plains finds expression in the maxim, “Good Indians dead Indians.” We can perhaps hardly arraign these murderers before any tribunal of civilized thought ”

“ For no other reason than that they were Indians, and with scarcely the pretence of any other reason, a mob assembled to destroy them, and nothing but the most prompt and energetic measures on the part of the military and the better citizens saved them. The danger was so great, and the intended outrage so abominable, that even some of the younger Quakers took up arms in defence of a people whose use and creed would not permit them to defend themselves ”

“ But no Christian of Indian blood shares in the celebration of its rites; the stone foundations of the cabins, some aged apple-trees planted by their hands, and a few pathetic traces of the fire that consumed the victims of the massacre, alone remain to attest the success and the disastrous close of the Moravians' loving and devoted labors at Gnadenhütten. The survivors of the great murder and of the cold and famine of that winter at Sandusky attempted a settlement in Canada under British protection, and later built a village in Northern Ohio ”

“ He was, according to the testimony of the annalist [7] who most severely condemns the Gnadenhütten massacre, “a brave man, but not cruel. He would meet an enemy in battle, and fight like a soldier, but not murder a prisoner.” Out of these evil elements — bigotry, lust of vengeance, and a generous but weak man's shame — was shaped the calamity of the Christian Indians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Great number of these were women and children, and the men bore only such arms as served them in hunting. Even if their bloodless creed had permitted them to guard against the attacks of enemies, they would not have prepared to defend themselves in a region now abandoned by hostile Indians, and lying near the settlements of the whites whom they had so often befriended; for it was the firm belief of these ill-starred people that they had only to fear savages of their own race, and that they were all the safer for their proximity to the Americans. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The race and color of their victims represented to them the pitiless savages who had so often desolated their homes, sparing neither age nor sex, and holding them in continual wrath and terror; and though many white prisoners owed their welfare or their ransom to the humane offices of the Moravians, the compulsory hospitality of the Muskingum villages to the war parties of marauding Indians was, as has been said, a constant offence to the pioneers. ”

“ As I look outwardly,” he continued, pointing to his crimson paint and warrior's plumes, “so is my heart within. What would it avail if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?” [8]
There yet stands beside the Muskingum, near the site of the hapless Indian village, a little hamlet bearing the pious name of Gnadenhütten, and its chapel bells still call the Moravian Brethren to the worship of their ancient church. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Let us rely on Him who so often has delivered us from his machinations.” In the midst of these sorrows and troubles this good man meekly gathered his flock about him at Gnadenhütten, and preached to them for the last time in the beloved chapel, while enemies compassed them about; giving “a most emphatic discourse,” says Heckewelder, “on the great love of God to man,” and charging them in no event to place themselves “on a level with the heathen by making use of weapons” for their defence. ”

“ Few even among those who had voted for the murder of the Brethren took part in the actual butchery. The great body of the whites turned aside from the ineffable atrocity, while those who with their own hands did the murder now entered the cabins. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Fancy may have her will as to what strange images of imperial Levantine and lordly German cities, of Byzantium, of Vienna, of Prague, and of the embattled life of those far-off lands, arose before the wondering eyes of these children of the forest, as the story ran; for not one of their kindred survives in any generation to refute her, but all have entered upon their inheritance. ”

“ Most of the allies of the Delawares had at last joined in the war against the Americans, and there had grown up among the Delawares themselves a hostile faction, which constantly increased. The leaders of this party perceived that nothing but the presence of the Christian Indians hindered them from dragging the whole nation into the war, and all their efforts were bent to their removal. The commandant of the Americans at Pittsburg was also perfectly sensible of this fact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It had been the custom of some of the settlers to steal the horses of the Brethren, and the entire population of the border seems to have inherited that stupid hatred which everywhere attended the enterprises of the Moravians. Sometimes large bodies of pioneers, bent upon errands of theft and murder among the hostile Indians, would pass through the Christian country. ”

“ In time they returned 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”