Laura M. Stevens

“Of snatching captive souls from satan’s paws”: A Fundraising Poem for Wheelock’s Charity School

pbsa 107:3 (2013): 377–386 Laura M. Stevens (English Department, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Drive, Tulsa, OK, 74104) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (2004) and is editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is writing a book on eighteenth-century British missionary fantasies. “Of snatching captive souls from satan’s paws”: A Fundraising Poem for Wheelock’s Charity School

“Spare his life to save his soul”: Enthralled Lovers and Heathen Converts in “The Four Indian Kings Garland”

In 1710 three Mohawks and one Mahican traveled to London along with an Englishman and two British-allied Dutchmen on a diplomatic embassy.1 Dispatched by Francis Nicholson, a former Lieutenant Governor of New York and well-known colonial administrator, they traveled with the primary goal of reviving a failed effort to launch a campaign against French Canada—a campaign that had failed the previous year because a British fleet promised to the colonial forces and their Iroquois allies had never arrived.2 In an effort to strengthen this alliance the visitors also asked that a fort and church be built in their territory and a missionary be sent to the Mohawks, the most anglophile tribe of the Iroquois confederacy. Seeking to consolidate power for anglophile factions in the Iroquois alliance to which they were connected, while elevating their own positions within that alliance, these four Indians, with relatively junior positions in their local hierarchies, were presented by Nicholson—and presented themselves—as royal figures fully vested with the authority to negotiate on behalf of their people. They were thus hailed upon their arrival in England as “The Four Indian Kings” and celebrated by commoners and elite alike. Their visit included an audience with Queen Anne, a visit to Bedlam, attendance at a performance of Macbeth in which the audience demanded they be seated on the stage, and many encounters with the crowds of London.

Puritanism and Its Discontents (review)

pact of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in Europe largely during the nineteenth century, is quite insightful. Acknowledging that after ‘‘the brief flurry in the first two years of the French Revolution the constitutional ideas and institutions of the American Revolution had little impact on the development of European or Latin American constitutionalism’’ (132), Bailyn nonetheless traces the circulation of printed texts, sometimes translations of translations, throughout central Europe. Examining remarks on the Constitution from England to France and Germany, from Switzerland to Latin America, Bailyn concludes, ‘‘Two centuries after its creation by provincials developing the minority ideas of the Commonwealthmen, American constitutionalism, having radiated throughout the Atlantic world, has become a classic formulation for the world at large of effectiveness and constraint in the humane senses of power’’ (149). For Bailyn, figuring out now how to ‘‘probe the character of our constitutional establishment’’ (149) is a profoundly important responsibility we all have, for the future.