possession of England and a representation of human life before the advent of
money (Locke 1988 , 301 ). It gives us an idea of what society would be like
without specie (a world in which one cannot accumulate vast amounts of
goods without hoarding garbage, and in which the need for the symbolic
medium of trade was unnecessary) as well as a prospectus of the continent
that industrious Englishmen could transform into tradable goods. For Pur-
itans who settled New England, however, the wilderness represented a very
diVerent prehistory.
In Puritan political hagiography, the colonies of New England were new
theocratic republics, proving their faith and their political principles in the
‘‘deserts’’ of the New World. John Winthrop’s ‘‘A Model of Christian Charity’’
set the tone for thisWrst example of American exceptionalist thinking: ‘‘we
shall be,’’ Winthrop promised, ‘‘as a city upon a hill, and the eyes of the world
shall be upon us’’ (Miller 1956 , 79 – 84 ). The signiWcance of this position was
monumental; to be exemplary meant paying the huge costs of covenanting
with God, the constant responsibility for living as a pedagogical community,
and the testing, and even scourging, of the community by a jealous deity.
Election Day sermons and captivity narratives cited Hebrews 12 : 6 : ‘‘For
Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He
recieveth.’’ To be in the New World, in short, was to be engaged in a sacred act
of political covenanting, tested by God before the world.
But how does God scourge the faithful? One typical New England answer
to that question establishes a leitmotif, the redemptive deWning wars of the
‘‘exceptional’’ republic. Increase Mather’s summary is representative: ‘‘That
the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of
our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful possession, have... been planning
mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in
the goings down of the Sun, no Man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable
standing, can be ignorant’’ (Slotkin 1974 , 83 – 4 ; see also Miller 1984 and
Bercovitch 1975 ). These ‘‘heathen people’’ were as important (if not more
so) to deWning the exceptional nation as the land itself. ‘‘American exception-
alism’’ has been consistently deWned in reference to outsiders, the racial and
temporal others by which Americans deWne their identity and their mission.
Agents of European monarchs confronted Native Americans as rival political
communities; for the Puritans, however, the ‘‘heathen people’’ of the New
World lacked that degree of agency. Native Americans were, rather, the
scourges by which God identiWed and corrected his chosen nation. In some
Puritan writings, native tribes were groupings of devils, ‘‘Satan’s imps,’’ agents
284 ronald j. schmidt, jr.