Apostle of Removal

IN 1850, Henry A. S. Dearborn, mayor of Roxbury, Massachusetts, proposed a monument to John Eliot, the seventeenth-century pastor of Roxbury and Apostle to the neighboring Indians. Indians had, however, long been strangers to the citizens of Roxbury; the region's native peoples had been confined to reservations in the late seventeenth century, while the Christian Indians of Natick, once hailed as the showpiece of Eliot's evangelical program, had been pronounced practically extinct in 1848.' Indeed, by 1850, New England's example had been reproduced throughout the eastern United States. The national policy of Indian Removal, which dated as early as Thomas Jefferson's 1809 proposal of a permanent Indian Territory, had triumphed in the following decades. In 1824, James Monroe had revived Jefferson's plan; in 1830, Andrew Jackson had presided over its flowering in the passage of the Indian Removal Act; in 1838, Martin Van Buren had crowned these efforts by ordering the Cherokees' removal from Georgia. If Eliot were to be invoked in this context, it would appear, it could only be in recrimination of an Indian policy so at odds with his example. And yet, it is evident that Dearborn views the Apostle's legacy as a way of assigning meaning to that policy and to its results. The proposed monument to Eliot's enduring presence, he wrote, was to consist of

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