The founding and evolution of Colonial New England is a historical topic well covered by Neal Salisbury in his monograph Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643. Salisbury, a professor of Colonial North America at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, is a specialist in early New England including the pre-Columbian era. Research fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian; give Salisbury both the accreditation and prestige necessary for Manitou and Providence to be considered front line scholarship in American Colonial history.

Manitou and Providence describes the conquest of New England and the subsequent changes wrought by the incursion of European civilization upon the natives who already inhabited New England. Salisbury does not retell an already familiar story, but redirects the conversation pertaining to New England’s beginnings from one of “the incompatibility of Indian and English cultures” to one of “interdependent explanations” including the scientific—namely that of disease.¹ Salisbury initially tackles the problem of demography in the formation of his thesis. He notes that past demographic studies have varied tremendously in their findings of Indian populations prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Salisbury concedes that only estimates can be obtained from these previous studies and so he allots a range of numbers between 126,000 and 144,000 Indians living in pre-epidemic New England based on the ratio of one adult male per 7.5 females and children.²

Having set the baseline population, Salisbury proceeds into economic and technological differences between the Indians and their English counterparts.  According to Salisbury, the southern New England tribes,  were sedentary agriculturalists by the time the English arrived, and therefore, were more economically, politically, and demographically stable than their cousins to the North.³ However, once the southern Algonquian tribes began trading furs with the Europeans for technological upgrades to their tools and weapons, they gradually moved away from their sedentary agriculture in favor of a more interdependent relationship with the English colonists. This new found symbiotic relationship eventually deteriorated into cultural subordination as disease thinned out the Indian population.⁴ Furthermore, as disease and technological dependence weakened the Indians’ positional strength with the English, they found themselves the victims of military expansion.

Salisbury also comments on the growing acceptance of Christianity by many of the natives as they acclimated themselves to English “superiority.” Salisbury writes:

The Indians had accepted the superiority of English technology and had already “a little degenerated from some of their lazy customs and show[n] themselves more industrious.” By the same token, the customary habit of beseeching Hobbamock…when Kiehtan was inaccessible was giving way to an active interest in Christianity.⁵

The Indians perceived the English technological superiority as proof that the English had access to a more powerful god than they. The Indian notion of Manitou or “spirit” resided in all things that excelled; therefore, the Indians recognized that there must be a Manitou behind the prosperity of the English. Many Indians, thus, desired access to this new kind of Manitou.

Salisbury’s thesis is, for the most part, well developed and devoid of fruitless conjecture. His economic, demographic, and political explanations of how the English came to dominate New England carry much weight. It seems though at times Salisbury feels he needs to be apologetic for Indian actions, reactions, and rationale. It is often that he wishes to convey the settlers as the aggressors, antagonists, and malefactors. It is often overlooked that the Indians were seizing land from among themselves long before the Europeans began seizing it from them. Micmacs, Mohawks, Mohegans, Iroquois, and Narrangansetts were vying for hegemony in New England before the Mayflower ever anchored in Massachusetts Bay. Manitou and Providence, therefore, retains the double quality of being a thorough work of scholarship, but at the same time, borders on the edge of polemic against such things as inequality, discrimination, and European ethnocentrism. In History, there will always be winners and losers. The rightness or wrongness in historical events is not for the historian to decide. Yet, Neal Salisbury may be pardoned since he has excelled in his research above most in his field.