The concept of an errand in the wilderness was a common idea shared by many early Puritans in reference to their conquest of the Indians inhabiting North America. The primary basis of this analogy is derived from the savagery of the Indian people, as opposed to the perceived civilized superiority of the emigrating English. Thus, the continent is referred to as the wilderness because of its mysterious indigenous people and relatively uncharted territory. The errand simply refers to the emigration to the American continent in an attempt to overcome its people for the furtherance of God’s kingdom. Leading influential Puritans including John Cotton, John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson all expressed their views on this topic in various works.

First, John Cotton was one of the foundational church leaders of early New England. He is remembered for many of his sermons, including one of his most famous, entitled Gods Promise to His Plantation. Delivered in 1630 at a crucial point just before John Winthrop’s fleet set sail to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Cotton expressed his approval of and extended a blessing toward the risky venture, citing the providence of God in his sovereignty leading them to settle in the New World. While Cotton was not among the initial group of Puritans who made the journey under Winthrop, he would join them several years later, becoming one of the colony’s most respected church voices.

Winthrop, too, expressed his views with respect to the Puritan wilderness errand concept. In a document most commonly attributed to him defending the emigration, Winthrop outlined a number of reasons for which he believed that God’s hand was in the matter, and that it was his sovereignty that was the guiding force. This concept of the sovereignty of God was basic to Puritan and Calvinist thinking, as evidenced once again by the writings of a third individual, Mary Rowlandson.

Rowlandson became famous for her autobiographical account of Indian captivity, published in 1682, entitled Captivity and Restoration. In her book, she describes in gruesome detail her experiences during her capture and the subsequent months-long bondage that followed. Throughout the narrative, Rowlandson, too, acknowledges the sovereignty of God; not only in favor of her own circumstances, but as it benefited the enemy as well. She wasn’t under the popular conviction that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian;” her accounts of the indigenous people by whom she was held hostage were not entirely negative; although the glimpses of positivity throughout this dark tale are few and far between. Like many of her contemporaries, she did believe that Western civilization in its perceived superiority was to defeat the indigenous people, thus conquering the wilderness, in both a symbolic and a literal sense.

All three figures possessed similar views regarding the task at hand–for the English emigrants to “subdue the wilderness” in order to further the cause of Calvinist Puritan Christendom. They believed that the indigenous people were mere savages, compared to the civilized Western society from whence they hailed. Thus, it was with certainty in these principles that the English settlers of America eventually succeeded in conquering the Native Americans.🔹