Thinking and Feeling Time

Claiming patience as a path to mending cultural misunderstanding has a colonial history. Attending to that history might spur reflections on the intersection of time and language. Patience is, after all, part of a humanistic tool kit that, many of us hope, will help make human relations better—whether by better we mean more just, more equal, or more happy. Patience with others, and with ourselves, seems fundamental to the improvement of human relations at which much work in the humanities aims. It is hard to be patient. That alone, to say nothing of its often good results, tends to make one think patience has great powers. When we accomplish patience, it can feel like we have mastered time.4

Academic studies of temporality—the feeling of time, the measurement of time, and cultural or religious ideas about time’s progression—have tended to focus on extremes of its sensibility. In the study of a work of literature or art, time as a formal property (duration, detail, rhythm, and so on) has long been a basic tool for interpretation. Such interpretation often involves the smallest units of representation, such as words, phrases, brushstrokes, beats, or units of measure like a foot. In broad-scale theorizations of religion, ideology, and literary and historical change, an attention to temporality’s big picture has been fundamental. It has engaged broadly recognizable concepts: progress, the ages of man, the Christian millennium, manifest destiny, the collapse of civilizations, the course of empire. Some of the most powerful expressions of temporality, however, happen in everyday interactions, such as the quiet but consequential breaking point expressed in the stillness of Rosa Parks or the fidgety urgency of someone behind you in line at the grocery store. The former we might regard as a decolonizing act, the latter something of a colonizing one—at attempt, without dialogue, to get you to share impatience and hurry up. In either case, although they might be characterized within a larger framework, these actions emerge from complex senses of pressure that transcend their immediate moment. There are elements in each that are framed by being considered part of a group, or by personality, or by religious affiliation (or lack thereof), or by a sense of pressure induced by a competitive economy that monetizes time.

Knowing this, we often think of a person’s temporality as conditioned by culture. Vine Deloria Jr. once wrote that if American Indians were in control, “the tempo would be much slower.”5 Serious or not, such assertions have a long historical context in Western theories about the four elements, the bodily “humors,” and national “temperaments,” dating back at least to Aristotle. In this interpretation, different kinds of bodies, in different contexts, sense and enact the passage of time differently. We intuit what we mean when we tell ourselves to “slow down,” but it is hard to nail down in describable actions or thoughts. Some larger forces are at work even when we try to master our own minds and movements. Religious traditions across the world have produced a range of techniques for such mastery, with strategies so different (from, say, St. Ignatius’s “spiritual exercises” to Zen master Dogen’s u-ji, or “being time”) that it would be hard to deny some kind of group-based specificity involved in the feeling of time.

That said, it turns out that managing the experience of time can help extend your life, whomever and wherever you are. Nobel Prize–winning studies by Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak on chromosome health (awarded in 2009) and by the trio of Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young on circadian rhythms (awarded in 2017) have uncovered some of the chemical processes that link humans’ internal tempos to external ones. While curbing impatience and stress certainly helps lengthen life-spans (by maintaining telomerase, an enzyme that preserves telomere length on chromosomes), recent studies have shown that it is less simple relaxation and more a reflection on the relationship between one’s feelings and one’s thoughts about them that produces results. Certain kinds of meditation, such as that practiced by Zen Buddhists, are more effective than other kinds at maintaining telomere length, scientists speculate, because their immersive quality connects reactive emotional states to cognitive ones; over time, this creates a habit of such rerouting. We might say that the intense emphasis of religious groups like the Sufis, the Puritans, or Zen Buddhists on an inward turn to reconnect with the infinite might well be among the most effective ways of postponing the divine union they seek.6

“There is no inherent good or bad to an individual tempo,” Robert Levine writes; “what we make of time is a very personal matter.”7 Collective impatience, however, urges us to attend to its potential for historical injustice. In the study of early colonial America, differences between ideas about time and history held by Indigenous people and Europeans have been characterized by decades of scholarship as a key element of the colonialist hierarchies of power that positioned Native people as incapable of knowing their own histories, because they were argued to be tied to rhythms of nature and lacked the recording power of alphabetic literacy. The role of cosmologic and historical concepts of time had been intensely analyzed in the seventeenth-century Northeast. Yet patience is a more quotidian, seemingly less theorized concept; it is historically and culturally specific in many cases but is difficult to study as a system. It tends not to receive the degree of intellectual or sociohistorical treatment we are accustomed to in discussions of ideas of history, eschatology, or economics. It is also difficult to trace in terms of evidence. What is the fossil record of patience? There is much theorization of patience, much prescription of it, but when we assert its actual practice in history, we often have to do so indirectly.

Patience, I propose as a starting point, functions at four analytical levels. First, it has a historically situated, philologically specific sense. Patience, in all its linguistic concreteness, means specific things in certain times and places. It may even, in different moments and situations, be said to have an aesthetic. It can mean different things in different semantic contexts, of course; consider Christian patience versus the patience of a plantation investor. These meanings are conditioned by time and culture. Second, patience is a cultural problematic. Within any given encounter or negotiation, does the time of interaction, or the time between interactions, measure the same to all parties? To what extent is such a sense an individual one, on the part of one of the people or groups involved, and to what extent do groups or individuals have different kinds of patience, with their own historical dynamics? Third, patience is a lived value or experience within the framework of the present day, in all of its contingencies and particularities. Some people feel that having patience is a good thing; some find it annoying or an impediment. Finally, patience is a critical value for historical and Indigenous studies in particular and for the humanities broadly. As a consequence, to consider academically the question of the history of patience as an ideal and its ethical potential means turning a critical lens on academics’ feelings of and about time.

These four levels are rooted in the notion of patience as something valued in social communication in the West. The presence or absence of patience, a sense of a need to maintain it, a sense of someone else having it—all seem to function socially in relation to a broader sense of time, to circumstantially specific notions about responsibility or role, and to a comparative framework with a tendency to treat patience and impatience as recognizable, if not definable, phenomena—something one knows when one experiences or witnesses them. The term links together feelings, temporalities, and social institutions (such as religion, economics, and the family) in suggesting a positive model of how a person or group might relate to them.

That positive model is often contentious, however, for a host of reasons. A politics attaches to patience, but it does so in a way that resides both within a moment of historical interaction and across time in its subsequent recounting—including those of our analyses here.8 How much, after all, can we put ourselves into the mind-sets of the “graver sort” that Eliot mentioned—folks used to sitting through, and in some cases going home and transcribing, hours-long sermons? People accustomed to the pace of communication in the early age of print, who lived on the slower side of transatlantic information transmission? Among Indigenous Americans, similar questions resonate. There is good evidence that Walter Ong’s insistence that oral cultures require repetition and long performance times is not always true; certainly English culture was still largely oral at the time of, say, Eliot’s conversion attempts.9 The stage for the reading of patience or impatience might well have been set similarly, but it might also have been uneven, particularly given the substantial variance among the languages, practices, and protocols of Native kinship and affiliative groups. The protraction of Native American public events had a function at least as cosmological as it was technical—that is to say, it was simultaneously a spiritual and political form—which was no less true of the Christian virtue of patience and its display.

Patience and Early Colonization

The problem of translating concepts like patience may be helpful for thinking differently about how colonial relations unfolded and what that unfolding means to us today. In the scene Eliot describes, for example, we see both the failure and success of patience. Different parties to this scene exhibited patience or impatience along a spectrum inscribed not just by personal character but also by larger cultural tendencies, as Eliot’s phrase “at least as I judged” signals. For European Christians, patience was one of seven virtues that could, with the right discipline, be used in an almost Galenic way to displace the seven deadly sins. Patience was an antidote to wrath in particular, and to certain other maladies of the mind less familiar to us today, such as acedia. The world’s evil and boredom could be borne, and good things wrought both within the soul and in one’s material sphere, if the words of James could be obeyed: “let patience haue her perfect worke, that ye may be perfect and entier, lacking nothing.”10 Treatises by Henry Scudder, Cotton Clement, and Richard Younge, all of which engage Christian patience as a central theme, were reprinted frequently during the seventeenth century. (Scudder’s book is about eight hundred pages long, thus exemplifying its lessons about patience in its very form—truly a brick for a spiritual edifice.) Job is the great model of patience for Christians, though the steady sellers just mentioned engage deeply with a range of biblical patterns. Sexuality and marriage were other domains in which patience had a popular, ancient, and multinational history—women waiting for good men; men waiting for virtuous women; and so on. Puritans named their girls “Patience” and their boys “Wait,” gendering even this supreme quality, as girls and women embodied the virtue and boys and men the command. Such patience was an investment in futurity, to be sure, but it was a kind of performance as well, tied to other domains and models of patience; in this case, their temporal framework is the steady, multigenerational work of family and reproduction.11

Patience has always been an economic strategy too, of course; the capacity for it functions in many ways to stratify economic power. In the seventeenth century, colonial ventures were signature sites of the relationship among risk, earning, and patience. Often, in New England and elsewhere, commentators drew on biblical notions of patience in speaking of the investment temporality of plantations. “Planting is a work of time, it requires vast expense,” writes Governor Thomas Lynch of investment in Jamaican sugar growing, “wherefore who will plant, must (like the builders in the Gospel) take their measures beforehand, and furnish themselves with money and patience.”12 In the language of the enslaver, we find a claim on patience. What are we to do, looking back, with this claim? The challenge to patience as a humanistic method is palpable in the patient enslaved person who quietly cultivates kinship and prays for freedom; in the patient master who, by controlling time, cash, and the self, dominates another human being; in the patient Monequassun who is interrupted in his confession; and in the patient English listener who demands an explanation despite the hour. It is evident in both Olaudah Equiano’s teaching of Miskito prince George and in the latter’s subsequent silence. Patience was a virtue at the core of colonization’s unfolding.

It is not simply that Europeans lacked patience and Indigenous people had it, whether it was rooted in oral temporality or whether it was just an irreducibly “different” cosmology. Instead, we might regard patience as a shared value emerging across cultures, but unevenly and with different gestures, feelings, vocabularies, and political and economic valences attached to it. What was shared might not be a concrete mutual understanding of the “forbearance or long-suffering under provocation” that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as patience. It seems rather more like a shimmering sense that everyone involved in a particular conversation was experiencing meaningful differences in the perception of time. As such, the evidence we are left with of such moments can open historiographic paths off the beaten ones. Might the elder who asked Eliot to call another convert have been trying to save face, aware of Algonquian protocols for public speech? Why not otherwise call Monequassun back to finish his confession, especially given the importance of the confessional form to evidencing God’s grace? While on the whole this incident shows English impatience, within it is nested a contest of judgments about time, translation, and belief.

Perhaps, on the Native side, the tempo of American Indian discourse was a form of resistance not just to the European regime of making modernity that Johannes Fabian famously describes in Time and the Other but also to any outsiders’ different temporalities.13 The Red Jacket memorialization saw two different navigations of the feeling of time by Indigenous leaders: one by Chief Jacket and one by Parker. Chief Jacket spoke in Seneca, dividing the audience and signaling to Seneca speakers that a different rhetorical frame would attend the conclusion of the ceremonies, for better or worse. We don’t know whether his words were translated at the time for the Anglophone members of the audience, but it seems possible that they were not, given how attentive the rest of the report was to such details. Parker, in English and without notes, delivered a promised short speech, but he demanded of his audience a tolerance in return—a tolerance for the complexity of Native politics on which his speech insisted. The Indian question is “inexhaustibly” complex; Parker acknowledges the audience as “exhausted.” We might imagine different purposes for the protocols of patience exhibited across these documents, even as we acknowledge that the Europeans reporting the events were filtering them according to the cosmologic and economic considerations described above. At times there are significant convergences across different kinds of group boundaries, or at least recognitions of the manipulations of concepts like patience across them. To illustrate the unstable landscape of patience in colonial New England, as well as the uneven results of patience as a culture-bridging method in both a historical moment and in historiography, I will retell the story of an extraordinary episode in colonial religious history, and the context of Algonquian time in which it unfolded.

Thou Must Be Punctual if Thou Wilt Be a Christian

Late seventeenth-century New England witnessed a war of patience among the Quakers, the region’s Natives, and Roger Williams.

Williams, who had been exiled from Massachusetts Bay and shunned from Plymouth Colony, helped found Providence Plantations under the banner of freedom of conscience and a policy of fair dealing with the local Narragansett people. Over decades, Williams became a key node in relations between the settlers and the many Indigenous groups in the region. The same frankness and inquisitiveness that led in part to his banishment created trust with the area’s Native leaders, who were wrestling with a complex, unpredictable political landscape. Ironically, once put into law in Providence, the same rigorous insistence on the primacy of conscience that had made Williams declare his thoughts so vocally to orthodox authorities opened the door to an influx of believers whose doctrines Williams found dangerous: the Quakers.

It is difficult to characterize Williams’s radical protestantism succinctly, but he certainly shared many points of belief with the followers of George Fox. Both emphasized the equality of persons in the church; the distinction between civil and scriptural authority, along with a concomitant refusal to swear oaths to earthly authorities; and the rejection of what Williams termed the “hireling ministry” characteristic of Anglican church order, with its salaried clergy. Moreover, the danger to civil order that Williams anticipated from the Quakers—a fear he shared with his nemeses in Massachusetts Bay—was not of violence, since the Society of Friends’ peace testimony precluded the use of physical force. It was less Quakerism’s planks than its foundations that troubled Williams. A committed biblicist, Williams found the Friends’ belief in the “inner light”—a direct communication with God—to be a dangerous tenet, allowing any worshipper to supersede the laws of Scripture and obey only a personal notion of the divine will.14

Of course the Friends were a social community as well as a religious one, so the civic implications of their theological positions were more complex (and in historical hindsight patently less disruptive) than their opponents claimed. However appealing the inner light may have been as a way of relating to the divine, it took a lot of patience. One had to wait to hear that real voice, so Quaker meetings became notorious for their slow tempos and silent quorums. The operational dimensions of the Friends’ patience were manifold, as they borrowed from the history of spectacular Christian patience no less than they innovated with respect to the personal management of one’s voice. In the contested theocratic landscape of New England, the results were notorious, as in the cases of Puritan executions and public tortures of Friends in Massachusetts Bay. The more tolerant authorities of Providence Plantations nonetheless warned their neighbors that Quaker patience, as they saw it, was a tactical spectacle. “Surely we find,” they wrote to the Commissioners of the United Colonies in 1658, that the Friends among them “delight to be persecuted by civill powers, and when they are soe, they are like to gain more adherents by the conseyte [conceit] of their patient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious sayings.”15 Patience brought Friends closer to God; it also brought them converts.

Conceit or not, by 1672, the Friends’ movement in New England was strong. The progenitor of Quakerism, George Fox, made the transatlantic journey and toured the region, causing a stir and making new Friends. Roger Williams had had enough; it was time for the Cambridge-trained theologian to try to stem the tide. He wrote up his cardinal accusations, fourteen in all, against the sect and its political consequences. Then he challenged the Quakers to defend themselves in a public debate. After a series of back-and-forth claims of public misrepresentation and attempting to rig the system of the debates, the parties agreed on a two-part event. The first encounter, to be held at Newport, would concern Williams’s first seven accusations; the second encounter, to be held up Narragansett Bay at Providence, would concern the remainder.

In the accounts of the dispute, a surprising amount of prose is taken up with mutual indictments about the use of time—indictments of the other side’s impatience, prolixity, or tendency to interrupt. The obsession with time could be seen in the way the participants structured the events as well as in rhetorical exchanges in the heat of the contest. As reported in his book George Fox Digg’d Out of His Burrowes, Williams’s first demands in his letter summoning the Friends to “conference” involved structuring the debate explicitly to ensure “free uninterrupted liberty to speak” and to facilitate the discussion of all of his fourteen points. With this gesture, Williams attempted to operationalize patience with “Ingenuity and Humanity,” he insisted, thus counteracting the spontaneity protocol of the Friends’ inner light by organizing the debate in what Williams described as a “civil” manner.16 Yet Williams himself had decades before described the humane scene he seems to have imagined for his declarations in the “uncivilized” world of his neighbors, the Narragansetts. He described local Native oratorical procedures in his translation manual, A Key into the Language of America, published in 1643:

Their manner is upon any tidings to sit round double or treble or more, as their numbers be; I have seene neer a thousand in a round, where English could not well neere halfe so many have sitten: Every man hath his pipe of their Tobacco, and a deepe silence they make, and attention give to him that speaketh; and many of them will deliver themselves either in a relation of news, or in a consultation with very emphaticall speech and great action, commonly an houre, and sometimes two houres together.17

Williams had appealed to this use of secular patience to engender Christian debate many times before, in his battles both printed and legal with a range of authorities. In the context of this debate, his insistence on respect for procedure took both concrete and emotional forms. Williams structured the debate as having two main branches. The first branch, fundamental but politically unpractical, concerned the legitimacy of Quakerism as a religion. The other branch involved the question of earthly, political sovereignty. Would the Friends submit to the rule of Rhode Island, or would they follow their own consciences and undermine it? “We have a People here amongst us,” Williams is reported to have asked, “which will not Act in our Government with us; What Course shall we take with them?”18 In the context of economic and military environments that were far from under English control, Quaker civic unpredictability and refusal to bear arms against others were worrying.

Before the debates began, Williams heralded his concerns about the Quaker threat to the fledgling colony’s sovereignty in a vitriolic exchange of letters with his neighbor, John Throckmorton, a recent convert. He offered as evidence the Quaker sympathy for William Harris, who had played a key role against the colony in a boundary dispute with Connecticut despite being a substantial Providence Plantations landowner. “I think you have been an Officer your self in a Corporation in England,” Williams challenged Throckmorton; “I question how you durst then (or durst now) omit to take Cognizance of such Actings, against your Corporations safety, and the Honour and royall supream Authority of his Majesty.”19 Early in the first stage of the public conference at Newport, Williams declared his intention of clearing his conscience for having tolerated the Quaker presence by “vindicating this Colony for receiving of such persons whome others would not,” because “we suffer for their sakes, and are accounted their Abettors.”20 It was not just Christian conscience that was on the line in tolerating such potentially heretical theology, but also the trustworthiness of the fledgling colony among its English peers.

Unlike the orderly Indigenous conferences Williams had described in his Key, the debate with the Friends of Newport and Providence depicted in George Fox Digg’d was a welter of interruptions. William Edmundson, one of his opponents, was full of “Boisterousness”: “he would speak first and all” and “frequently and insolently interrupt me.”21 Having by the second day set time limits on speaking turns in order to speed up debate, Williams found even these allowances cramped. Edmundson “was often remembring me saying Is this thy Quarter of an hour? for I believe they stood there upon Coals and were not willing that I should insist upon it my full Quarter.”22 Even before the formal meeting, Williams had encountered the power of Quaker protocols to derail opponents. At one of their public assemblies in Newport, the Friends, led by John Burnet, had issued a volley of prayer and dismissed the meeting the instant that Williams proclaimed his objection to Quaker women speaking in public. As a consequence, Williams tells us, he had “resolved (with Gods help) to be Patient and Civill.”23 But civility, the history of colonization teaches us, is in the eye of the beholder. Appeals to patience, read across the accounts of the tumultuous debates that Williams initiated, appear as a rhetorical pivot, woven into their writers’ formal techniques.

Williams, for example, asks for his readers’ patience only a dozen or so pages into his hefty tome, in the middle of detailing his debate with Throckmorton. “The Ingenious and upright Reader might now well suppose that the Contest were over,” Williams writes, anticipating a reasonable reaction of exhaustion with his tale: “But it is not the Light of Truth or Reason or Scripture or Experience, or the Testimony of the Prudent or their own Consciences that will satisfie this white Devill of this pretended Light and Spirit within them, and therefore must I crave the Readers Patience while I produce J.T. his third and last Letter to me and my Answer to it.”24 The prolixity and the sheer heft of Williams’s book weigh in, and on, passages like this, begging to be read as a material example of its author’s patience. Yet one could just as easily interpret Williams’s attempts to draw readers into his brotherhood of patience as patience’s negative extremity: obstinacy. George Fox Digg’d addresses the reader twenty times, and many of these moments solicit readerly patience. Williams’s very impatience with the reader’s imagined impatience highlights this passage’s droning insistence that trying to convince Quakers of their theological blindness is a fool’s errand.

Might that inner voice not convey “the wild and foolish notions of the Devils whisperings,” Williams asked his English readers?25 The Quakers, he was sure, had a demonic “black Familiar” rather than a true Inner Light. The root of the problem, as he saw it, was once again the absence of patience. The inner light implied the immediacy of revelation and its transmission into words or action. Here “immediate” connotes rapidity in time, as it does today, but it also carries an earlier sense of a lack of mediation—by, say, signs, angels, or other divine “means,” as it was often put. “Why should not this Argument be good for mee and for others as well as the Quakers?” Williams demanded in his opening salvo in the debate: “They say their commands are immediate (for Interpretations are immediate) but I say they herein suffer Satan to cheat them; for they say they pray, they fast, they wait, they listen, they judge of the motions that arise within them, and so I have done. The great maker and searcher of all hearts knowes, that none but his holy Majesty was privy to the Conception of this business.”26 Williams was unconvinced that judgment was involved in the Friends’ response to divinity’s immediate commands. Having warned man “against false Gods, false Worships, false Christs, false Spirits, false Prophets: He Commands us in Scripture not to believe them, &c. but to try them, to try all things.” Williams hypothesized that, for example, God might permit the “black Familiar” through an “immediate revelation to employ some malicious soul to Murther me.”27 While such a demonizing assertion about a people who had committed to nonviolence was both illogical and insulting, the Friends’ response focused on the pivotal nature of divine revelation in defining Christian purpose rather than the rational dynamics of contemplation that Williams would have preferred. The Friends implied, too, that a responsiveness to immediate inspiration defined the polity—a sophisticated end run on orthodox fears of Quaker civic unreliability. “And how dost thou differ from Mahomet or the Papists, and the Powhows,” they asked, “that hast No Voice or Motion within in Heavenly things in matters of Supernatural Light?”28 An irresolvable disagreement about the role of latency in Christian revelation smoldered at the core of the debate.

The Friends’ response to George Fox Digg’d, titled A New-England Fire-Brand Quenched, though just as lengthy, took the more energetic and alluring form of a dialogue. In place of Williams’s long disquisitions and qualifications are short assertions by each side, taken from notes made during the conferences; quotations from Williams’s account; and correspondence. Unsurprisingly, the Friends’ responses get most of the airtime, and the interruptions that Williams complains about are not reflected in the dialogic form. (At one point, the authors acknowledge in passing that Williams was interrupted—but only to ask in turn why, when he had the leisure to write George Fox Digg’d without such disruptions, he still failed to make a convincing case.29) The Friends’ riposte concludes with “A Catalogue of R.W.’s Envious, Malitious, Scornful Railing Stuff,” as well as Quaker testimonies, as counterevidence.30 Despite the deprecatory language on both sides, the impression given overall by the formal choices in A New-England Fire-Brand is of a more balanced back-and-forth, as well as a fuller representation of the stances of both parties in the dispute. The reader is constantly addressed in A New-England Fire-Brand, hailed as an authority (as “Gentle”) and a “sober,” reasonable fellow traveler.31 “Reader did’st thou ever hear, how he hath jumbled things together here?” we are asked, with a playful touch of homonymy.32 Williams’s style is impugned as sharply as his readings of George Fox’s work: “Let the Reader observe, what Railing Expressions he giveth in the Front of his Reply!” To be sure, the Friends claimed the same moral heights of patience to which Williams had requested title. “And was not our patience manifest, in bearing thy Cankcred Spirit, which utter’d forth all these railing words against us, let the people Judge?”33 But not once does A New-England Fire-Brand request the reader’s patience.

The Quakers also protested against Williams’s assertion that they were “a dangerous People to Nations and Kingdomes & Common-weales.”34 In their account of the debates, they turned Williams’s claims of patience against him in their denunciation of the use of state force both to convert unbelievers (including, by association with Catholic colonization, Indigenous Americans) and to punish the Friends for nonconformity.

And we have and do deny outward, Carnal Weapons to convert people to Religion by, but those are your Weapons of New-England, their Fruits have declared it, whose Souls cry under God’s Altar; How long, O LORD! &c. And therefore let thee and them Dread God’s Vengeance from Heaven. So with your Carnal Sword ye are like Mahomet and the Papists; for thou say’st, thou would’st have us Punish’d: and that must be by such, as have the Sword.

And so thine and your Pretences are Opposite to the Meek and Patient Spirit of true Purity and Holiness.35

At times, Williams’s “Pretences” argued against him even in the space of his own book, in a way that shows how little power patience had to effect a reconciliation between him and his adversaries. When, at Providence, one of the assembly called for “the Choice of a Moderator between us,” the boisterous Edmundson answered, “Roger Williams had himself provided a Moderator, and he produced and Read my Paper of Position.” “I knew with whom I had to deal,” Williams tells us in response, “and therefore purposely waved, what ever I thought they would bogle at, & purposely gave them all possible Advantages, &c. and I humbly waited on God for patience for his sake to bear with all Inconveniences, Insultings, Interruptions, &c. and then, I knew there would be no great need of a Moderator.”36 Ironically, here Williams places the moderator within himself, his own inner light of patience functioning as the dispute’s regulator. Yet to wait on God for patience was surely no less mystical a feat than to wait for immediate revelation.37

They Would Live Upon Us, and Dear

While the war of words was kindled in Rhode Island, a war of deeds was raging all around Williams and his fellow settlers.

As the debates in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations rattled on in 1672, the settlers’ Native neighbors watched—and waited. They watched from the hill at Montaup, the fortified community of the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, also known as King Philip. From Pocasset, on the opposite shore from Rhode Island, the saunkskwa Weetamoo followed the comings and goings of their European allies in the estuary. The management of patience—of time—for the Wampanoag and Narragansett people who surrounded this English settlement was only one dimension of a deep relationship to place that was threatened by the expansion of settler territorialism. The Native communities around Rhode Island had for a decade been under land extraction pressure by Massachusetts, Connecticut, and especially Plymouth. The tactics included incarceration of Natives for debt or drunkenness, leveraging personal or tribal differences to obtain favorable outcomes in property acquisitions, and using the relations of Native leaders to pry away land through agreements that had not undergone the proper processes of authentication.

Williams’s concern to establish the legitimacy of the colony he had founded had multiple audiences. These included the English crown and colonies, to be sure, but also other nations, and most crucially, the Indigenous nations with which he had labored more than most settlers to establish right relations. At one level, his debate with the Friends was an instance of interpolity conversation that might seem extraordinary today because so few such spirited civic contests, with such great stakes for souls and states, happen in public lately. Regarded from a Native standpoint, however, this conference was one of many discussions made possible by an Indigenous context, citing comparisons on both sides with Indigenous ways, perhaps even using Indigenous protocols—but to the end of weakening Native sovereignty. When King Philip’s War broke out, Williams would find himself once again in the position of experiencing “grievous Interruption.”38

The Wampanoag leader Metacom’s dissatisfaction with English settlement dated back years before the dispute between Williams and the Quakers. While the main line of the controversy had been between Metacom and the Plymouth Colony over land and legal jurisdiction, Natives across New England always kept careful track of the affairs of the colonists. Their religious differences, like their economic competitions and their charter controversies, were part of an integrated political landscape, which even this late in the seventeenth century still principally comprised Native interests and networks of relations. For the most part, good diplomacy between Rhode Island and the surrounding communities had been maintained despite the deed war.

Weetamoo and her husband, Petonowowet (also known as Benjamin), met with Rhode Island governor John Easton about English encroachment in May 1675, a month before the war began. “In the meeting with Easton,” Lisa Brooks tells us, “Weetamoo sought to maintain the still considerable expanse of territory at Pocasset, including her town at the falls of Quequechand, where no Englishman had yet dared to plant. The town was seated near the ferrying place from Portsmouth, a likely site for the meeting.”39 Easton’s response, a request made to Plymouth for arbitration in the case, “was not entered into the court records.” Easton tried again to mediate the conflict a few weeks later. Meeting with Philip and many of his men at the south end of Montaup (just across the bay from Patience Island), Easton once more suggested arbitration. “They told him that it was by supposed ‘arbitration they had had much wrong, many miles square of land so taken from them.’”40 Even as Plymouth fomented the perception that Philip had engineered a widespread and unstoppable “insurrection,” Philip was still negotiating formally with Rhode Island’s leadership.

These conferences were part of a decades-long, slowly unfolding diplomatic effort by Weetamoo and many other leaders to slow the pace of English expansion and to transform its terms into ones of coexistence rather than alienation. Grounding this effort were the annual cycles of planting, harvesting, hunting, and fishing as well as of the ritual celebration of all these activities that the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and Nipmucs surrounding Williams’s plantation not only valued but also understood as pillars of time. Such events upheld the future bounty of nature. These frameworks for participating in time and history are woven into the very names of the people of this area. “Long before it was reinscribed as ‘New England,’” Brooks writes, “this place was named Wôpanaak or Wabanaki, ‘the land where the sun is born every day.’”41 Even the English name, New England, looked forward but summoned the past—indeed, it looked eastward. Its yoking of time and place unknowingly inherited a spirit from the names that preceded it. Those names linked the diurnal responsibility to welcome and thank the life-giving sun to the place in which the people lived.

The struggle over Quaker legitimacy in which patience played such a starring role unfolded inside a much larger conflict of temporalities. Native people repeatedly waited for English settlers to be true to their word, then persistently appeared in court to complain or to renegotiate against increasingly long odds and ever more elaborate English work-arounds designed to acquire land. Williams’s concern that Quakers were weakening Rhode Island’s sovereignty seems distinctly out of proportion compared to the many attempts, by way of deed manipulation, on the part of Plymouth, Connecticut, and Massachusetts to chip away at Rhode Island’s stability by manipulating Indigenous people with whom it had maintained comparative peace. Williams, the Quakers, and their Native neighbors were all in one sense acting in 1675 in ways that attended to long scales of time, whether Christian millennialism or the ancient cycles of earth, air, and water that kept the Wampanoag and Narragansett worlds in harmony. In other ways, they could not have felt the passing of time more differently. For Indigenous residents of the land where the sun is born every day, the time had come to restore balance. For English settlers, balance seemed to be just around the corner, in little need of force. However patient Williams was for the beginning of Christ’s new reign, and however patient the Quakers were for the end of all war, neither could imagine the long outwaiting their wronged hosts were undertaking.

Williams’s career as a mediator put him, despite his “old bones and Eye,” at one of the crucial junctions of these networks as the conflict ramped up in June 1675 with the burning of Swansea.42 For a time, the town Williams had founded was spared. Eventually, at the end of March 1676, Native warriors came to burn Providence. Like Abraham trying to dissuade God from hastily razing Sodom and Gomorrah, the aged Williams, against the warnings of his neighbors, walked to a point of the river at the town’s edge to parlay with the attackers. Time was on both sides’ minds:

I asked them Whither they were bound. They Said to all the Tows [Towns] about Plimoath. They would Stay about two dayes more with us (which they Did not but [went?] away yestrday afternoon the day after their coming). I asked them Why they assaulted us With burning and Killing who ever were. . . . Neighbours to them (and looking back) said I this Hous of mine now burning before mine Eyes hath Lodged kindly Some Thousands of You these Ten Years.43

As his own house was consumed by flames, a scene played out that repeated in miniature the structure of Williams’s earlier conference with the Quakers. Having admitted that “they were in A Strang Way,” the Indigenous leaders “desired me to come ovr the River to them and Debate matters at larg.”44 They nonetheless put Williams to a test that emphasized their superior negotiating position, encouraging him to return to the town to get a hostage, though the land between had already been occupied by Native warriors. Informed by runners of the danger, and having heard the raid’s leaders’ disavowal of control over the warriors destroying Providence, Williams consented to talks with the commanders.

Just as in his debate with the Friends, Williams both displayed and requested patience. He was met with a clear response:

We had much repetition of the former particulars Which were debated at the Poynt. Nawwhun Said that we broke Articles and not they (as I alleadged). . . . He said You have driven us out of our own Countrie and then pursued us to our Great Miserie, and Your own, and we are Forced to live upon you. I told them there were Wayes of peas [peace]. . . . I told them planting time was a coming for them and Us. Cuttaqueen Said they cared not for Planting these Ten Years. They Would live upon us, and Dear.45

Williams, increasingly agitated, warned that the English king would send a flood of soldiers into the conflict if the Natives continued to resist. In reply, it appears that Kutquen—a leader of the raid—told Williams they could talk again “a moneth Hence after we have been on the Plimoth side,” presumably wreaking havoc there. In short, Kutquen had said, we have waited long enough; it’s your turn.46

Kutquen was a Kwinitekw leader, from a people who lived, in Brooks’s words, in “a middle ground between territories, cultivating alliances from the inland” and who worked with the Narragansetts and Wampanoags both to prosecute and to mediate the conflict.47 His mere presence must have signaled to Williams the wide-ranging alliance that had been formed—and consequently the potential resilience of the Native force. Kutquen would, the following month, play a key role in the negotiation for the release of Mary Rowlandson. The stance that he articulated to Williams, however, had been uttered earlier, in a famous handwritten note left after the Indigenous devastation of Medfield. Thought to have been authored by James Printer, it was posted on the remains of a bridge burned by the Native warriors. It declared, “Thou English man hath provoked us to anger & wrath & we care not though we have war with thee this 21 years.”48 “It seemed that Kutquen’s statement was not his personal opinion,” Brooks writes, “but a common belief held among the alliance at Wachusett, interpreting the political landscape through a syncretic lens, wherein divine will was directed toward rebalancing the scales of justice toward Indigenous continuance.”49 But if it took imbalance—whether for ten years or twenty-one—to find a way back, the protectors insisted they would persist. Patience was an implicit part of Native military strategy as well as an explicit rhetorical stance.

No Englishman should have known better than Williams that a reckoning was coming. None knew better, or had described with more care, the senses of time and justice that guided local Algonquians’ lives and politics. In A Key into the Language of America, he had been careful to note his neighbors’ different forms of both patience and precision. “They are punctuall in measuring their Day by the Sunne, and their Night by the Moon and the Starres,” he wrote, sensing the ways in which, no less than the landscape, changes of season and weather profoundly shaped the lifeways of the region’s people. He found Narragansetts relentless “in their promises of keeping time; and sometimes have charged mee with a lye for not punctually keeping time, though hindred”—a fact he would have done well to recall when William Edmundson was insisting that his dilatory tendencies made him un-Christian.50 At the same time, Williams emphasized patience’s other edge: that the Natives would test English patience in turn, writing, “Who ever deale or trade with them, had need of Wisedome, Patience, and Faithfulnesse in dealing: for they frequently say Cuppànnauem, you lye, Cuttassokakómme, you deceive me.”51 Yet how much advice about this connection between patience and truthfulness could convince Williams’s audience, or even Williams himself, to enact the virtues Christian civilization already prescribed?

At one juncture of an earlier colonial war (against the Pequot tribe), the English and Narragansett allies were gathered outside a Pequot settlement when one of the tribe’s elders came out to negotiate. He asked the English many questions and elaborately answered their queries in return, buying time for the village’s residents to escape quietly. Strategically, the English “were patient, and bore with them, in expectation to have the greater blow upon them,” as Captain John Underhill put it in his account of the war.52 After all, did not Scripture assure them that “he that is slowe to wrath, is of great wisdome: but he that is of an hastie minde, exalteth follie”?53 Messengers were then sent to and from the Pequot settlements; after hours of this delay, and the “greater blow” obviated, the Pequots “did laugh at us,” Underhill reports, “for our patience” instead of engaging with arms.54

Scenes like this help us explore the notion of patience as historically specific, as a cross-cultural problematic, as a lived experience, and as a critical value. Such episodes distance us from the immediacy of patience, within which patience is often posited as a key to cross-cultural understanding—a conceit that may come with risks both methodological and strategic. Patience may be regarded as a function of desire in some times and contexts, and as a function of culture in others. What we wait for is what we want, be it spiritual or material redemption, an individualist cosmos, the fulfillment of a group way of being, or an epic historical pattern. In this chapter, we have seen both it and its claiming as a material means of obtaining power and an instrumental moral imperative.

These lessons may be brought to bear not just on the historical concepts but also on the intellectual-institutional politics within which the historiography of early America is enacted today. The academy has famously long timelines compared to other industries, but today’s researchers and writers of colonial history are, in reality, under increasing time pressures: the usual six years to tenure evaluation; increasingly frequent demands for workplace assessment; thickening bureaucratic requirements; growing classroom sizes and shrinking faculty rosters; a sense borne of social media that there must always be a new product, a new post, a new argument. The open-ended calendar of collaboration across the bounds of disciplines, cultural groups, or political orientation demands courage, imagination, or a Roger Williams–like level of self-confidence, which few of us have. It’s still unusual to find graduate programs whose structure accommodates training that would ground a wide range of cross-cultural collaborations and prepare a scholar for decades of such work. The measuring sticks of the humanities tenure process have only slowly begun to adapt to collaborative practices in cultural studies, critical race studies, and other areas like the digital humanities. The pressures of scholarly relevance, of applicability to a career or argument, of rapid downloadability for rapid digestion—all inflect the feeling of reading for many academic readers and shape what answers can be given to the question, to what can an academic essay speak? This state of things is where the colonial meets the study of the colonial. As Brooks reminds us, there are other ways to imagine the activity of scholarly recounting of the past. “The work of history” itself “in the Abenaki language is called ômjowôgan, a cyclical activity of recalling and relaying in which we are collectively engaged.”55

Patience is surely essential in such a context, but just as surely, it is not enough. What N. Scott Momaday has called the Indigenous “long outwaiting” of colonial invasion, or what James Clifford calls “the indigenous longue durée” cannot be turned into rules to live by. Sometimes the short run matters; sometimes the peace will be broken. “If there has been any progress in securing our rights to land and life,” writes Yellowknives political theorist Glen Coulthard, “this progress is owed to the courageous activists practicing their obligations to the land and to each other in these diverse networks and communities of struggle”—networks and communities reminiscent of those built in seventeenth-century New England.56 The patience and perspective summoned and attested by Indigenous persistence was not and will not be only rhetorical.