In 2008, Eric Slauter published an essay that appeared jointly in the William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature addressing what he called the “trade gap” in early American studies. To summarize: scholars of early American literature read and cite scholars of early American history, while scholars of early American history rarely return the favor. More recently, a different kind of rift has emerged in early American studies. A cohort of scholars engaging with Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) has turned its attention to colonial New England. Scholars like Jean O'Brien, Lisa Brooks, and Christine DeLucia have offered valuable new perspectives that make it abundantly clear that Perry Miller's notorious assertion that New England puritans were “left alone with America” is a grotesque falsehood. But not all early Americanists have embraced this work. In a 2020 review essay in The American Historical Review, David Silverman expressed concerns about the methodologies, epistemologies, and findings of NAIS scholars. A roundtable ensued, and the conversation continues.
With this context in mind, Ana Schwartz's Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Early America, is an even more remarkable achievement. Schwartz manages to demonstrate her bona fides regarding the body of traditional New England intellectual historiography, while at the same time integrating the insights of scholars who study indigeneity and race, to make it clear that the spiritual travails of the puritans unfolded in the context of a diverse populace, including both free and enslaved Indigenous and African peoples.
In methodology, Schwartz's book echoes Jim Egan's Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing and Abram Van Engen's Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England by focusing on the category of sincerity, rather than experience or sympathy. It stands in fruitful dialogue with Matt Cohen's Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized in its concern with categories of thought and feeling. In sincerity, Schwartz finds a compelling way to interrogate the experience of puritan English settlers in North America. Schwartz begins by telling us that “Sincerity is the protagonist of this book; history its antagonist” (1). What follows is a remarkably wide-ranging journey across a relatively narrow spatial and temporal compass. For Schwartz, it is crucial that this agon between sincerity and history played out in the hearts and minds of English settlers on Algonquian territory. She points to settler colonialism as one of the key frameworks for understanding the life and work of New England puritans in ways that preceding generations of intellectual historians have largely ignored. As Schwartz details, settlers “told themselves stories” about what, exactly, they were doing squatting on Indigenous land. This simple gesture of reframing is enormously generative and might be the most enduring intervention of this book.
The first chapter surveys the profoundly disorienting aspects of settler experience in a new land. Primarily, the “wilderness,” or what Winthrop referred to as a “vacuum domicilium,” was a thriving Indigenous homeland. Through readings of William Bradford, Thomas Morton and Phinehas Pratt, Schwartz demonstrates the toll that this epistemic conundrum took on settlers, and the violence it engendered against Natives. This epistemic turmoil continues in a chapter focused on the beaver, and how these creatures troubled the boundaries between the human and the non-human, particularly as this binary informs notions of property. The third chapter considers Michael Wigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, and a cohort of Indigenous converts to Christianity to examine the exhausting state of self-awareness and self-disclosure that was the price of full membership in a puritan church community.
The fourth chapter broadens this notion of the toll of sincerity to explore the tensions between generations of settlers, a familiar theme throughout scholarship of puritanism. As the generations proliferated, Schwartz demonstrates, the sincerity that Calvinism demands became an almost insupportable burden for many English settlers. The final chapter considers sincerity and its relation to friendship through the figures of Mary Rowlandson, Roger Williams, James Quananophit (James Printer), and Anthony Thacher, a barrelmaker shipwrecked on a coastal journey. For Schwartz, “Friendship was settler sincerity's cold comfort” (49).
One of the strengths and, perhaps, also one of the liabilities of this book is that it is hard to absorb in a single reading. Schwartz's erudition is considerable, and her range of sources is expansive—there are times where it is hard for the reader to synthesize Unmoored’s insights at the level of the paragraph into arguments that animate a chapter. It is a book that will reward rereading, but one that can be daunting to read.
One thing missing from this book is a clear sense of exactly how the term “history” is intended to work. Schwartz posits it as the antagonist of sincerity, but it is not always clear if she means the press of things that happen, or if she means the narratives of those things, or both. This is, ultimately, a small quibble for a book that sets a new standard for future studies of Colonial New England. It might seem odd to suggest that the salient intervention of this book is to persuade scholars to take puritans more seriously, but Schwartz offers a field-shaping corrective to the fundamentally ironic posture many readers have taken ever since Perry Miller published his Errand into the Wilderness. Instead, and especially in the book's coda, Schwartz invokes Lauren Berlant's notion of “cruel optimism” to explore a wider array of New England minds. Unmoored is a powerful book that demands consideration by anyone interested in the literature, history, or historiography of Colonial New England.