Cornbury, Lord

Cornbury.

Cornstalk (1720?-1777)

Cornstalk was an important leader among the Shawnee Indians for almost 25 years during the mid-18th century. He was born in central Pennsylvania but as a child migrated with his people to eastern Ohio to escape the pressures of English colonization. Deeply influenced by the recurring migrations of Native peoples, Cornstalk became a strong proponent of Indian land rights. During the Seven Years’ War his Shawnee warriors attacked white settlements along the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. In 1763-64 Cornstalk supported a unified Indian resistance to British land encroachment and unpopular trade policies. Over the next decade he repeatedly struck Virginia settlements in the Shawnee-claimed hunting grounds along the Greenbriar River. His militant opposition to white encroachment made Cornstalk the principal target of Virginia governor Dunmore’s military invasion of the Ohio country in 1774. Despite inflicting heavy losses on the Virginia militia at the Battle of Point Pleasant in September, Cornstalk was forced to surrender vast amounts of territory in what is now the state of West Virginia. Afterwards military reverses and the seemingly endless tide of colonial settlers induced Cornstalk to abandon military opposition in favor of peaceful interaction with the white settlers. In 1777, while trying to ameliorate escalating tensions between Indians and settlers, Cornstalk and his son were murdered by a mob of angry settlers at Fort Randolph, Virginia. His death triggered decades of conflict between the Shawnee and the United States, which did not conclude until the death of Tecumseh in 1813.

Further reading: Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

—Daniel P. Barr

Cotton, John (1584-1652) Puritan minister John Cotton was the architect of Congregationalism in New England. Born in Derby, in the English midlands, Cotton attended Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his B. A. in 1602 and his M. A. in 1606. At Trinity he heard William Perkins, whose sermons stressed the role of God’s law in showing sinners their helplessness to save themselves, thus driving them to prepare for conversion; unfortunately, Cotton himself was only driven to dread Perkins’s preaching. Later, after Cotton had joined the faculty of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he heard Richard Sibbes, whose sermons stressed not the law and human preparation but the Gospel and divine initiative. In 1612 Cotton experienced that initiative in his own conversion.

Later the same year, Cotton took a pastorate in Boston, on England’s Lincolnshire seacoast. There he spent the next 20 years evangelizing his community, catechizing his congregation, and coming to exercise great influence over English Puritanism’s rising generation. After an early run-in with his bishop, he enjoyed at least a measure of peace until 1632, when the Anglican Church’s Court of High Commission finally moved against him. He responded by donning a disguise, fleeing to London, hiding for several months, and then in 1633 sailing for Massachusetts, arriving in Boston on the same ship that carried Thomas Hooker.

John Cotton (Boston Public Library)

Cotton was soon chosen to be the “teacher” of Boston’s First (Congregational) Church, of which John Wilson was the pastor. While Cotton followed Sibbes in stressing the dissimilarities potentially differentiating one conversion experience from another and the convert’s essential passivity in the face of God’s irresistible grace, Wilson, instead, followed Perkins in stressing the fundamental similarity of all such experiences and the convert’s active role of preparation. Anne Marbury Hutchinson, one of Cotton’s English parishioners who had followed him across the Atlantic, responded that Wilson, Hooker, and other prepa-rationist ministers were preaching salvation by works rather than faith. The result was the Antinomian Controversy of 1637-38, whose resolution left preparationist ministers in control and cast a cloud over Cotton’s reputation.

If Cotton swam against New England’s prevailing current with his understanding of conversion, he used his understanding of church government to help define that current’s main channel. His most important publication on this topic was The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644). He also helped to draft the Cambridge Platform of 1648, which gave New England Congregationalism its definitive form.

Further reading: John Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (London: Matthew Symmons, 1647; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972); Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Lar-zer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1962).

—George W. Harper