The "scissors metaphor" is a historic analogy recorded by Moravian missionary Johann or John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder in his 1818 book, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations. In it he describes the English and American nations as a "pair of scissors" working together to cut—or destroy—the Native people caught in between, for the purpose of taking their land.”
John Heckewelder spent his life engaged in missionary work among the Lenape or Delaware culture, and in doing so, became one of their most sympathetic and informed chroniclers in the new American nation.
Heckewelder was born in England in 1743 to German Moravian parents who moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, eleven years later. Bethlehem was the headquarters of the Moravian Church in North America, and Heckewelder grew up among fellow believers who worked as missionaries among Indians living in the Susquehanna and Allegheny valleys.
His parents apprenticed him to a barrel maker, but in 1762 Heckewelder undertook his first missionary work by accompanying Christian Frederick Post on a journey into the Ohio country in western, Pennsylvania along the Ohio River. Under the tutelage of Post and another Moravian missionary, David Zeisberger, Heckewelder lived among the Lenape in the 1760s and 1770s, learning their language and becoming a careful student of their culture.
In 1770 in the Ohio country Heckewelder helped establish the village of Gnadenhutten as a safe haven for Christian native converts. Its name appropriately translates from German as "Tents of Grace". The town was shaped like a "T" with a clear central street. It was lined with well-built log cabins, a church/meetinghouse, and a school. It was home to a mixture of peaceful Lenape and Mohican Native Americans, along with German Moravian missionaries. At its peak, the community grew to around 150 residents.
Although the Moravians proclaimed neutrality and were pacifist they were suspected by each side of aiding the other during the American Revolution.
The British accused Heckewelder and Zeisberger of treason for passing information from the Indians to the American rebels. The two missionaries were forced to explain themselves before British officers in Detroit, and while they were doing so, on March 8, 1782, a band of Pennsylvania militiamen murdered 96 of their Indian converts at Gnadenhutten.
After the war, Heckewelder helped rebuild the shattered Moravian Indian communities of western Pennsylvania in Ohio, and he worked as a negotiator between them and the new United States government.
In 1810 Shawnee chief Tecemseh reminded future President William Henry Harrison, "You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Lenape- Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?"
Heckewelder eventually retired from his missionary work and returned to Bethlehem in 1818. In his retirement, Heckewelder continued to work occasionally as an Indian interpreter, but he devoted the last years of his life to writing. His work was highly valued by the leading scholars of the new nation, who pressed him for information about Indian languages, customs, myths, and archaeology.
In this manner, Heckewelder personally bridged the gap between Pennsylvanians of his generation, who had grown up in a world populated with Indians, and those of the rising generation, who knew of Indians only through history books.
Heckewelder died at the age of 80 on January 31, 1823, in his family home located at 424 Heckewelder Place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Today the house serves as the administrative offices for The Bach Choir of Bethlehem.
Information for this episode was provided by John Heckewelder’s book, The History, Manners and Customs of The Indian Nations who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the neighboringstatesatgetenberg. org, The Moravians: John Heckewelder from the website - Heroes, Heroines & History, and the article the Gnadenhutten Massacre Revisited: An Extended Response to David Barton.
