Apess’ companion essay to “The Increase”, “The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes,” asserts unwaveringly “that the Indians are indeed no other than the descendants of the ten lost tribes” (Apess 114). He once again uses this logic not an an incitement to conversion or diminishment of Indigenous peoples: the curious claim is, in some ways, not about Indigenous people at all. For Apess is primarily concerned with leveraging a critique of the degradation and “encroachment of their [the Indians’] white neighbors” (114), a theme that is prescient in its signaling of the Mashpee Revolt that Apess would come to be embroiled in a few years later. The links between Apess’ religious and political sensibilities are evident in his sermons; in many ways, his religious ethos is an implicitly political argument.

It is in his essay on the Mashpee Revolt, however, that his melding of the religious and political is most apparent. In his explanation of the “pretended riot,” he writes that “we regarded ourselves, in some sort, as a tribe of Israelites suffering under the rod of despotic pharaohs; for thus far, our cries and remonstrances had been of no avail. We were compelled to make our bricks without straw. We now, in our synagogue, for the first time, concerted the form of a government, suited to the spirit and capacity of freeborn sons of the forest, after the pattern set us by our white brethren” (179). Here Apess draws a direct connection between religions and government, an Indigenous government concerned specifically with maintaining tribal claims to land. Apess’ prior writing on righteousness resounds here, and it becomes clear that as entangled as religious and political theologies are for Apess, they are not one and the same: “I had mistaken the law, which in this case was a very different thing from justice,” he later writes.

Lisa Brooks writes in The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast that land as a currency in contracts of transaction was an English settler tradition that was not evident in pre-colonization North America. North American Indigenous people, writes Brooks, viewed land in a more relational sense: land could be used, but not possessed (Brooks 67). In Apess’ writing, Old Testament religious conventions of contract and claim become the basis upon which the Mashpee model their government, though it is the “pattern” of their “white brethren,” not their own tradition. Apess draws a line between the temple and New English government: indeed the legalism of the Old Testament and its covenants could be described as transactional; in contrast, the New Testament’s model of righteous love, routed through the Christ figure, usurps all past covenant theologies and supplants them with a relational model of grace and forgiveness. Gone are the “chosen,” for in the New Testament the Christ figure arrives, a salve, to dissolve national distinctions and sweep all into a common kingdom.

Implicit in Apess’ essay is a parallel between Old Testament theologies — through which Indigenous people such as Apess placed himself and his kin — and English conceptualizations of the land that stress ideas of property and economic transaction. The text then becomes an archive of how Apess appealed to English conceptions of land and law, though the echo of an imminent righteousness from the preceding sermon both complicates and resounds. Old covenantism, like transactional English land law, is a means for Apess to appeal to the structuring ideas of New England society as he works out a theory of Indigenous resistance to encroached-upon land.